# Indexing web site



## Nollie (Oct 9, 2010)

Hi,
I have designed a web site for my woodworking business. The site is on the web now http://www.leonswoodworx.co.za. I am trying to save money by doing it myself. Business is not that good around where i stay.The problem i have is that Google and Yahoo does not recognise the site. How do one get indexed on these search engines. I have registered at both search engines , but apparently it would take some indefinite time to get indexed. Can the experts help me in this regard .
I would apresiate 
Regards 
Nollie


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## NBeener (Sep 16, 2009)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf


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## Murdock (Aug 7, 2011)

The first 2 things I can suggest are get some more 'real' text on the site. There is very little HTML based text. The "About" page has a large block, but it is all inside of an image, search engines don't index that.

Replace that text with 'real' text, and get some more on the site. Make sure you are using the keywords you want to be found under within that text. An most of all, make sure it is interesting for the people who want to find the site. Ultimately 'optimized' text may work for a while, but 'real' 'readable' text lasts.


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## dkirtley (Mar 11, 2010)

Just to restate what Neil and Murdock said and expand a little.

You have done exactly the things that will make the indexing engines ignore your pages.

Meta tags:

You have a lot of words that are too broad don't really help and by being so disjointed, they will raise flags with the crawlers and look like the bogus pages. I wouldn't even bother with meta tags as they have been so abused that the crawlers will actually score you lower for them.

Image text:

Search engines search text. When they see a lot of images and no text, that also raises flags. Think of how the Viagra spam and such is done with images with text. It is usually a flag that people are trying to do something unseen and suspicious.

Garbage names for images and links:

"wpe87a8645.png" does not have any relation to the images. People come in from image searches as well. (images.google.com for example) The file name having relation to the content will be an additional source of seach engine traffic. Link names to other pages will behave in the same way.

About search engine optimization in general:

The garbage "tricks" that gets passed off as search engine optimization will be counter productive. The search engines might rank them up for a while until google and the rest catch on. Then it will be an immediate disqualifier once someone over there notices a trend of people trying to fudge the system. It will then be artificially lowered in the rankings to compensate.

Final thoughts:

Play it straight. Have text that the engines can see and have links (such as quality trustworthy web rings) which will have other sites pointing to your pages. If you use meta tags, put very few and directly related to the content. If you want real fancy layout, have a PDF brochure that prospective clients can download. PDFs actually do get indexed as well.


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## Nollie (Oct 9, 2010)

Thanks for all the information that you have given me. This will make a big difference . I have gone the wrong direction here.

Thanks again Neil, Murdock and David


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## TMcG (Mar 9, 2010)

The other suggestion that springs to mind is to use a blog site like blogspot, wordpress etc.. to take advantage of the pre-existing themes that are available and then you can focus on the content rather than the structure.

They also can take advantage of indexing and SEO plugins to help raise the visibility of the site


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## thedude50 (Aug 13, 2011)

use your key words as meta tags and try web position gold it has worked for me


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## superstretch (Jan 10, 2011)

If I recall, meta tags pretty worthless to Google-they rank based on links to your site, title text, and body text


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## CarlFisher (Aug 16, 2011)

Correct, meta tags don't lend the weight that they used to and are only really beneficial to crawlers other than Google these days.

Relevant content is king along with how that content is formatted. Proper use of header tags H1, H2, etc… and following up with relevant body text is a good start. Definitely text rather than images when possible. When you do use images, as mentioned above, make the file names relevant to what the picture actually is (think how you would use google's image search site)

Linking is also a big part. The more links into your site from similar sites, the better you will fair. The same for linking out to similar sites.

Also things like site map files generated from googles sitemap creator can help crawlers find the information you want them to find and ignore the stuff you don't.

Lots of other black magic around search engine rankings, but this gives you the basics to start with.


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## rogerw (Jan 14, 2011)

Having done websites myself I feel qualified to add my two cents worth. lol.

I noticed that your "about", "portfolio", etc. buttons point to pages with the filenames of "page2.html, page3.html, etc. It will be a lot less of a headache if you change those filenames to "about.html","portfolio.html", etc. This way you won't have to keep a log of which files are which. The answers will be in the filenames. Which is easier on the head?

page2.html
page3.html
page4.html

or

about.html
portfolio.html
drawingboard.html

...just an observation…

And yes… get rid of the big picture and do it in text. and meta tags. there are also specific tags concerning search engine robots.

all said there are a ton of html and javascript references out there. find them and use them.

have fun!
Roger


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## Nollie (Oct 9, 2010)

Thanks you all.

I have changed some stuff on the web page and also added some stuff. Lets see in a few days what will happen in Google and Yahoo. Yahoo picked up the site in about 30 minutes
Thanks again


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