How to get a website to appear in search results

[Emu2005]

Hi,
I am trying to get my website to appear in search results. Just wondering if anyone knew a relatively pain free way of doing this. I have googled it and keep reading things like submitting meta pages or something (i really don't understand what this means). Has anyone had any success in paying to get their website to appear? Or doing it themselves?
Any help anyone can give would be much appreciated.
Many thanks
Emu

[squarebear]

You would be better posting this in technology but basically you need a section in the top of your html saying what keywords are in your site. For example if you ran a florists, you would put:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="flowers, florist, bloom, bouquet, roses">

And so on...

[Emu2005]

Thanks squarebear - I've reposted in Technology.

Sorry for being a bit slow, I am confused by what you mean by 'putting a section in the top of my html'.

I don't understand this. Sorry I'm not great at computer stuff!

[dasherman]

The best ways to get a decent Google ranking are:-

1) A good domain like .com or .co.uk
2) Lots of links on other sites linking to yours,so if it's a business website put your self on directory sites such as touchlocal.com,or sign loads of guestbooks.
3) Submit your site using dreamsubmit or submitexpress. Or submit direct to Google.

http://www.dreamsubmit.net/
http://www.submitexpress.com/
http://www.google.com/addurl/

If you're unsure of how to add keywords it is possible to see the code on other sites,try this link:-

http://www.submitexpress.com/snooper/

[squarebear]

If you look at the page source for this page, there is a section at the top that says:

<meta name="keywords" content="am, anyone, appear, appreciated, doing, dont, Emu, free, give, googled, help, Hi, Just, keep, knew, means, meta, pages, pain, paying, reading, really, relatively, results, search, something, submitting, success, thanks, themselves, things, trying, understand, website, wondering."/>

Google and other search engines use this when people search for any of the terms mentioned in that list.

[whambam]

Getting on Google is the easy part. Just submit it, stick your webaddress on a few other sites and they will crawl your site and add you to Google.

Getting higher up the search results so people come to your site first when typing in "florist" is a LOT harder and for every genuine scheme that could help you if you pay, there are 100 that will rob you blind offering 0 results.

The best thing to do is to have a LOT of traffic and a lot of people talking about your website address everywhere to go up the listings.

Personally I dont place much use on website search engines unless you are a huge company. It is far better to use word of mouth to attract traffic than it is to rely on google. It is easy (if you have access to your hosting cPanel) to check referal links to your site (where your traffic is coming from) and i would hazzard a guess that placing a link on a forum or other website will attract 20 times more traffic than someone searching a search engine and coming across it will do.

Alternatively, if you intend to pay to get traffic, again, dont bother paying for a better search engine placement hoping someone "may" just type the right keywords and "may" just click on your site link over 1000's of others in the search list...... just pay for Adwords or other advertising and market your website directly to the audience in an eye catching way. It will have a much better result of attracting customers than it will relying on a search engine listing.