Free URL listing services [Archive]

Bill Catherall

06-19-2003, 09:12 AM

First, she should make sure she has the proper META tags in all of the pages. These are used by search engine "spiders" for more accurate listings.

The code for each page should look something like this: (substitute all "()" with "<>")

(HTML)
(TITLE)
(META name="description" content="enter your description here")
(META name="keywords" content="enter your keywords here")

.......
(/TITLE)

(BODY)
.....

(/BODY)
(/HTML)

The names of the META names should look exactly as I wrote them above. There are other types of tags that serve other purposes like "copyright," etc.

But where I wrote enter your description here you'll enter the description of the page using proper capitalization and punctuation. The search engine will use this in the search results to describe your page to the user. So make it as relevant, attractive, and easy to read as possible.

Where I wrote enter your keywords here you'll put a list of all possible keywords that might be used to search for your page. You don't have to use commas to separate each keyword, but you can if you want to.

If I had a page about Hummer trucks :D the META tag would look like this:

(META name="description" content="Off-road adventure with the world's most versatile off-roading vehicle. Watch how a Hummer can ford through waters and climb hills that would make a Jeep cower in fear and learn what makes them the best.")

(META name="keywords" content="hummer humvee hmmwv offroad off-road off-roading offroading 4x4 trail military vehicle vehicles jeep")

For more information about what META tags are available and how to use them just do a search for "meta tags" and you'll get a wealth of information.

As far as submitting your site to search engines goes, first see if your host has any kind of promotion program that will do automatic submissions. Many do and will offer this free if you are paying them for hosting the site. Otherwise, you can do a search for "free search engine submission" and find a bunch of sources.

But beware! When doing these free submissions you open yourself up to a lot of spam. But this really depends on what email address you used to register your domain name. If you did a private registration and the email address is protected then you don't have anything to worry about. If, on the other hand, you were dumb like me and left your domain registration information public then you'll get lots of fun offers in your inbox. :rolleyes: (It's usually tame stuff and not offers for ummm...adult oriented materials, but you just never know.)