O/T - - - Website rebuild,

Martyn,

In my experience, unless you need to get it listed to attract commercial traffic, I wouldn't bother. I used an off the shelf 'submissions agent' (when I had a commercial site) which very effectively publishes your information to about a million (possible exaggeration!) listers and search engines. I got listed alright, but I spent the rest of my life fending off spam messages from every site in the universe. If you set up a separate email account which you specify when listing, you can probably ignore the spam by never down loading from your alternative address.

Proper search engines - Google included - will find you without registering with them. Sites that are not proper search engines as such won't.

Mark

Hi Martyn:

Going into mobile text-code language doesn't do much for a lot of us :-))

Getting onto the search engines takes a bit of time and patience, and also the site needs to get request from Google and Yahoo from their users so they can see traffic there.

Google used to have a box for advising them about new sites, but I see it has been taken off now, so you may have to use the main site to contact them. With thousands of folks putting up new sites each week, the admin for this must be pretty awful, so they probably use a web bot to go look and see what is there.

Richard Heulin can probably advise more than I can on the more interesting side of things.

Remember that web hits are not the be-all and end-all of being on the web!

Peter

Snip.

The url of your present site would allow me to see if there are any obvious problems which are hindering it from being listed. The more content the better chance of being listed. Things to avoid are those sites that claim to list your site in thousands of search engines. They are simply a wheeze to harvest addresses for spammers. There are only a handful or so of worthwhile search engines and basically once your site is listed in Google the others will pick it up. Splash pages/entry pages with an image and zero content are the kiss of death, also pages with only MM Flash content, these have nothing for a search engine to list which means that nothing is exactly what happens.

Things that will help are: Content, Content, Content, good descriptive page titles, good image names. Also helpful is taking two bites of the cherry, IE Petter type W - Petter W type Mk II - Mark 2 - Mark2 etc. There is a school of thought that maintains that search engines time out on pages of more than 100K in file size, I have no proof that is the case but have plenty that lean file sizes and content helps. Another thing that will help is a link to your site from one that is listed by Google, the better it is ranked the more effective the link will be. As there are a few people in the group talking about constructing sites you and they are welcome to contact me via email, my from address is real and fully functional but I prefer messages in plain text, I have my software set to reject HTML messages if the subject seems genuine I can recover them but could easily miss them among the vast volumes of dross my filters consign to the bin.

Do I have the vaguest clue of what I am talking about? try entering fordson in Google and see. The links you need for Google are:

Some advance notice for all Hot Air and Stirling engine collectors.

The date of the 2005 gathering at Kew Bridge Steam Museum will be on Sunday 3rd April.

Entry forms can be obtained from Lesly Bossine at the museum.

Bob Sier