Finding my site by "googling" it

Thanks for the link motorpartsguy!

Hi Brian,

It does take time for search engines to find your site, you aren't going to achieve first page ranking immediately. However, there are steps you can take to speed up the process. You can read about them in this thread here: http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...

Also a great place to start is to share your site with our SynthaSite community, and you can do that at this thread here: http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...

Good luck!

Hi brian, sorry to hear that you are having some trouble. What exactly are you having trouble with. Let me know and I will do my best to help you.

Hi Leafpool,

Please post your URL (name of your site) so we can have a look.

Hi Southpoint Shore,

To verify your site with Google Webmaster you need to use the meta tag option. It is very important that you copy the correct portion of the tag in order to be successful. Copy only the letter/number string between the quotation marks and paste it in the designated field in the Properties sidebar.

For detailed, step-by-step, instructions on how to verify your site with Google Webmaster and submit a sitemap, please see our Google Webmaster Tutorial - http://www.synthasite.com/tutorials/g...

Can you please try this again and if you are still having problems, please let me know.

Hi Rian,

Can you please tell me what error message you are getting?

We have instructions on how to verify your site with Google Webmaster and submit a sitemap, please see our Google Webmaster Tutorial - http://www.synthasite.com/tutorials/g... Please use our instructions and not Google's. Google's are written on the assumption that you are coding the website from scratch. Our instructions are written to work specifically with SynthaSite.

Hi Jehimoe,

It takes time for new sites to be picked up by search engines, and there's no guarantee that you'll show up for the searches you want to. There are however, things you can do to increase your ranking.

Search engines like Google show users the sites that they think the users will find useful. The most important things you can do to get your site indexed is to update your content frequently and get other related sites to link to your site. If users like your site enough to post a link to it, search engines begin to trust your site a little more. This also applies to visitors - the more visitors you have, the more likely search engines are to send other visitors to you. While many users have achieved good search engine rankings with a SynthaSite subdomain, using a custom domain name will make it easier for users to remember and revisit your site.

You can submit your site to Google through a program called Google Webmaster Tools. We have posted a tutorial that walks you through the steps to do so at http://www.synthasite.com/tutorials/g... When you submit your site, it's a matter of sitting back and waiting for Google's crawlers to reach your site. This could take as little as a few days, or as long as a few months. Unfortunately, this is out of our control.

You can also add tags to your pages to tell search engines what your site is about. These are key words which will help search engines identify your site. In the properties sidebar for each page you will see a field labeled "Keywords". Type your tags in there - your location, your business, what you offer etc. This is the place to put the sorts of things you'd expect people to be typing into search engines to find you. You should also add a description into the "Description" field - this should be a sentence or two describing your site. An example of a description would be "The Quick & Easy Website Builder that Requires NO Technical Skills and offers free website hosting." The "Window Title", which will become the title tag, is what shows up at the top of a browser when viewing your page, it will also be the text Internet users will click on in the search engine results pages (SERPS) to get to your site. An example of a title tag would be "ABC Store - Affordable Custom Widgets - Austin, Texas".

Here is a link to another tutorial that gives you some more tips on attracting visitors: Promoting your Website - http://www.synthasite.com/tutorials/p... We also have a thread in our forum with more info: SEO with SynthaSite - http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...

If you're a small business or affinity group, you may want to have a professional help get traffic to your site. Some businesses on SynthaSite have found it useful to work with an SEO (search engine optimization) company to improve their rankings and reach visitors. If you'd like to do so, we suggest speaking with our partner http://www.inlocal.com/?kbid=4268&m=20

If you want to see who is visiting your site, we suggest that you install Google Analytics. Here's how to do it:
1. Go to Google Analytics - https://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for a free account
2. Type in the URL of your site
3. Copy the verification code provided by Google
4. Go to SynthaSite and drag and drop a HTML widget at the bottom of each page you want to track
5. Paste the code from Google into the HTML editor on each page
6. Republish your site

Your site will then be verified and you can log into your Google Analytics account to find out all the information you want to know about the people who have visited your site.

Hi T Man,

I'm sorry you feel frustrated. It takes time for new sites to be picked up by search engines, and there's no guarantee that you'll show up for the searches you want to. There are however, things you can do to increase your ranking, have you tried these?

Search engines like Google show users the sites that they think the users will find useful. The most important things you can do to get your site indexed is to update your content frequently and get other related sites to link to your site. If users like your site enough to post a link to it, search engines begin to trust your site a little more. This also applies to visitors - the more visitors you have, the more likely search engines are to send other visitors to you. While many users have achieved good search engine rankings with a SynthaSite subdomain, using a custom domain name will make it easier for users to remember and revisit your site.

You can submit your site to Google through a program called Google Webmaster Tools. We have posted a tutorial that walks you through the steps to do so [here](http://www.synthasite.com/tutorials/g...). When you submit your site, it's a matter of sitting back and waiting for Google's crawlers to reach your site. This could take as little as a few days, or as long as a few months. Unfortunately, this is out of our control.

You can also add tags to your pages to tell search engines what your site is about. These are key words which will help search engines identify your site. In the properties sidebar for each page you will see a field labeled "Keywords". Type your tags in there - your location, your business, what you offer etc. This is the place to put the sorts of things you'd expect people to be typing into search engines to find you.

You should also add a description into the "Description" field - this should be a sentence or two describing your site. An example of a description would be "The Quick & Easy Website Builder that Requires NO Technical Skills and offers free website hosting."

The "Window Title", which will become the title tag, is what shows up at the top of a browser when viewing your page, it will also be the text Internet users will click on in the search engine results pages (SERPS) to get to your site. An example of a title tag would be "ABC Store - Affordable Custom Widgets - Austin, Texas".

Here is a link to another tutorial that gives you some more tips on attracting visitors: Promoting your Website - http://www.synthasite.com/tutorials/p... We also have a thread in our forum with more information: SEO with SynthaSite - http://getsatisfaction.com/SynthaSite...

If you're a small business or affinity group, you may want to have a professional help get traffic to your site. Some businesses on SynthaSite have found it useful to work with an SEO (search engine optimization) company to improve their rankings and reach visitors. If you'd like to do so, we suggest speaking with our partner http://www.inlocal.com/?kbid=4268&m=20

If you want to see who is visiting your site, we suggest that you install Google Analytics. Here's how to do it:

1. Go to Google Analytics - https://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for a free account.
2. Type in the URL of your site.
3. Copy the verification code provided by Google.
4. Go to SynthaSite and drag and drop a HTML widget at the bottom of each page you want to track.
5. Paste the code from Google into the HTML editor on each page.
6. Republish your site.

Your site will then be verified and you can log into your Google Analytics account to find out all the information you want to know about the people who have visited your site.

I hope some, or all, of the above is helpful to you. Now that your site is built and published you have taken the first big step towards having an online presence. From now on you should focus on developing and updating your site, and doing as much as you can to promote your site and attract visitors. It can seem like a slow process, and it is a challenge for all website owners, but anything you do towards this will help in the end.

Just to let you know, we have our own instructions for adding the Google Webmaster code. Please see our Google Webmaster Tutorial. Google's are written on the assumption that you are coding the website from scratch. Our instructions are written to work specifically with Yola.

We have a tutorial that explains how to create an online store using the Online Store feature on Yola. Here is the link: Creating An Online Store

You can see a full list of our tutorials here: Yola Tutorials