search results -> my site?

[jchilders04]

Hey i've had this site running for quite a few months, i had it submitted to search engines and whatnot but still have no results trying to find my site myself. Can i get any thoughts, advice, information about it? Does it take X amount of months? Please either email me or post up here, i'll try an get back here for it. The site IS for a business so any timely info is much appreciated

[KnowProSE]

Hey i've had this site running for quite a few months, i had it submitted to search engines and whatnot but still have no results trying to find my site myself. Can i get any thoughts, advice, information about it? Does it take X amount of months? Please either email me or post up here, i'll try an get back here for it. The site IS for a business so any timely info is much appreciated

What is it, exactly, you are searching for when you search for your site?

[nine]

it might take a while if the site is new. try to get more incoming links, and make it search engine friendly. it took google about 1.5 months to index my new website...

also you can ask a question about SEO at www.googlecommunity.com, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to add your website's link to your signiture...

[vegasgwm]

Hey i've had this site running for quite a few months, i had it submitted to search engines and whatnot but still have no results trying to find my site myself. ...

is your site SEO - friendly?
If its a dynamic site with ? &... in the url's you got work to do baby.
But thats not all, lots of reasons why searchengines may come to your site look at 1 thing and leave.
My advice, if your site is not search engine friendly, do your research about SEO on the net and fix the site.(its a lot of work, trust me)

Then watch your raw access logs and stats closely to see if the robots come to visit and how fast they leave.
It took me about a month to get my site seo friendly and ready, but once done it took only a week and my site was listed all over place.
oh yeah, pick a few big search engines, yahoo, msn, aol, google, exite... and HAND submit to them one by one!

good luck

[jchilders04]

i dont believe its a dynamic site...no ? or & in the URL...the site has been up for at LEAST 4months + and no luck. What do you mean by getting more incoming links? any other info?

[vegasgwm]

i dont believe its a dynamic site...no ? or & in the URL...the site has been up for at LEAST 4months + and no luck. What do you mean by getting more incoming links? any other info?

Would you mind posting your url here?
My site had been up for more than a year and no where to be found, but that's because it was totally NOT SE friendy.
I didn't wrote this "incoming links", but it means,
that your SE popularity will increase greatly when other populair sites(that are on lots of SE) link to your site. (not tthe other way around)

[nine]

What do you mean by getting more incoming links?

if other websites link to you, search engines that crawl them, will hop over to your website too. more chance of getting noticed that way.

[brod(d)ers]

I had the same problem, my account had be active for about 4 months and i could not get my page from google, or the like. My site finally came online with google the other day (About 4.5 months after submitting it to google) so it really is just a wait and see process. Search engines have programs that, as mentioned above, "crawl" the internet looking for new pages. The program also crawls the list of sites submitted to the search engine - so yeah may be a while before your site becomes "visible".

You probably have, but just thought i'd check... Have you added meta tags for descriptions and key words on your homepage? Would definately be worth doing if you haven't already done so, as search engines use this information to search and display results.

cheers,

sam.

[jchilders04]

the url is:
http://www.hpmperformanceproducts.com

it looks incredibly rough cause i had a kid put it together just to get it working and search engine visible, then will be redone.

[dvessel]

waddayaknow, it's listed but don't expect any good results with bad markup.

google (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.hpmperformanceproducts.com)
yahoo (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.hpmperformanceproducts.com&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8)
msn.. not listed (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=www.hpmperformanceproducts.com&Form=MSNH)

One step at a time.. Using search submission tools might not be the best way. And having higher ranking site link to you is not practical for most when starting up. Look for a google site map submission tool (http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=google+site+map&spell=1) to help it navigate your site and index it properly.

Semantic markup (http://www.google.com/search?q=semantic+markup) is important to get higher rankings. What this means is that certain html tags has special meaning, similar to meta keywords in a sense but it's in the actual body of your pages. Google ignores meta information because it's been abused. It might help other search engines but it's a good idea to get your semantic markup correct if you care about Google results. Can't speak for MSN or Yahoo. It does make sense to put less effort into meta info and more into your content and how it's tagged. example: using a header tag for <h1>ford</h1> will have higher relevance when someone searches for "ford" as opposed to <b>ford</b>. There's a lot more to this and you shouldn't abuse it or it will backfire.

As long as your content isn't covered a million times already, when done right you can get good results. I tried being meticulous about semantics on my site and I get hits for things I don't intend since I get listed pretty early and that's with very little content on my site. I just started out.

I'm using a site map that gets updated every time I add new content or even when I update existing ones. About once a day I can see the google bots hitting my site. It took about a month to get listed maybe a little more but don't expect anything good to come out of it unless you invest some time and do it right. Bad sites are a dime a dozen and it will be lost with the countless sites out there.

edit:
oh, and try to loose the frames. If a search engine actually finds a page it won't have any links from your nav links to go to. Also presents plenty of usability problems.

[jchilders04]

so you think it would work better if i redid everything, as say, tables? and thanks for the info dvessel any more info would be great thanks!

[dvessel]

so you think it would work better if i redid everything, as say, tables? and thanks for the info dvessel any more info would be great thanks!

Well, anything is better than using frames IMO. Using CSS styling & positioning is strongly recommended. Tables can easily cause obstacles on semantics when used for layout. If you don't want to get into CSS then yeah, use tables but don't expect a big improvement on search results.

CSS & semantic markup aren't directly connected but the one lends itself to the other. I was scanning through and found this. Although it doesn't talk closely about search results, it will give a good introduction into to using the right tags. A lot has been written already about this so I won't attempt to repeat.

http://www.brainstormsandraves.com/articles/semantics/structure/

from the article:

So why bother with using semantic markup? What’s the big deal?
1. Longevity;
2. search engines rank keyword weight based on semantic structure;
3. your markup will make sense to anyone else, whether today or later;
4. See this article by Jason Kottke: Standards don’t necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct


Here's another:
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/05/30/who_cares_ab/

He also has a brief list of tags near the end.

It can be mind numbing at first but it's worth it in the long run. Not just on getting discovered but on maintaining the site. The alternative to learning this? Hire a developer who understands this already. :)

[vegasgwm]

I see you posted your site. Well, one big problem. FRAMES. You ever wanna do well with SE, LOOSE the frames baby!

[nick106b]

Can someone please explain why frames and tables are such a no-no?
Nick

[dvessel]

Can someone please explain why frames and tables are such a no-no?
Nick

Hmm.. lets see..

Frames:

Uses separate files to get the whole page together. Typically a navigation bar is one frame, content on another and then another parent frame to piece it together. Well, what happens when you someone links to a specific content on your framed site? Well, they can't without the page falling apart and if a search engine links to a specific page then it doesn't know about your navigation elements since they are disconnected.

You also effectively prevent anyone from bookmarking a page since the containing frame takes over the url. It's the same situation as when someone links to a page. Some of this can be over come with javascript but it plain sucks.

Tables:

It's meant for tabular data. You want to put a spreadsheet online then use tables. That's what it was designed for. Tables used to be used for laying out everything since there was no alternative in the past. It's changed now. It causes bloat in the code and difficult to edit. If your not ready for css positioning then go ahead and use it but consider the fact that there are other browsers besides graphical ones that will have problems with a tables based layout. Most don't care about this but a search bot like Google will see the site purely as text. If all it runs into is table rows & cells, it won't think so highly of the page.

Get 2 sites with the exact same content. One using tables, the other without and the one without will be ranked higher.