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Throughout my life on the web & net, i’ve used the alias/nick ‘Placid’. That’s the beauty of it all, you can be anonymous. When I finally decided to start beplacid.com, I wanted the site to be about me, and for me to offer code & technical solutions to readers - that meant getting noticed. This in turn meant I had to work hard not only on content and learning about search engines, I had to be sure what I wanted to offer. I’ve decided to share my experience of indexing my site with others; I hope it helps.

Getting Started

The web’s like a cheap market: some bargains, some utter trash. Search engines tend to ignore the trash and run straight for the bargains. To emphasise this, search engines such as Google and Yahoo developed initiatives such as sitemaps to aid themselves and webmasters in organising websites (see my sitemap for an example). Along with webmaster guidelines you get a clear idea of what to do. In essence though, this all boils down to the following points:

• Decide what your site’s about, then stick to it
• Write concise & clearly, and don’t rely on heavy scripting.

Getting Seen

You need search engines to see your site. They do this by following links (anchors) from other websites. I placed a link to beplacid.com with the title ‘Placid’ wherever I could. That meant forum signatures, email, friend’s websites - anything. Doing this means the search engines discover your site through links. Easy task, hard to master. You need to be linking from sites that are mildly respectable - not just any old trash. Having higher ranked websites link to yours ensures search engines follow the links to your sites, and not others first. Perhaps more importantly, don’t link to your site from something irrelevant; that is don’t get your friend’s cookery website to link to yours, if your site is about Linux. Get it?
Tools Of The Trade

One thing that has helped me in indexing, is using the Google Webmaster’s Tools to see how well I was progressing. Yahoo do offer a similar service but it’s not as extensive, and doesn’t offer much. This isn’t where you stop though, as there is one tool that really assists you in learning how a search engine sees your site: lynx. Lynx is a popular text-based web browser, which I believe was first written in the popular Unix days. Using it to view your webpage(s) allows you to see how well the content you want seen by a search engine is read. It’s vital in ensuring what you’re doing is right.

Apart from the above tools, you should be using meta tags to describe your site. Don’t overload these though, just be factual and concise, and make sure that the keywords you provide are actual keywords in your page(s).

Last but not least, remember to update your sitemap - but again, be factual, don’t bullshit

Summary

When indexing beplacid.com, I did all of the above. I still do, too. It has sprung this site from non-existent to number 5 on the search results at Google when you search for ‘Placid’. That was my intention, to get on the first page (and finally to be #1) - it happens if you continue to work at it. Good luck!