We can demonstrate success in tailoring web design to keep up with the ever-changing requirements of the top search engines.
Sites in our BerkshireLinks.com network come up at or near the top of major search engines for a variety of search phrases:
Our new media site, NewBerkshire.com, has the No. 1 page ranking for the search phrase "Berkshire arts news," on Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com.
We have prepared this page as a basic overview of the process of getting your website listed with Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, which together account for 90+% of searches, according to web usability expert Jakob Nielsen. (For more information, see: www.useit.com)
As stated in the excerpt (below) from Google, the most important factor in determining how you will be listed is having links to your website included on other already-listed websites.
To get that process started, we make a special offer to our web design clients for the BerkshireLinks Business Listing program.
Do what Google says to do: "Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it."
Besides taking care of your site's content, which means making it fresh, original, and useful, you should make reciprocal-link requests to your business colleagues and friends, whereby we will post a link to their website on your's if they will do the same for you on their's.
After your website has been published to the Internet, we will submit your website (following the various guidelines for free submissions) to:
(Lycos no longer accepts free submissions, but finds pages to index in a fashion similar to that employed by Google. AltaVista now uses Yahoo!).
[excerpted from How Do I Get My Site Listed on Google?] Google is a fully automated search engine, which employs robots known as 'spiders' to crawl the web on a monthly basis and find sites for inclusion in the Google index. Since this process does not involve human editors, it is NOT necessary to submit your site to Google in order to be included in our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed are not manually submitted for inclusion.
Google does not accept payment for inclusion (known as "paid inclusion") of sites in our index, nor for improving the rank of sites in our results.
We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the Web, but if you like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and cannot predict when or if they will appear.
Please visit our "Add URL" page to input your URLs. You can submit your site as often as you like, but multiple submissions will not improve the likelihood of your site being added or accelerate the process. We do not penalize sites for 'over-submitting'. If you choose to submit your site, only the top-level domain is necessary, as the spiders will follow your internal links to all the rest of the pages.
The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly.
If you are having difficulty getting listed in the Google index, you may want to consider submitting your site to Yahoo! or Netscape. You can submit to Yahoo! by visiting http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/. You can submit your site to Netscape's Open Directory Project (DMOZ) by visiting www.dmoz.org. Once your site is included in either of these directories, Google will often index your site within six to eight weeks.