Getting Listed On Search Engines

The initial listing is easy, most search engines have a submit form, so I skooted around the web filling them all out. This is where I hit a small snag.

Afterwards I installed a plugin to the site that made the urls more human and search engine friendly. It shortens URLs, removes spaces and if the content is modified it resubmits it to Google when the googlebot comes calling, It also creates a sitemap you can submit to google, the plugin is SEF Service Map. The snag was that by the time I got the plugin up and running google had already indexed my site and quite a few URLs were comming up as invalid. After I resubmitted the site map it took about 2-3 days for that to sort itself out . At this point it doesn't matter , no-one knows my site exists yet.

ugh!! the second snag, Meta-data, I realised that I had either not entered or entered it incorrectly on every product article.

Going through and editing every one manually was good.

Sun Feb 22, 2009

Surprisingly entering them manually was a good idea, I was aware of scripts and other code to automatically generate meta data for pages but  going through each page let me fix errors (my spelling is very poor) and have greater control over the fields. Before I did it I checked the pages google indexed and the search phrases which were gaining in rank through Webmaster Tools. I entered similar portions in the meta data placing words or phrases I was personally likely to search for if I owned the product. I also tried to name the product  entries similarly to how large retail websites have named theirs. Within 2 weeks I was getting about 4 visitors a day via search, that doesn't seem like much but the site is  new and unknown the searches people were arriving by were generally product names or product names with various problems appended. Most of the searches were in the first 2 pages of queries. This is something I feel I did correctly on the first version of the site, but trouble was ahead....