I'm having a hard time getting search engines to find my website. I've
tried alot of things, have meta words in the webpage.. What is the
BEST way I'm going to be found from search engines?? Example of what I
have in my Keywords below and nothing ever comes up in in ANY search
engine. HELP!

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="welcome santa barbara congenials club,
newcomers, newcomer, santa barbara congenials, santa barbara single,
santa barbara couples, santa barbara singles, single, singles, couple,
couples, social, socials, santa barbara socials, Santa Barbara
Singles, Santa Barbara Socials, Welcome Santa Barbara Congenials club,
santa barbara club, santa, barbara, club, Santa Barbara, California,
Congenials, new, New, visitor, Visitor, Carpinteria, Goleta, UCSB, UC
Santa Barbara, Montecito, santa barbara">

---

Clarification of Question by dbadawicki-ga on 21 Dec 2002 12:47 PST

and the website I'm talking about is www.sbcongenials.org

---

Request for Question Clarification by scriptor-ga on 21 Dec 2002 12:53 PST

Dear dbadawicki,

To tell the truth, I do not really understand your problem. I
performed a Google search using "Santa Barbara Congenials Club" as
search term - and the result I got was your website:

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22Santa+Barbara+Congenials+Club%22&btnG=Google+Search

So your site has not been ignored at all. Or did I misunderstand
something about your question?

Best regards,
Scriptor

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Clarification of Question by dbadawicki-ga on 21 Dec 2002 13:44 PST

You are right, I actually hadn't noticed that.. But other keywords
doesn't bring it up really. Can you help?

Hi there,

I have identified a number of ways you can improve your search engine
ranking for Google. Google currently dominates web searching, and each
of my recommendations should also improve your ranking on other search
engines.


META Keywords
-------------

Google ignores them. The only use for META keywords these days is to
include common misspellings of keywords - some search engines might
still index the META keywords, and misspelled searches are extremely
common.


Your current ranking
--------------------

The keywords you wish to found by are a mixed bag. As noted by another
researcher, a search for "Santa Barbara Congenials Club" has you at
number one. In fact a search for just "congenials" has you at number
one as well, although I doubt it is a word that is searched for very
often.

You are going to have problems getting on the first page of results
for keywords such as singles, couples, club etc - they are just too
commonplace. You are best to focus on Santa Barbara. This tool at
Overture gives a good approximation of the keywords people search for
that include Santa Barbara:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?term=%22santa+barbara%22

I suggest that you decide on a three word phrase that includes "Santa
Barbara", such as:

"Santa Barbara singles"
"Santa Barbara adults"
"Santa Barbara club"
"Santa Barbara activities"
"Santa Barbara socials"
"Santa Barbara dancing"

Make sure that the phrase is something that prospective members might
be searching for. You can choose a different phrase for each page of
your site - this is a good way of finding out which works best.

The difficult part is fitting the phrase into several places on your
page. The higher up in the general text, the better. However the best
place for it is in the TITLE tag. Google loves keywords in titles.
Something like this could work for you:

Congenials Club - socialize with Santa Barbara singles and couples

Also, place the following keywords somewhere in the body of the page,
preferably in a properly formed sentence - Carpinteria, Goleta, UCSB,
UC, Montecito.


META Robots
-----------

At present Google thinks there is only one page on your site, because
it has followed this instruction in the HTML of your homepage:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" content="INDEX,NOFOLLOW">

If you change it from NOFOLLOW to FOLLOW, the GoogleBot will index the
other pages in your site when it next visits, which will be reflected
in search results in a couple of months. Google will then know that
your site has more than one page - single page websites traditionally
rank very poorly.

I strongly suggest that on the table1.htm page you include this tag in
the HEAD section:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

Otherwise all the email addresses on the page are open for
"harvesting" and could receive a lot of spam.


Links pointing to your site
---------------------------

Instead of just relying on keywords, Google also ranks sites according
to the number of links that point to them, and treats the number of
links as an indication of how good your site is. Ask Santa Barbara
related websites to link to yours. The best to target are local
directories, like http://www.santabarbara.com . Also, if any of your
members have a website, ask them to add a link to the club website.

To greatly increase traffic and ranking, get listed in the two best
web directories, for free. Open Directory typically takes between 1
day and several months to add a site, while Yahoo sometimes takes a
year or more...


Yahoo
-----

http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/California/Cities/Santa_Barbara/Community/Organizations/

Click on "Suggest a Site" at the very bottom of the page, then follow
the free option.


Open Directory
--------------

http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/California/Localities/S/Santa_Barbara/Society_and_Culture/

Click on "add URL" at the top of the page



Search strategy: Personal experience


Merry Xmas,
robertskelton-ga

Very good