Ok, I don't know how or why it happened, but my website comes up on google weather you type in Vina Blue, "Vina Blue" or vinablue. Cloud gave me some good tips but I'm not sure I fully understand them.

My boyfriend's site www.sunwolfpress.com doesn't come up as easily and this perplexes me because his site has been up longer than mine.

Does that mean that mine gets more hits? Or is it that his pages aren't titled? We're using Dreamweaver. Cloud told me something about meta tags and I'm not sure what they are. Are those the titles?

The funny thing is, if you type in "Sun Wolf Press" you get my links page to get to his page.

Could be that your website gets more hits, yes.
But also that your pages are coded to match those searches and his don't.

Heavenly said:

Yeah, now that I look at his opening page it isn't titled the way mine is. I think that's the problem. It should come up if someone types in "sun wolf press" in quotes, but since his page isn't titled it doesn't come up. I must fix that.

Hi Heavenly!
[This message was edited Wed Jul 2 15:33:50 PDT 2003 by VinaBlue]

VinaBlue said:

Hello mate, I'll do my best to give some more detailed tips. Heres the advice Ben gave me when I first started out:

1) Use meta tags appropriately (search the web if you don't know what they are). DO NOT KEYWORD SPAM -- you will actually be *automatically* removed from google if you do this.
2) Use descriptive "title" tags
3) HAVE CONTENT. This is critical for "smart" engines! They will do all kinds of analysis of what is actually ON your pages.
4) Have the site up for a long time... the "older" you are, the better your ranking sometimes
5) Get a lot of other sites to link to your site. This really helps on google, for instance.
6) Don't use popup ads on your homepage. This can count against you on some engines.

Meta tags is a small protion of code behind the head tag that are only viewable by search engines. Search Engines read your meta tags & rate your site accordingly. Dreamweaver has a meta tag editor in it as far as I can remember but if you want more info check out this link

Title tags are the bit that appears on the top of your web browser & at the bottom on your computer's task bar. Search Engines treat this as the title of your page but also as the main source for keywords. For example, mine used to say simply 'The Cloud9 Mission' but after what Ben said, I changed it to 'The Cloud9 Mission - Jazz, Soul & Funk Artist Project'. Now any searches for Jazz, Soul, Funk, Artist & Project turn up my page.

Ben's comment about how long your site has been up is the most important though. Ive only really noticed the search engines reindexing cloud9mission.com after the cloud9mission.uk.co domain was terminated (another point, search angines dont like it when your site changes address & as a result I lost a 7 out of 10 search engine rating which took over a year to achieve)

Google searches for your URL on other sites too. Say if google sees your link on 10 sites, it thinks "this many other resources think that Vinablues resource is good" & rates you accordingly.

Another thing to look into is a 'robots.txt' file. Search engines look for this file as soon as they visit your site & it contains information to the robot (a piece of software used by search engines to explore sites) on how exactly you want search engines to index your site. Check this link for more info.

Its a strange buisiness with internet search engines & very few people know how exactly it works. This is what I know so far

One of my recent discoveries is the open directory. Basically the web has got so big, everyone has a site these days & they needed a way of sorting through some of the rubish. How many times have you searched for something & had something completely unrelated turn up in your results?? So someone had the bright idea of creating a human edited directory instead of a computer one that only featured sites with worthwhile information on them. Now the search engines use this open directory to get a more accurate search & I noticed that as soon as I had submitted my site to the open directory (which is free) I started appearing in some really good search results. Check out www.dmoz.org & submit it to a logical catagory like 'music/artists/v/' then they will accept it.

Hope this helps, let me know if you need anymore info

God bless

Lewis

Wow, Cloud! Great info. Thanks.

VinaBlue said:

No probs mate

Just what I know so far about them.

Do you know how to view the source of a webpage??

Most of what I learned was from studying the source code of other great sites. NPGMC was very helpful

cloud9mission said:

Yeah, I know how to view the source, but that html code gives me a headache! I only look at it when I am desparate. I viewed the properties to see the title.

VinaBlue said:

dats cool mate, if ya need help with the html or any other programming language, ask any time but also, check these links if I aint given you them before. These are some of the places I used for inspiration & information long before the days of cloud9mission.com:

http://www.linkdup.com - a index of well designed super sites for your to get inspiration from.

http://www.flashkit.com - a great tutorials site for flash

http://www.2advanced.com - damn near the best site Ive ever seen!!!

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/ - where I learned to program, theres some wicked tutorials on here that are very easy to follow & its got nearly every programming language a webdesigner could possibly need to know. Some good stuff for dreamweaver too though.

www.w3.org - this is the official site of the web consortium, the guys who decide what things each programming languages do to set it as a standard on the web. Basically these guys came up with html among other things

http://www.pageresource.com/ - another good programming tutorials site

http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/ - a glossary of different meta tags I just found for ya

http://dynamicdrive.com/ - a cool place to find all sorts of great things to add to your site

http://www.thefreesite.co..._Freebies/ - another place to find cool additions to your site.

Whew! Thats it I think, hope you find these helpful mate

Feel free to hit me up whenever you got troubles, I use either yahoo or msn messenger & my user name is the_cloud9_mission on both

God bless

Lewis

VinaBlue said:

you can view the source of any webpage using internet explorer. Right click on the page & click 'view source'. Then just copy & paste that code into dreamweaver to see how other sites have done something

Have a look at mine for example & you'll see my meta tags at the top (all of them start with 'meta'), feel free to copy & paste them into your page & change the text

howsat mate??

cloud9mission said:

I haven't had a chance to read all this, lol. I will keep it for futrue reference and I think it's good info for all us musicians to have. I appreciate you taking the time to post all this info.

VinaBlue said:

Thats cool mate. Im always happy to help, I'd be happy to answer any more questions you have mate. Tell you what though, you should have a chat with Ben Margolin. Hes your man for anything webdesign