Chapter 2
Your One-Hour Search-Engine-
Friendly Web Site Makeover
In This Chapter
Finding your site in the search engines
Choosing keywords
Examining your pages for problems
Getting search engines to read and index your pages
A
few small changes can make a big difference in your site’s position in
the search engines. So rather than force you to read this entire book
before you can get anything done, this chapter helps you identify problems
with your site and, with a little luck, shows you how to make a significant dif-
ference through quick fixes.
It’s possible that you may not make significant progress in a single hour, as
the chapter title promises. You may identify serious problems with your site
that can’t be fixed quickly. Sorry, that’s life! The purpose of this chapter is to
help you identify a few obvious problems and, perhaps, make some quick
fixes with the goal of really getting something done.
Is Your Site Indexed.
It’s important to find out if your site is actually in a search engine or direc-
tory. Your site doesn’t come up when someone searches at Google for rodent
racing. Can’t find it in the Yahoo! Directory. Have you ever thought that per-
haps it simply isn’t there. In the next several sections, I explain how to find
out if your site is indexed in a few different systems.
Some of the systems into which you want to place your Web site aren’t
household names. If I mention a search system that you don’t recognize, page
back to Chapter 1 to find out more about it.
