Free Business Listing Websites

[femmefan]

Now my website is up and running I have been trying to get listed on all the free sites I can find and I also want to put links on my website to others as I know that search engines look for links in and out. I have added a page to my website specially for these links but am finding that many sites which require a reciprocal link in order to get listed insist that the link should be direct from your homepage. Does this mean that search engines only look for links on the homepage? Am I wasting my time putting them all on a separate page?

Google is currently only listing my site via the telephone number :!: Have I formatted the homepage wrongly? If anyone who knows what to look for can check it out for me and let me know what I've done wrong I would be grateful.

Cheers,
Hazel

 

[Ruth Mills]

Looks fine to me, but try adding the following meta tag,

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"/>

This will explicitly tell search engines that you want them to index your site.

Think I need to design a free salon directory website now, where people can add their salon websites... yet another Ruthie project to do, eep!

 

[femmefan]

Looks fine to me, but try adding the following meta tag,

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"/>

This will explicitly tell search engines that you want them to index your site.

Think I need to design a free salon directory website now, where people can add their salon websites... yet another Ruthie project to do, eep!

Hmm, I thought I added that after reading about it in one of your other posts. I had to add it directly to the file online as my offline editor doesn't give me access to the raw html in the header. Perhaps my latest update has overwritten it.

Btw I was just thinking about you :lol: I very nearly pm'd you directly with this question Ruth as I know you are quite an expert in this field but I though that may be a bit cheeky since you do it for a living :lol:

Any ideas how why google is indexing the phone number?
Cheers,
Hazel

 

[Ruth Mills]

Hmm, I thought I added that after reading about it in one of your other posts. I had to add it directly to the file online as my offline editor doesn't give me access to the raw html in the header. Perhaps my latest update has overwritten it.

Btw I was just thinking about you :lol: I very nearly pm'd you directly with this question Ruth as I know you are quite an expert in this field but I though that may be a bit cheeky since you do it for a living :lol:

Any ideas how why google is indexing the phone number?
Cheers,
Hazel

Have just had a look and the robots meta tag is there OK - nice one

Also, in answer to your question as to why Google is indexing only the phone number - the short answer is I don't know! I'm guessing that it's a question of waiting until Google picks up links to your site from other sites - hopefully it will have already picked up a few links to you from the salon geek site...

 

[femmefan]

Have just had a look and the robots meta tag is there OK - nice one

Also, in answer to your question as to why Google is indexing only the phone number - the short answer is I don't know! I'm guessing that it's a question of waiting until Google picks up links to your site from other sites - hopefully it will have already picked up a few links to you from the salon geek site...

I must have just beaten you to it - I just put the robot metatag back in It's a bit of a pain really not having access offline. It looks like everytime I upload I will have to edit online as well :irked: I suppose that's what you get for using template driven software :lol:

How long do you think it normally takes google to properly index a site? I'm wondering how long to leave it before having a more serious look at it.

Cheers,
Hazel

 

[Ruth Mills]

I must have just beaten you to it - I just put the robot metatag back in It's a bit of a pain really not having access offline. It looks like everytime I upload I will have to edit online as well :irked: I suppose that's what you get for using template driven software :lol:

How long do you think it normally takes google to properly index a site? I'm wondering how long to leave it before having a more serious look at it.

Cheers,
Hazel

Ah, what template driven software are you using then? I have noticed that Google may initially index a site very quickly if linked to from a site such as Salon Geek where there are a lot of posts being made - but then after the initial listing, the site may then subsequently disappear from Google for a while or come lower down the rankings - strange beast that Google is...

 

[femmefan]

Ah, what template driven software are you using then? I have noticed that Google may initially index a site very quickly if linked to from a site such as Salon Geek where there are a lot of posts being made - but then after the initial listing, the site may then subsequently disappear from Google for a while or come lower down the rankings - strange beast that Google is...

The software is called ewisoft and I've used it just to create the html pages then upload directly to my own webspace, so it's not an online one which then has to re-direct. I tried all sorts of software till I found this one and most of them were very limiting. Of course, if you have the time to learn how to build from scratch there are lots of good editing packages, but I don't have the time and am stuck with the templates. Perhaps when I have some spare cash I'll get you to do a 'proper' job for me :lol:

Cheers,
Hazel

 

[Ruth Mills]

The software is called ewisoft and I've used it just to create the html pages then upload directly to my own webspace, so it's not an online one which then has to re-direct. I tried all sorts of software till I found this one and most of them were very limiting. Of course, if you have the time to learn how to build from scratch there are lots of good editing packages, but I don't have the time and am stuck with the templates. Perhaps when I have some spare cash I'll get you to do a 'proper' job for me :lol:

Cheers,
Hazel

LOL, thanks Hazel

Well, the way I do things is to write the HTML and CSS for each site from scratch, although I do make use of the Struts2 framework and Tiles, which are a Java-based templating mechanism - so what I usually do is create a generic page layout for each site in JSP (containing things like the header and footer and navigation bar etc - basically the things that will be identical on every page) - then the content itself (price lists, text, photos etc) is stored in an XML database, and the Struts configuration determines which content is retrieved from the database for a particular page. As all the content that is likely to change is stored in the database, that means that it's possible to design an "admin" page where the website owner can log on and update content as and when they need to - e.g. to add a new treatment, update prices, add a new photo, etc. Hope I'm not blinding you with science lol...

 

[femmefan]

LOL, thanks Hazel

Well, the way I do things is to write the HTML and CSS for each site from scratch, although I do make use of the Struts2 framework and Tiles, which are a Java-based templating mechanism - so what I usually do is create a generic page layout for each site in JSP (containing things like the header and footer and navigation bar etc - basically the things that will be identical on every page) - then the content itself (price lists, text, photos etc) is stored in an XML database, and the Struts configuration determines which content is retrieved from the database for a particular page. As all the content that is likely to change is stored in the database, that means that it's possible to design an "admin" page where the website owner can log on and update content as and when they need to - e.g. to add a new treatment, update prices, add a new photo, etc. Hope I'm not blinding you with science lol...

Well, yes and no :lol:

I sort of understand the principles and plenty of the jargon. I simply wouldn't know how to put it all together. I had a play at creating a website which used css with a different piece of software but couldn't really figure all the bits out that I needed. Something simple like telling everything to centre in the computer window and re-organize itself if the window was re-sized was a total mystery. I searched and searched but couldn't find the right settings or code. It was quite fun though keep editing the styles to see the colours and fonts magically change throughout. Wish I had more time to play and learn more but nails have to come first I'm afraid :lol:

Cheers,
Hazel

 

[Ruth Mills]

Aagh, CSS! Although I have found that one of the main problems with CSS is that what will display absolutely gorgeously on one browser might not work on another... the usual culprit being Internet Explorer 6! On some sites I have designed, I've found that I've had to make workarounds - so that they will display exactly as I want them in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, etc - but will still work (although not be quite as pretty) in Internet Explorer 6 - the main reason being that IE6 does not handle all CSS styles as expected - in particular if you define a DIV as "fixed" then it tends not to work in IE6...

So really I'm not surprised you had problems with getting CSS to work - as frankly it can be a black art sometimes! I guess the most important lesson is testing - once it works in one browser, test it in as many other browsers as you can to make sure that it still works as you intended...

 

[Dawn27]

Hi Ruth, i'm a bit of a tech misfit. Created my own web site Complexions Bridal Make-up my photo's take ages to show when potential clients go on to have a look which is frustrating, could you advise me in your wisdom why this is its hosted by fasthosts and site through site builder does that mean anything to you???? what is a meta name robot thingy you are talking about. I'm intrigued. Would really appreciate your advise on this.
Many thanks
Dawn

 

[Ruth Mills]

Hi Ruth, i'm a bit of a tech misfit. Created my own web site Complexions Bridal Make-up my photo's take ages to show when potential clients go on to have a look which is frustrating, could you advise me in your wisdom why this is its hosted by fasthosts and site through site builder does that mean anything to you???? what is a meta name robot thingy you are talking about. I'm intrigued. Would really appreciate your advise on this.
Many thanks
Dawn

Yes you are quite right - some of the images are taking quite some time to load for me too... and I know why thankfully - it looks as though you have put some of the images on at their original resolution as they would have come off the camera - like http://www.beautifulbridebycomplexions.co.uk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/sara.JPG - which is 2112 x 2816 pixels and 2.3 megabytes of data - yet on the web site, it is being shown at 180 x 240 pixels - so what you need to do is re-size the image to 180 x 240 pixels (make sure you back up the original first!), save it, and replace the one on the web site with it. You could use IrfanView to do this, IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide - if you don't have existing graphics software such as Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop etc...

Now, meta tags are a special sort of HTML tag that are used to define "metadata" which can be read by things like search engines and whatnot - the good news is that your site already defines meta tags for "keywords" and "description" - meaning that there are already lots of goodies for the search engines to feast on to make your site get a better ranking on Google and whatnot - so you have already done a great job there.

The "robots" meta tag is another one that you could add, e.g.

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"/>

This would explicitly say to the search engines that you want them to index your content. Although the good news is that they probably will by default anyway unless you explicitly tell them otherwise...

So adding the "robots" meta tag is optional - but may possibly help you with some search engines... it all depends on the individual search engine I guess, as they are all coded differently and have their own individual quirks...

 

[Ruth Mills]

Hi Ruth, i'm a bit of a tech misfit. Created my own web site Complexions Bridal Make-up my photo's take ages to show when potential clients go on to have a look which is frustrating, could you advise me in your wisdom why this is its hosted by fasthosts and site through site builder does that mean anything to you???? what is a meta name robot thingy you are talking about. I'm intrigued. Would really appreciate your advise on this.
Many thanks
Dawn

Just thought - something that would work great for your gallery pages is having a larger version of each image pop up when you click on it, like on the images on Cath's permanent makeup site, Permanently Natural - Professional Permanent Cosmetics by Catherine - I used something called "Facebox" to do that, Facebox 1.2 which is a free Javascript plugin that works with the JQuery javascript library, jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library (damn am giving away some of my best web design tricks now lol)...

 

[Ruth Mills]

Hi Ruth, i'm a bit of a tech misfit. Created my own web site Complexions Bridal Make-up my photo's take ages to show when potential clients go on to have a look which is frustrating, could you advise me in your wisdom why this is its hosted by fasthosts and site through site builder does that mean anything to you???? what is a meta name robot thingy you are talking about. I'm intrigued. Would really appreciate your advise on this.
Many thanks
Dawn

Dawn, drop me a pm if you want some help with sorting the meta tags and the images out