Web-Studio Blog

Ask is a link based search engine which trawls the web through site links and indexes the pages it finds. There is not really a "submit URL" section but there is something else that can be done. This is a three stage process and will notify ASK that you have a website that you would like them to see.
Firstly you will need to ensure that you have the robots.txt file in the root directory of your website and this file contains the sitemap auto discovery directive
SITEMAP: http://www.YourDomainName.co.uk/YourSiteMap.xml

Then you need to ensure that you have a sitemap to put in the same root directory. This can easily be done for smaller sites by visiting http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which will create one for you. Download this and add it to your root directory. When this has been done you can 'ping' Ask and let them know you have a site that wants to be indexed. Type the below url into your browser to submit your sitemap to ask:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomainname.co.uk/yourSitemapName.xml

For more information have a look at their documentation http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml

Labels: search engines, website promotion

The Meta description of your website is an important area to spend that little bit of extra time on. It is used to entice people who find your site on the search engines to click on your link. Do not have the same description for every page.
This description will appear on the search engines under your page title (which is very important to get right!) so make it appealing and relevant.
More information on how Google advises you use your description:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264&hl=en#writegooddescriptions

Labels: descriptions, web design, website promotion

The first thing we look at when a client wants to improve their search engine position is the way a search engine views your website. We use a Lynx Viewer simulator which are freely available online. The Lynx viewer shows us the text on the website which could be indexed by the search engines. It also lists the links that the search engines could see and what anchor text is used within those links (the anchor text is the text used a link to another webpage). As you have probably guessed by now it is a word game. You need to ensure that each page on your website contains good quality text which is relevant to what you are trying to promote.

Test your own website and see if the text that appears contains the keyword phrases that people type in the search engines to find you.
http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php
If you are not sure what people will be typing into the search engines to find you then use our keyword suggestion tool in the webmaster tools section.

Labels: lynx viewer, website promotion