| Q1: | I have lots of pages in my site. Do I need to fill out a separate form for each page at each search site? |
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A1:
| No. If you submit just your home page (which is presumably linked to all the other pages), the search spiders will crawl through all the links on the page (and all the links on the linked pages, and so on) until it has indexed all the pages on your site. |
| Q2: | I submitted a request to be listed with a search engine but my page never comes up, even when I enter my company's unique name. What can I do? |
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A2:
| Most of the big search engines offer a form you can fill out to instantly check whether a specific address is included in their database. If you find that it isn't, you can submit another request form. Sometimes it takes days or even weeks for the spiders to get around to indexing your pages after you submit a request. Yahoo! is particularly infamous for being way behind on index requests because they employ human beings to check every page they list. |
| Q3: | When I put keywords in a <meta /> tag, do I need to include every possible variation of spelling and capitalization? |
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A3:
| Don't worry about capitalization; almost all searches are entered in all lowercase letters. Do include any obvious variations or common errors in spelling as separate keywords. Although simple in concept, there are more advanced strategies available when it comes to manipulating the <meta /> tag than I've been able to cover in this hour. Visit http://www.selfpromotion.com/ for a deeper discussion of the <meta /> tag and web site promotion in general. |
| Q4: | Can I use the <meta /> tag to make a page automatically reload itself every few seconds or minutes? |
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A4:
| Yes, but there's no point in doing that unless you have some sort of program or script set up on your web server computer to provide new information on the page. This technique can be useful in special scenarios, however. As an example, sites that display live information such as sports scores often use this technique to automatically reload themselves and show updated scores every few seconds. |
