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Why them 'bots no list me? (Not on search engines)

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 5:20 pm
by mparker1113
Hi,

I have had a site up for over 6 months, that has this in its index.php page:

Code: Select all

<html><head>
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Vermont,Real estate,Property,Sale,Land,VT,Commercial Property,commercial property,good location,location,Real Estate,real,estate,DeRosia Associates, Ivan DeRosia,Green Mountains,Valley,vallies,strange property,strange properties">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Vermont properties for sale. Commercial, residential, vacation, and more. Good prices--great properties.">
 
<!-- css styles, javascript functions are here....--->

</head>
I try the search engines for words taken right out of my keywords : "DeRosia Associates Property Land VT Commercial Property" and only 41 pages show up -- none of them mine.

Is the problem that the bots do not search .php pages ?? That makes sense. Would the bots respond favorable to my having an html page that had that info listed in the meta tags, but then had a redirect to my php page ??

I sure would like to figure this out.

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 5:27 pm
by feyd
They don't care if it's .php or .html. As long as the page responds correctly and they can read it they'll index it.

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 6:03 pm
by MarK (CZ)
Maybe no links going to your site?

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 6:40 pm
by toasty2
Did you submit it to some search engines?

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 7:06 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Have you searched Google for what their parameters are for listing web sites? You'd be amazed. A lot has to do with the number of links you receive from other sites. Some has to do with how many links you have to other sites. Some has to do with the use of your site (popularity). Little has to do with the meta tags you use in your markup, though it is used in the index, but not the page ranking.

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 8:05 pm
by mparker1113
I have no linkds from other / to other sites that I know of. Geez, what about meta tags. I haven't submitted either. I don't want to pay right now. I would have thought that they should have read my meta tags. Can I get my page recognized for free?

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 8:11 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Yes, but there needs to be some amount of activity on your site. Either people need to visit it, or sites need to link to it or you need to link to other sites or some combination of all of them. Free is possible, but requires some work.

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 8:31 pm
by Ambush Commander
Precisely. The whole point of search engines is to find relevant content, and if no one sees you, knows about you, or links to you, the search engine isn't going to take some META tag as the end-all be-all solution.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 1:32 am
by matthijs
Getting ranked is about 2 things: incoming links and quality of your site. The second means a site which is coded correctly, so that search engines can understand your pages. Using webstandards helps (clean code, good use of h1,h2,h3 etc). Meta tags do nothing for seo, just forget them. Fill them up with 3 words just for the sake of it, but that's it. Good content, in which the keywords for which you want to be found are found, is very important. make the content interesting for humans.

Then, you'll get automaticly to the first factor I mentioned: incoming links. The more the better, but the quality of the links is also important. A link from a big well-respected site is worth more then a link from an unknown site. What's also important is how people link to you. So "click here" is not so good. "good garden hoses here" is much better (at least when you sell garden hoses).

So try getting those links. Write interesting content and let people know of it. By email, on forums, other weblogs, etc. If appropriate, you could have given a link here. We might also look at the code and see if that's ok.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 10:04 am
by Jenk
I do believe having a DOCTYPE declaration will assist to a degree as well. But the main point is for your site to be active so google et all can find it.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 2:23 pm
by ambivalent
mparker1113 wrote:Can I get my page recognized for free?
http://www.google.com/addurl/

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 5:17 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Nobody truly knows apart from those working on the code but some argue that META (read, keyword) tags are not particularly important these days and may even be completely ignored by search engines such as Google and MSN search. I can't confirm that however. I'm pretty cure you could be marked down for not using keywords that actually relate to the content in the page.

Either way some tips ion choosing keywords for SEO.

* Try not to duplicate keywords if possible
* Think very very hard about the order you want to place the keywords in
-- Placing them in the order that you can make linear phrases with is a good idea since they are more likely to directly match search queries (Bob's fishing shop which specializes in deep see fishing may choose keywords "Bobs deep sea fishing shop", rather than "Bobs fishing shop, deep sea, fishing)
* Try not to include special characters
* It's rumoured that some search engines offer preference based upon the casing used in the query in comparsion to the casing in your content. Most people type search queries in lower case - so make your meta keywords lowercase ;)

BTW... it's also rumoured that search engines ranks sites with code that validates against a DTD higher than ones that dont.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 9:18 pm
by RobertGonzalez
I agree with d11 in all aspects except the part about engines ignoring the meta information. I don't think the engines use the meta information for ranking or placement, but they do use it for indexing. So when you come across a result in the search, the meta 'description' information is often displayed. Again, I don't think it is used for rankings or placement, but it is used in the index of the members of the search result.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 1:03 am
by matthijs
So when you come across a result in the search, the meta 'description' information is often displayed.
Indeed, so pay those meta tags 3 minutes of your time by filling them up with a short and clear sentence/ few words.

When you a see a search result with the title "title.gif" are you going to click on it?? :) (yes I have seen those)

d11wtq makes some good points about the keywords.

I would like to add though, that the main point should be high-quality, clear, accessible, readible and interesting content for your visitors.

I think that a natural result will be that the content contains the right key-words, the right variation in (related) key-words because you variate your text a bit and last but not least, pleases your visitors. And my guess is that that is way more important then any keyword analyst can do for you. Of course, unless you're building one of those fake scrape sites which are only build for the search engines.

And secondly, I think that on-site factors are less important then off-site factors. Like high-quality incoming links. That's probably a result of years of key-word analysis and stuffing pages after pages with auto-generated content on all those dubieus sites. So I would personally never sacrifice the quality of my content to change some key words because tool X tells me the ratio of word y and word z is lesss then optimal. Remember, people don't link to bad content.