How to index websites

It can take some time. Google will pick it up rather quickly, It's already got some of mine that I haven't even submitted yet.

That said..........

Have you used Keywords and Descriptive meta tags? Is your text content reflective of those meta tags? Have you titles on all pages? Have you submitted the site to search engines? How long ago?

*Edit* Have you used alt text for images? (Google picks up alt text)

Okay wait.............if people already know the url why would they search for it?

If they don't know the url then the items I listed above are necessary.

I used Ms Publisher to create by website. Not sure if that software uses keywords or descriptive meta tage, but I've seen these terms in some of my research on this issue. All pages have titles. I submitted to MSN several weeks ago, Tried to submit to Google yesterday but couldn't deal with their system for doing this.

Many people just enter the site name in the search box and don't use favorites, although I've told my users to go the favorites route. The user needs to enter "http://www.websitename.org" each time he or she wants to log on; they seem to frequently omit the "http;//"

Thanks Roo for your response. Any additional thought/ideas would be appreciated. As you can probably tell, I'm a novice at this.

Arrrgghhh.....MS Publisher? First off that in NOT a good idea. It is NOT an HTML editor and outputs code that isn't even code.

That said.....put in keywords and metatags on every page by hand yourself:

I'll even make it easy for you...a search turned up this meta tag generator:

http://www.addme.com/meta.htm

But check out some of the links in this Google search to find out about adding more typle of meta information, and to gain an understanding of how to do it, and why it's important.

By the way these go between the head tags like so:

Page Title

Thanks again Roo. I told you I was a novice -- used MS Pub because it was available and easy for a novice. It's working great, except for the indexing issue. I'll read the article and give the tags a try...

I hope publisher doesn't do what it used to do. A few years ago a friend who was a teching major took a class for learning how to make websites for their classes they would teach one day.

ONE out of 11 projects used Front Page. The rest had them build websites from Word, Excel and Publisher. At the time, the way publisher created a site, one huge image map. I mean everything, text and all!

So hopefully it has improved for what you are doing

I understand why you would need it in the seach engine. Many times I have been at someone's place, give them a URL, and they will put that into yahoo or google... (I even once saw someone type IN the location bar, google.com, press enter, then enter the URL in googles search box.

It is also amazing how many people are programmed that everything starts with a ...

Ok, I went off topic enough

Also try to get relavent sites to link to you, this can help search engines pick you up quicker.

-Greg

Thanks Greg for the comments -- both on-message and off-message!

I don't believe MS Pub currently works the way you described.

Roo, with your help I've added some meta tags and will hope the site eventually gets picked up.

Greg, because we are a site that caters to a small group of homeowners, it's not clear to me how I can get other sites to link to my site. Can you give me some ideas hpw this might be done in this situation? Thanks...

Free search engine submittion form

Google http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Yahoo http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
Daily Orbit http://dailyorbit.com/add.htm

Whats your website address? If you let us know the URL we might be able to give you some advice on how to improve the website from a search engine optimisation perspective.