I have spent a long time researching how to improve the google ranking of your site, and I know that some of you have your own home pages and others have some really cool websites, recently I managed to get this forum to the top of the rankings on Msn, Google, Yahoo, Askjeeves, and Altavista.
Forgive me if you know these tricks, I just thought I'd share them with you so that you can use the same tactics to boost your rankings..
The first thing to do is to get your site submitted to the search engines, there are free services on the web that do this. I don't think it is a very effective way of doing it but it won't harm to do it a couple of times.
Secondly, links.. You need to have your links in as many web pages that are crawled by spiders as you can. So if you are a member of a place that you know is established and you can find it with google, put a link to your site in your signature. When a web bot crawls that site, it will find any new links on that site and add them to it's list of sites to crawl.
Usually once a web bot has been to you, it will come back at a set frequency, for example weekly to crawl you again. Make sure that you put lots of new content on your site when you know you are being crawled, it encourages more spiders to be sent out. When this site hit a peak in December and January, we had up to 60 webbots on this site at once!!!
Don't be afraid of webbots crawling your site, they are mostly good. Some are harmful, most are cool, but the main ones you want are googlebot, google images, inktomi slurp (yahoo), and msn.
You can manipulate the search keywords once you are listed.
Go to google and type in the address of your forum "
www.dbfinteractive.com" for example.
If it finds your place, click on it. View a few pages, then go back to google, type it in again
www.dbfinteractive.com + programming + demos etc.. and you can add associated words to the site.
They say that these things are safeguarded against, but that is wrong.
For example, try typing "liar" into google, it will take you to Tony Blair's biography.
The search engines are your friend if you know how to use them.
Also feel free to use the links section of this board i your site is relevant to coding or humourous. You'll surely get a few visits from bots.
Finally, make sure that you have a robots.txt file in your root directory, it could be something simple like the one we use here.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
User-agent: becomebot
Crawl-Delay: 30
Disallow: /cgi-bin
That's simple, it keeps all well programmed 'bots out of our cgi bin, also there was one bot called "becomebot" that was fairly useless and leaching lots of bandwidth so I've slowed it's crawl down to stop this happening.
Googlebot for example will download this text file once a week. Most well made robots obey robots.txt
Hope that helps you get visits to your pages
It's helped us a lot!
