how to make my site searchable ?

[bluetoother]

how to make my site searchable by search engines ?if same topic exsist in the site plz tell me how i find it here in the forum ?thanks

[real_illusions]

theres quite a few waysalthough one very important thing is - linkshaving links to all pages or most pages, where those pages have links to other pages, in easy to find places, not hidden by javascript.and in the head - <meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL" >theres also index,follow as well for that meta tag, but i cant remember exactly how it goes.although that meta tag will tell the search engine bots thats its allowed to index the page in their cache and follow any links on that page.a sitemap is always useful, for both the bots and your users.Generally - if the site is easy to navigate for a human, it should be good enough for a bot.

[chadmichael]

I'm no expert, but from what I know of search engines, and there business model, I think its very important to have well structured html. The search engines don't want to be tricked into finding pages, they want to be able to understand the content and categorize it in a manner that is appropriate for the actual content. The only way they can understand your content is if your document yields well structured data. I think this will increasingly be more important. For starters, make sure you use good html. Perhaps someone has more knowledge of further topics in semantic web stuff, i.e. the way you can make the semantic meaning of your pages more evident to the parsers that the bots use.

[justsomeguy]

I'm not sure if they take the semantics into play very much. I think that something like Google will sort of render the page so it knows whether you are trying to hide text over a same-color background, but I don't think it matters either way if you have a table vs divs vs paragraphs or whatever. It does look at the <h1-6> tags, but the main thing it looks for is the content itself. The single best way to have your site show up higher is to use the keywords you want people to search for as much as you can in the content itself, including in the link text. Also, keep in mind that search engines don't read graphics. It would be better to use an image background with text over it or just CSS for your menus and buttons instead of using images with the text in the image.

[The Praetorian]

Okay, I had a question. The searchable thing works great. Now if I want to adjust what comes up for the description on google, would I change "ALL" to what I want the description to be? Or would I need to add a different meta tag for this?Also, does adding keywords actually help? I read somewhere that Google just ignores keywords anyway. Using the bot thing added my site to googles list (turned up 3rd page in when I typed in the title of my site). And in the keywords, are they case sensetive?

[justsomeguy]

Keywords are not case-sensitive. However, I heard that Google is treating "_" as a separate character and "-" as a separator, so if you search for "html tutorial" pages called "html_tutorial" might not show up, where pages called "html-tutorial" would. I think that Google is ignoring meta keywords more and more, just because you can type anything in there and it doesn't mean your site has anything to do with those keywords. It's more important to have the keywords in the body of the site itself, and also to have other sites link to you where they put the keywords inside the link text.And the meta tag for description is just "description", do a google search for "meta" and "description" to get more info.