A Cat's Whisker - Website Design

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SELF HELP - Registering with search engines

This area is intended to allow you to undertake certain tasks yourself and therefore avoiding the need to pay me to do it!

Registering with search engines is an obvious one for this page.

Background
You may or may not be aware that there are two basic forms of search engines, those that trawl the net searching for websites to include . . . . . so you don't need to worry about those, and those that don't! 

In order for these to find your website you have to "register".  I am told that you should re-register periodically, but in my experience that hasn't proved necessary, but it wouldn't do any harm to undertake the process every few months.  

For the latter to work the website must have "meta names", that means that it needs a list of words (say 20 to 25) that you want people to be able to use to find your site, the more specific the better.  I will have to do this bit for you, but it is usually done from information that you supply to me and as part of the overall website design.  

For an example take this site.  I have included the following for this site "jonty wild, a cat's whisker, a cats whisker, acatswhisker, cats whiskers, affordable website design", etc etc 

Words to avoid are those that are too vague e.g. "website design" although I have included this, it is most unlikely that anyone will find me using those words, any search will simply find too many entries and no-one is going look through a search finding 10,000 entries!  

Forget words like "music" - "folk music" might be okay, "england" no, but "hitchin" would be okay or "hitchin england", etc. etc.  Contact me if you want help in deciding what to use. 

How to do it
There are two ways, the hard one - find each one yourself and register and the easy one, assuming you would like to use the easy way, read on.

You will find a number of links below which will either take you sites where you can register with several search engines in one go, these seem to work okay, but usually don't give you the opportunity to write any description or take you direct to an individual search engine.  

I advise that you write down each search engine that you register with, this will avoid duplication of effort and reduce your phone bill!  Also some of the links take you to a sites that offer to register 6 to10 in one go.  Sometimes these are flagged ready, however I suggest that you reduce the number to 1 or 2 at a time.

You don't have to register with all, some are quite obscure with limited or specialist users, but definitely register with the main ones such as AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos etc.

Good luck you won't find it too difficult (except Yahoo, which is a pig!).

Watch out for "express" or other chargeable services, if you don't want to pay select the "basic" options.  And don't expect instant success, registration is quick, but the search engines may take several weeks to include your site!

These take you to sites that will allow you to register with several search engines.  Use these first then select any individual ones that you also want from the table at the bottom of the page:

These take you specific search engines sites: