If I was to host a website, say with BT, how do I get google to find it?

s’magic innit man.

google it for an answer !

You can pay for the privalege of coming out as the first result in searches linked to your site/business

jimmy, on another note
you fancy a kielder/newcastleton day soon.

pay… how much? for a joiner in glasgow thats gonna be pricey, no?

(anyone need one?) /shoehorn

ton – strapped for time with term started again. Might manage GT at a push 🙁

Keep me informed if you’re in town though. Once April comes round, bring it all on 🙂

april will be cool
i will do a meet post nearer.

jimmy,

google ‘google add url’

or get back links from sites that are already on google. (which will help your PR) and all the rest of the nonsense with google.

Its based on page ranks and cross-linking. ITs a complex thing but the basics are …Ignoring the “paid to get to the top” results, the best way of getting there is to use a simple layout that has lots of relevent text in the pages. Get your pages linked to from sites that are already well ranked (popular forums, as a signature etc), submit your sites sitemap to google, register as a webmaster and use their tools. Email me if you want some more info, im no expert but I’ve done it for some small pages. You can then sumbit to other search engines that allow direct URL adding. Also adding google adsense adverts seems to push your rank up a bit.

I thought you had to add meta tags or something to your site?

I spent quite a bit of time looking in to this as my site suddenly dropped out of the listings.

You need to add a robots.txt file to tell google what to look at and what to ignore.
You should also add a sitemap.xml file which will help describe the website for it to ‘crawl’.
Log your website with http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and this will tell you when it has been crawled and how often.
Regularly update your website with new info/articles.
Get other sites to link to yours (be careful with this one) this can get you considered spam if you muck it up.

Avoid sites which pay for adding your site to search listings. Also worth manually submitting to yahoo and google.

If you don’t understand the terms above then do a search on google. I had no idea what they were all about but did plenty of research.

Jimmy – which side of Glasgow and would you travel to Perth?

Oh and I would get a host with your own domain name and virtual server. Try http://www.aegishosting.co.uk that’s where mine sits.

Google uses directories to find sites, I think Dmos it one of them.
The more directories your in the better the chance of showing up first.

http://jean.manco.googlepages.com/googleanddmoz

There’s some bollocks above:

You can’t pay to come high up in the results, you can only pay to get an advert above the results.

Most directory sites make next to bugger all difference to results, as they suck a bit, so have poor page-rank.

If you don’t have anyone linking to you, then stick your URL into
http://www.google.com/addurl/

It is worth putting your url in things like your forum profile on here – popular sites like this have quite a high page rank.

Make sure your text is relevant, and you have keywords and page description meta tags that are honest and sensible.

If you are geographically based, then listing your address on google maps business listings can help too, as the map listings come nice and high up in a search.

https://www.google.com/local/add/login?utm_medium=et&utm_source=us-en-et-bizsol-0-finderB-all&utm_campaign=en&hl=en_US&gl=US

Joe