Hands on: Get your website noticed

Once that’s done, Google checks that you have made the changes and then you can view more statistics about your site.

From www.google.com/webmasters, click on Webmaster Tools. Then, on the ‘Dashboard’ page, click the site you want to see information about. On the summary page, click Crawl rate, in the Tools section, and you’ll see a display.

As you can see, an average day sees about 2MB of data downloaded by Google’s crawler, and 93 pages, but the maximum rate is a startling 22MB. If you feel the crawling is having an adverse effect on your site, you can change the rate to a slower crawl.

Another useful tool is the Query stats, accessible via the Dashboard page or via Statistics. Here, you can see the queries that result in people being shown a link to your site, and the average position within the results. For this site, we’ve got a few 1s and 2s, and most of the rest indicate we’ll be on the first page somewhere. The right-hand column shows the most clicked-on searches.

So now you know how to slow Google down, but what if you don’t want your site indexed at all, or you have more specific requirements? Both of those are possible using the robots.txt file, which can specify which pages of a site are indexed (and even refuse access to some search engines), and the sitemaps protocol, which lets you provide more detailed information about your pages to search engines that support them. We’ll explore both in detail next time.

Getting to grips with HTML Kit
Click on the link below for an example of using HTML Kit to create a page quickly. It may not be quite as slick as using Dreamweaver to hide all the database tricks from you, but as long as you know the basics of what’s going on behind the scenes, it’s surprising how quickly you can knock up a page.

Here's how to use HTML Kit to create a page.