On Thursday 24 February 2005 23:28, Paul Taylor wrote:
On Thursday 24 February 2005 22:01, Roger Beaumont wrote:
On Thursday 24 February 2005 12:19, Paul Taylor wrote: <snip> In the latter case, has the site been submitted to the search engines in question? I didn't know this could be done and it has not been an issue as other sites I have done appear in the top page of Google. This is fairly new to me and I am doing it in between all of my teaching load so it is a bit hit and miss.
I've done that for you. For future reference, go to Google, then "About Google", then "Submitting your Site". Hopefully, after google does its next web-crawl, searching for "Taumata Guest House" should give a hit... It is worth going to other search engine sites and checking out how to tell them explicitly about this (or other) websites. That may not be enough, but it does at least get you into their databases.
Does the client's name appear as actual text on the site (as well as in meta tags)? Yes, but their name is their guest house which is Taumata. They must have got this from a holiday in the Antipedes as this appears quite a lot. The site is also split between two sites: B & B and Child Minding (his wife's business). Therefore, there are two subdirectories with Mambo in each one, within the httpdocs directory on the server.
There's a whole lot of other scenarios between the above extremes; and to give useful advice probably needs more detail about the problem. Can you give a URL so that we can look at the site itself?
http://www.taumata.co.uk Not pretty, but functional :)
The trouble (!) is that both guest houses and child-minding will have a helluvalot of references. Hitting exactly this/these site/s will depend upon lots of other factors. Search engine placement can be a full-time job (again, "!"), but for B&Bs there are lots of index sites (google for 'Bath +"bed and breakfast"'). Many allow you to register free of charge. When you appear on those index sites, you start to have multiple links to this site - so Google rates it higher. I expect that also applies to child-minding... Basically: 1. Manually 'register' the site with as many search engines as you can be bothered with (Google is the minimum). 2. Search for 'index' sites that will include a reference to your target and register with them. Only after that do the 'advanced' techniques of meta-tag (etc) creation start to be significant. Back from commercial to educational priorities... Set your students an exercise to investigate what factors affect search-engine placement. Both they and you could learn a lot. Hope that helps - and do feel free to mail me off-board if I can help further. Roger PS A close friend of mine runs a B & B site for a friend of his. I've learnt much from him about this particular area. That website now keeps the establishment pretty full. Google for either '"chestnut cottage" +durham' or '"chestnut villa" +durham' and you'll see what I mean. R