Promoting your site with search engines
A critical part of getting your website online is submitting it
to search engines. Search engines allow people to find your site
easily. The higher your site ranks in a search engine, the more
likely it will be that people will find your site. In fact, if your
site ranks lower than the top 30 results then people will probably
not find your site this way.
Wait until your website is almost completed before you submit it
to search engines. This will ensure your site will be ranked as
high as possible. Also, if you change the address (URL) of a page
after you have submitted your website, the search engine may only
give a link to the page that no longer works.
Search engines and directories
Strictly speaking, there is a difference between “Search
Engines” such as Yahoo and Google. Yahoo, one of the oldest
and most used services, has a directory and a search engine. In
the directory, people have reviewed and ranked the websites. Google,
on the other hand, indexes websites using a complex calculation
that includes ranking a website according to the quality of the
sites that link to it. Like Yahoo, Google is from Stanford University.
At last count, their server farm consisted of at least 2400 computers,
ensuring the fast results they are known for.
What search engines look for
Regardless of how the search engines work, there is no shortcut
to getting ranked highly by them. Here is a list of factors that
will increase the ranking of your website in search engines:
- Number and quality of websites connecting to
yours.
- Keywords (website descriptions) used in the
meta tags. (See next section.)
- Density of keywords in the body text of your
website.
- Proximity of keywords to the top of your pages.
- Alt tags and how they match your keywords.
- The Domain name.
- The words in the page titles.
Meta tags
There are two types of meta tags that you need to add to your site:
description and keywords.
The description is a summary of your website that
people will see when they do a search on Google and your website
comes up. It should quickly summarize the purpose of your website
and be about 20 to 30 words in length.
The keywords are words that people will use to
search for your site. Use keywords that you think other people will
use to find it. You can use about 20 to 30 keywords. Don’t
repeat a keyword more than three times.
To add the description and keywords go to Insert
> Head Tags > Description,
or Insert > Head Tags >
Keywords.
Once your site is ready, use the Free
Search Engine Submission Sites page of this website.
Search engine placement sites:
Using the Find and Replace feature in Dreamweaver
This feature is a powerful and fast way to replace text or code
on all of the pages on your website. It’s a great way to put
meta tags on all your pages at the same time. Be very careful about
using this feature because it can be hard to correct a mistake.
1. Go to Edit > Find and Replace.
2. Choose Entire Local Site.
3. Next to Search For, choose Code or Text.
4. In the next box, either type in, or cut and paste the text or
code you want to replace.
5. Next to Replace With, type in the text or code
you want to replace it with.
6. Click Replace All. (Or you can do the replacements
one at a time by clicking Find Next and then Replace
for each instance.)
7. Dreamweaver will warn you that changes cannot be undone in pages
that are open. Click OK.
8. Check your pages to see that the changes took place.
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