Making Search Engines Find My Site

#1 Google does not and never has used the "keyword" or "description" meta-tags. It uses links to your site from other sites to do its primary "site ranking".

Google for "google bomb" to get an indepth explaination at how Google ranks sites and how to swamp Google and bump up your ranking. It will take at least a MONTH because they only spider once every month and not all sites, sites that it thinks does not change often get skipped for months at a time sometimes.

The other option is to use something like Overture.com ( which does not partner with Google ) but everywhere else and buy your way to the top.

It is explained very clearly on the Google site how and why you do or do not show up in searches.

Without lots of links to your site from other sites, and the link text has to have relevant key words, your site will continue to live in the Google basement.

Mythale RPG is a better link than www.fletchergames.com because Mythale RPG is actually in the link text.

another example

Independant Game Development is a more valuable link than GarageGames

study the "google bomb" explainations . . .

Matter of fact, if Google could spider this page it would bump up your ranking, but sadly it can't. :(

#2 Thanks! This makes alot more sense now.

#3 Make sure your site is on dmoz, Google make use of it as do a number of other search engines. However, some of the maintainers of dmoz are either verrrry lazy or do not like competition, as you can wait months (9 and counting) for submissions to get in, or they just dont make it in at all, no reasons given.

Also, look at alexa, they can give you a text file to put into your root to make their spidering usefull.

You can alter the frequency Google spiders you, it depeneds on how often you update, wiggle fingers in the air, update your robots.txt file (you have one, right?).

If you really want to get into it, check out one of the SEO forums, and ask your question there. I tend to use webhostingtalk.com or forums.seochat.com, there are more but they should do you.

Oh, and look for guidelines on your keywords and description tags, they do make a difference.

#4 I submitted my site to dmoz around the same time as I originally posted this thread (yes, Steven Fletcher = Steve Fletcher; I changed my login name - not just the name that's publicly viewable, which meant leaving my old account behind).

I think they probably just ignored the link because my site was very much "under construction" back then. In fact, I'm about to change everything again soon anyways. So I suppose I'll submit the url again a couple of weeks from now...

My site already shows up on alexa (even though I knew nothing about it), but I just clicked on the link to get the site report.

Oddly enough, alexa even shows a list of links to pages that no longer exist on my site after showing the current links.

I don't have a robots.txt file. I thought that it's only purpose was to prevent search engines from linking to particular pages on your site.

I deleted my keyword and description tags after Jarrod said that google didn't use them. I guess I'll just put them right back in.

#5 I have no idea if anyone is still checking this post but I'm running into a problem with submiting my website. This is the like the first time i'm submitting a web page for viewing. I understand that it takes yahoo and google a while to list your pages if they list them at all. Also I noticed a lot of expensive submission services. I want to know whats the cheapest way out? And in my time trying to submit my site to search engines I've noticed that they're submission forms are hidden or buried. Any suggestions?