Weaving your Webpage


Getting noticed on search engines

     Just putting your webpage out onto the Internet won't get it noticed unless you tell someone you're there. One method is if you know someone who has a page with a high number of hits. They might be willing to put a link to your page on theirs. But the best way is by letting the search engines know you are there.   

     Unless you are linked to by someone else on the internet, your new page is probably not in any search engine yet. To get in a search engine, you should submit your site. For most search engines, all you will need is your URL (http://www.yourprovider.com/yourdir/yourpage.html) and possibly a contact email address.

     There are two types of Search Engines. An Index is a collection of the text off web pages that it has spidered or crawled, as it visits new pages it collects links from it, and visits the linked pages, and so on. It slowly makes its way around the web collecting more pages and links, updating the index about old pages and deleting pages that no longer exist or that have moved. Normally all you will need to get into an index search engine is submit your URL, and the spider (program that collects the data) will visit your page, possibly the next day, possible the next week, or possibly in the next month, depending on the engine.

     A Catalog doesn't actually visit your page, instead you submit your URL, Title, and Description to it, and place it in the proper category. OFten these are verified by a real person which usually delays entry a few weeks, but sometimes your entry is automatically added once you have submitted. Catalogs are often more accurate in finding a page on a well known topic. META tags are not used by many catalogs.

Here are a few major places to submit your page     

AltaVista (http://altavista.digital.com/)

Excite (http://www.excite.com/)

HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com/)

InfoSeek (http://www.infoseek.com/)

Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/)

OpenText (http://index.opentext.com/)

Webcrawler (http://www.webcrawler.com/)

Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/) - Search - To submit to yahoo, search for your category, then click the ADD URL button.