How can I get my website to show up on google and other search engines? What about Meta-Tags and domain forwarding?

If your website appears on Google it’s also most-likely to appear automatically in other search engines as well. Also note that Google has 70% market-share which means that 70% of the searches on the web are made through Google. That’s why I’m going to describe only how to get your website indexed on Google here and am not covering other search engines.

If you’re using WordPress to build your website before you start going through the steps described here login to your Administration Panel (Dashboard). Go to Settings, Privacy and under “Blog visibility” make sure
“I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers”
is selected.

Chapter 1: Going through the process step by step
Note 1: About meta-tags and search engines
Note 2: About Google and domain masking

Chapter 1: Going through the process step by step

If you have multiple Sites published to the same server also read magenta

1) Submit your URL going to addurl

2) Register here to register to the Google Webmaster Tools.

3) Now create a sitemap http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
-Put your base URL (www.yourdomain.com) where it says Starting URL
If you have multiple websites submit http://yourdomain.com/sitename/
-Click on start

4) Download the un-compressed XML Sitemap

5) Open it in Safari to see if almost all pages are included, if they aren’t something went wrong. If it doesn’t open with Safari right-click on it (ctrl+click) and choose “Open with” and select “Safari”.

6) If it’s ok. Upload that file to the main location on your server (not in the folder named with the title of your site…)
Entering: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml in your browser should bring up this file. If it doesn’t come up in the browser then something went wrong and you will have to find out what. You probably placed it into the wrong location.
If you have different websites change the name of the sitemap.xml file to sitename_sitemap.xml

7) Once you uploaded that file go to the Google Webmaster Tools you registered to in Step 2. In the Dashboard if it isn’t already already on the list you need to add your base URL. To do that hit “Add site” , type your domain in the appearing box
http://yourdomain.com

and hit “Continue”.

8 ) Google will ask you to verify that it really is your website.

Under “Choose verification method” select “Upload an HTML file”:

Now you will have to build the verification file.

- Open any text editing application you want.
- Don’t put anything on the blank page.
- Save the file to your desktop
- Name the file with your Google number (something like google8824XXXXXX)
- If you can choose the file format select HTML otherwise you will need to change the extension of the file to .html afterwards
- A file will appear on your desktop called google8824XXXXXX.html

Put it in the main location (root) on your server (same location where the sitemap.xml file is)
Entering: www.yourdomain.com/google8824XXXXXX.html in your browser should bring up this file. If it doesn’t come up in the browser then something went wrong and you will have to find out what.

Once you created and uploaded the file hit “Verify” and you will see a message appearing at the top of the window

and get redirected to the Dashboard.

Now go to “Site configuration” and “Sitemaps”

and hit .

9) If you uploaded your sitemap to the root of your server you will just have to type in “sitemap.xml” (or the name of the file if you renamed it)

and click on “Submit Sitemap”.
If you have multiple websites sitename_sitemap.xml Do Steps 3 to 9 for the other sites as well. In the end all your sitemaps will show up in the Dashboard.

Again a message will appear at the top of the window

and your sitemap will be on the list:

11) That’s it. However you will have to wait about two weeks before you see your site indexed by google. To see if your website is indexed in google go to google, in the search box type site:’your url’ (see example here ) note that it changes whether you include or not the www. I find most of my pages indexed without because I first registered it that way.

You will have to replace the old Sitemap with a new one every time you add a new page to your website to keep it updated. No need to update it if you republish without having added a new page. To replace a sitemap:
- Make a new sitemap
Upload it to your Server
Go to your Google Webmaster Tools account
Click on the URL of your site
Go to Sitemaps, Check the box near the sitemap file name and hit “Resubmit selected” and you’re done.

Note 1: About meta-tags and search engines

Some time ago you could “feed” search engines with words (keywords) by putting them in the meta tags (more precisely meta description tags). Nowadays search engines ignore those tags (probably due to spamming) and only look at the content. To me meta description tags are useless.

On this Google Webmaster Help page Google states that

“This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.”

Under the title tag looking at my website on Google the actual content of the pages displays. If you don’t add meta tags to your pages Google takes the whole content of the page. Depending on what the potential-vistors search for the description (snippet of the content of my pages) changes dynamically. If the relevant part is at the bottom of the page it shows the bottom of the page if it’s at the top it shows the top. Meta description tags aren’t so dynamical. In addition to that if one puts a sentence in the meta description tags it would just show that sentence. Whereas if the content is taken it contains a lot of sentences, meaning lots of keywords.

On the previously linked Google Webmaster Help page clicking on More informations talking about meta tags they state:

“they won’t impact your ranking within search results”

which is the main reason why people want to add them: a higher ranking. Doesn’t work, sorry.

I read that Yahoo makes more use of the tags than Google does. But it’s a fact that more than 70% of the searches on the web are made with Google (who’s using Yahoo?). Please note that if a website gets indexed by Google it most probably will be indexed by Yahoo and other search engines too.

I never did any Meta Tags and it seems to me that my site works fine without Meta Tags on Google… Google includes Page Title and Page Content.

Bottom line: I see no need for Meta Description Tags.

That’s my point of view. But people reading this: You’re free to decide on your own… It’s up to you…

The only useful thing to me are Alt-Texts. Alt-texts are alternative text for images especially for search engines which can’t actually look at the picture to see what’s on them.

4 TIPS:

- Update your sitemaps
- Further use synonyms in your content. Write your content so that it fits as good as possible everything a ‘googler’ could search for.
- Search engines don’t look for tags, they look for the content of your pages.
- In the end it’s all about three things: Content, Content and Content

To know what Googlers are searching for visit this page: Google insights for search.
As an example if you have a website with music lyrics write “lyrics” in the searchbox. Scroll down and you will see which lyrics are the most-searched ones at the moment. You can also select an area. The lyrics searched for in the UK usually are different from the ones searched in the USA. These are the keywords you have to integrate in your content.

Note 2: About Google and domain masking

Using WebForward with cloaking/masking may make the sites appear in google without content because it generates an iFrame embedding the content but the page itself doesn’t have any. If you want your sites to appear in Google under your personal domain you have to have it forwarded as CNAME.