Registration
mechanics
This
page looks at some of the steps you need to go through to register sites
yourself with search engines.
Are
you registered already?
If
you are indexed at a site, try a search, do you show up?
- Altavista
- Excite
- Infoseek
provides no way to test
- Google
provides no ‘official’ way to test, but your can try entering
your URL
Register
with U.Va. locations
- Individuals
can go to http://www.virginia.edu/SrchSubmit.html
- Puts
you on the list of U.Va. individual pages on the virginia.edu
search page
- Gets
your pages indexed by national search engines that search virginia.edu
- Departments
should contact webmaster@virginia.edu
for appropriate placement on U.Va.’s main server
- Make
sure you are linked from your School’s page
Commercial
search registration options
- For-fee
or free services
- Do
it yourself
- It’s
a lot of work
- http://www.signpost.ca
shows a six-step model of how to approach registering yourself
with multiple search engines
- See
the Search Engine Watch publicity page, above, for links to
more registration services and guides
The
Signpost model, http://www.signpost.ca
Step
1: Prepare your site, http://www.signpost.ca/text/step1.html
- Pages
should have a meaningful title
- Pages
should have a good first paragraph
- The
site should be READY! (e.g. you have finished designing it and
inserting content)
- Include
Description and Keywords in the header of every page in the site
<META Name=“Description” CONTENT=“60-100 word
description”>
<META Name=“Keywords” CONTENT=“space separated
list of keywords”>
- Use
Dreamweaver templates to manage meta content
To make items in the “Head” section editable, go to
the HTML view of the template.
Add < ! - - BeginEditable “something” - - > and
<! - - EndEditable - - > around each element
Step
2: Collect site information, http://www.signpost.ca/text/step2.html
You’re
going to need to enter this information (or at least some of it) at
every search site where you register. Typing it all out once and saving
it in a window where you can cut and paste to the web page will assure
consistency and make you type less.
Cut
and paste the following into sites where you register:
- Contact
name
- Organization
name/address
- Page
URL
- Page
title
- 20
and 50 word descriptions
- Keyword
list
- Category
(personal, nonprofit, corporate, educational, government)
Step
3: Register with search engines, http://www.signpost.ca/text/step3.html
- Pick
the major ones first
- Web
crawling sites typically just want a starting page
Step
4: Yahoo directory registration,
http://www.signpost.ca/text/step4.html
Yahoo
is one of the most frequently consulted directories (43.6% in 9/99
per Nielsen), so you'll want to register with Yahoo since so many
people use it. It is a manually indexed directory – you ask,
they include you if they think your site is appropriate. It can take
weeks for your site to be indexed after your initial request.
To
get the best results from a Yahoo registration:
- Do
your homework: find the appropriate category on their site
- Prepare
a 50 word description
- Go
to the appropriate category and click on Suggest a Site
Step
5: Register with more sites, http://www.signpost.ca/text/step5.html
It
is hard to know all the sites out there, but others have collected
the information:
Step
6: Keep checking back, http://www.signpost.ca/text/step6.html
It
can take anywhere from 1 to 2 weeks before an index site will list
your site (longer for directories). Sometimes things fall through
the cracks anyway, so you need to keep checking back every few weeks.
- Try
a search - if your site doesn’t come up figure out why
- Try
searching for url:yourURL to see if you are in there at all
E.g.: url:www.people.virginia.edu/~mst3k
