Steven Karel
Administrator
August 21, 2001
10:01:50 AM
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There are two issues here:
- Making sure the search engines index your website
- Getting your website to show up in the top ten results
Getting the search engines to find your website.
If your site has links pointing TO it from other webpages already in the indices, and there is no 'robots.txt' file preventing it from being indexed, it will (eventually) get indexed. With many of the search engines, you can "submit your URL" to try to speed up the process. Here are some links for 5 of the top search engines:
For the Brandeis Search engine, just get someone to create a link from an already indexed webpage. Maybe Rich has other suggestions.
Getting your site to rank highly
This varies from search engine to search engine. Basically, the more text you include, the better. Make sure that ALL of the words that people might use in searching for a page are included somewhere. You can include Meta Tags to specifically denote keywords, but not all search engines will pay attention to those (as they've been widely abused in the past). Some search engines weigh terms more heavily if they're in TITLE or header tags. Some search engines, notably Google, rank pages based on algorithms that calculate how often they're cited -- there is no magic bullet to getting your page at the top of a Google search, other than writing the best damned webpage out there, and getting everyone to link to it. That's probably why Google is, currently, the most useful of the search engines.
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