Websites
This month I thought I would spend some time looking at websites. Whether it is a business website or a club or society site. Most people do not look beyond getting the site built.
But once your new site is finished and sitting proudly on the internet, what then?
The first and most important thing is to get people on the Internet to find your site. How do you do this? The answer is the search engines, there are quite a large number of these but the most popular is of course Google, followed by Bing and Ask. Yahoo is not a search engine as such but a web directory. It is the largest human-compiled directory in existence, and now has over 1 million sites indexed.
The only other directory worth submitting your site to is The Open Directory. This is another human-compiled directory, but one where any Internet user can become an editor and be responsible for some part of the index. Many other services use Open Directory listings, including Google, Netscape, Lycos, AOL search, AltaVista and HotBot.
An important point to keep is mind is that there are, very few search engines that are worth submitting your site too. There are dozens of lesser search engines out there but most are no longer relevant as Google has over 90% of the search engine market share. You might consider submitting to them, but usually they aren’t worth the time. When you look at market share you see how to focus your time.
Google – 90.68%
Bing – 3.87%
Yahoo – 2.85
Ask – 1.26
Others – 1.34 (Market share figures are to 15th January 2011)
Submitting to a search engine is easy. Simply find their ‘Add URL’ link, and you’ll land on their site submission page. Type your website address into the box, check that it’s correct, and send it in.
That is not all there is to it though, not by a long chalk. One of the things people find frustrating in this digital age is how long these things can take. Once you have submitted your site to a search engine it can still take up to six weeks for the search engine to actually visit your site. Until then you will appear so far down the listings that it will not help people find your site. Google uses a sophisticated ranking algorithm, which factors in how many links a page has pointing towards it to decide how relevant it is to search request. So to appear higher up the Google results page your site has to be relevant with lots of links pointing to it.
If you have a topic you would like me to cover, please let me know.
Mick Maidens is the Owner of Kent PCs for Computer Repairs in Challock (Nr Ashford).
Email: info@kentpcs.co.uk Phone: 01233 740306
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