Publicising Your Web Site With Search Engines : Publicising Your Web Site With Search Engines Marieke Napier Information Officer UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based. Email m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk URL http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/


Promoting your Web Site: Promoting your Web Site Talks at conferences Sites linking to you Promotion adverts/articles in the media Mailing lists Word of mouth Search engines Your Web site Search Engines


What are Search Engines?: What are Search Engines? “A search engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found.” Webopedia.internet.com Search Engine or Directory? Spider, Index, Search Engine


Web Site Design 1: Web Site Design 1 Keywords What are your keywords? How are they positioned? Lists of links Tables Frames Graphics Metatags


Web Site Design 2: Web Site Design 2 Links Have an alternative to frames URLs Short and sweet avoid ?, *,~ and other strange characters Bridging Pages Database delivery Robots.txt file


Metatags: Metatags Dublin Core (DC) Resource Discovery Framework (RDF) Spamming Variations of Keywords Search Engines that don’t support Metatags - Excite, Fast, Google, Lycos

Indexing using Robots.txt: Indexing using Robots.txt Robot Exclusion Protocol (REP) - robots.txt feature allows HTML authors to control robots User-agent: * # Following apply to all robots Disallow: /cgi-bin/ # Don't index /cgi-bin directory Disallow: /resources/ # Don't index /resources directory


Relevancy Ranking: Relevancy Ranking Location and frequency method Problems Popularity method Important pages? Reviewed sites Metatags Payment


Submitting your Site: Submitting your Site Submit key pages Submit manually from Search Engine Web sites Use a submission application or Web service Add a URL Google.com


Which Search Engines?: Which Search Engines? AltaVista Excite Google HotBot Lycos Northern Light AOL, Ask Jeeves, Direct Hit, Go, RealNames, Web Crawler


Measuring Your Success: Measuring Your Success Checking your URL Search for Spiders Botwatch Statistics Referrer information Link popularity


Problems: Problems Links, URLs, frames Bridging Pages Robots.txt file Database delivery Javascript HTML Free Web site Hosting


Using Statistics: Using Statistics Statistics packages Purchased Statistics Services Externally-Hosted Web Statistics Referrer logs


Link Popularity: Link Popularity Analyse how many sites link to you using a search engine


Resources: Resources For more a list of all URLs and resources referred to in this presentation have a look at: