Thursday, July 13, 2006

Web Hosting, Advertising, Keywords

A friend asked me about how to get his website listed on google and yahoo. I thought I would share a summary of what I wrote .

Submitting URL to search engine for free
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps - Submit a sitemap that allows google to efficiently index your website content. It requires you to create a robot.txt file and verify that you are owner of the site. There are two verification methods, uploading a html files with a provided name or including a meta tag in your header. You site must be verified before you can use the tools mentioned below.

The site also provides statics about your site, how/when its been last "crawled", pages that have been indexed, etc.


Checking keywords.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - Give this one a try and see how many hits your keywords will generate.
Google has another great tool for keywords research. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=3

Cheap Domains (No web hosting included)
http://order.sbs.yahoo.com/ds/ChooseDomain?d=&.p=YD1&m=dom&.src=sbs&.promo=PASSPORTPLUS Yahoo! Small business. Domains cost $3 for the first year. However, it goes up after that! I bought one domain with them and the service is pretty good
http://godaddy.com domains cost $6.95. I’ve bought a couple of domains with them and they have good customer service.
http://www.ipower.com – Domains cost $2.95 but I’ve heard the customer service is kind of iffy.