Search Engine Optimization

Increasing Search Engine Visibility
Probably the question I most get asked is "WHY CAN'T I FIND MY SITE ON GOOGLE" or "HOW CAN I GET MORE TRAFFIC". This is probably the hardest area to understand when constructing a site, here are a few basics and useful links.

Google Yahoo Bing and other search engines
Do not expect your site to appear on the search engines instantly, they are good but but not that good. The web is very very big with thousands of new sites being created every day. It might take up to a couple of months until the search bots discover and crawl your site. Setting meta tags for description helps as does a descriptive title. Also you can try adding your site manually
Google Add URL
Yahoo Submit Info
Bing Submit Site

Meta Tags
Google Yahoo and Bing all CLAIM that "THEY DO NOT USE THE KEYWORDS META TAG" but anything that could help should be used so add it anyway. Far more important are the TITLE and DESCRIPTION of a page. They should be concise and relevant to the content of the page. You can set title, keywords and description for any html page from the page options in the building tool (xtgem sites only). Search engines should (no guarantees) use the description and title when they finally list your site.

Search Engine Pages About Meta Tags
Google
Yahoo
Bing
There are a whole load more meta tags you can add to your pages. "NONE OF THESE TAGS WILL IMPROVE PAGE RANK", although some serve other special purposes. Sometimes you will NOT want search engines to list a page. For this use a special meta tag (there is no guarantee)
<meta name="robots" content="noindex , nofollow" />

Toplists And Directories
Join every good and genuine one that you can find.
Join Mobpartner and see their auto submit tool and Banners Exchange tool.
Check out igloo.mobi

Facebook, Twitter, Guestbooks And Forums
Post your url on as many as you can but don't be surprised or upset if the moderators delete your posts. Promote your site on as many social networks as you can find. Create facebook and twitter pages and add their buttons and widgets to your site.

Content
It is very important to understand that content is a priority in any site. If you put in enough hard work to provide your users with quality original content, your site will eventually attract attention and become popular. Try to keep your page code valid and free from errors. Search engine bots do not like errors or invalid code, you can use online services to check your html.
W3C validator services
Onlinewebcheck.com

Images And Image Search
The images on your site are another tool in improving your visibility. Give them proper names and alt texts that actually mean something, for example "little_fluffy_bunny.jpg" means a lot more to a search engine than "lfb001.jpg"

A Simple Google Search Box

This site

This is the same code as produced by the site search widget with the addition of a check box for search within a domain
<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"><input type="text" name="q" maxlength="255" value="" /><br /><input type="submit" value="Search" /><input type="checkbox" name="sitesearch" value='<xt:url type="domain" />' checked="checked"/>This site<br /></form>
For non xtgem sites, replace '<xt:url type="domain" />' with your site name.