Hands on: Get your website noticed

Search engines are the gateways to the web today. Can’t remember the exact name of a site? Just Google it. Not sure where to look for information on a product? Google it.

A good listing on Google is much sought. Firms will spend a fortune on snake oil salespeople who promise to increase their page ranking and ensure they appear in those crucial first few hits.

Of course, those aren’t the only ways to drive traffic to your site. This month, I’ll explain a little more about how you can help the search engines without having to spend a fortune on extra software that promises to optimise your pages for you.

Meet meta
This will be teaching some readers to suck eggs, but for the rest here’s a quick recap. Links to other relevant sites are obviously important, but they’re not the only thing. Your site needs to be indexed properly. You can help by adding meta tags to the pages, especially to the index page.

Meta tags can be used for many things, but the two we’re interested in here are the description and keywords. In the former you need a concise description of your site, while the latter contains a selection of the key words you think people might type when they’re trying to find the sort of information on your site.

All you have to do is add these in the section of your page. In some web design tools, you’ll find a menu option to insert them for you, or you’ll be asked to type them as part of a site setup wizard. Either way, you end up with something like this:

When you’re adding keywords, tempting though it may seem, it’s not terribly sporting to put in the names of your competitors’ products. Once you’ve uploaded your index page with meta tags, you can ask the various websites to index you, or wait until they find you. But that’s less likely to happen if you only have a few links on other sites, so you may want to submit your pages via locations such as www.google.com/webmasters.

Spider men
After your site has been submitted, or if there are links to it from elsewhere, it’ll be indexed by a web crawler, also known as a robot, bot or spider. These are, in essence, programs that read the pages and analyse them, helping search engines to build up a more detailed picture of your site.

This is where things can become interesting. On one of my sites, I recently noticed that the forum software was claiming our highest ever number of simultaneous visitors – about 125. But less than half were registered. I looked in the logs and found many requests from similar IP addresses. It turned out that between Yahoo and Google, which were by coincidence attempting to index at the same time, there were about 80 connections to the web server. It didn’t flinch, thankfully, but that’s partly because it’s running on a powerful system and there is an unlimited bandwidth-hosting plan.

Had that happened 18 months ago, the server would have ground to a standstill. If I were paying for data transfers, it could have eaten up a lot of my allowance.

In reality, it’s unlikely to happen to very many sites – it just happens that this one comes top in many Google searches for its particular topic and has a busy forum, generating lots of links to it from elsewhere.

The first thing to do is to get a grip on what’s happening. You can analyse your server logs, looking at the User-agent information for the different bots, or target specific search engines.

Google’s webmaster tools area will give you a wealth of information. You need to register that a site is yours, which is done by uploading a file with a specific name, or adding a code to a meta tag. The logic is that if you can do this when Google asks you, then obviously you have permission to upload to the site, so it must be yours.