I have purchased an setup a website through ipage. If you type in the address, it will come up. If you search for me, the company, any of that good stuff....nothing!!! Can someone help me?

I have people that call and say"I've googled you and can't find you site..." What's the point of having the stinking thing if no one can find me? Eerrrr!

Thanks!

with some, they ask you to submit tags. You can also submit your site to google, yahoo, bing and others. sometimes, it takes several days for it to take effect though...that's fine with me, it's free.

also, you can submit your site to your local listings advertisers. If you do a search for bakeries in wherever, tn. you should get a list of links...if you click on them, some will give you the opportunity to submit your site and upload photos too. make sure to include tag words with every opportunity possible! tagwords/keywords are probably the most important aspect of making searching and finding anything easier. (just look at how many people that DON'T use them here and their beautiful works don't come up in a search...after they've left the front page, they only get seen again by chance...someone stumbles upon it) keywords, keywords, KEYWORDS.

look around on your site manager page and see if there is a 'promote your site' link.

More popular sites are listed higher in Google search results, the goal is to get other sites to legitimately link to you. This should happen naturally as your business grows.

In the meantime, you'll probably want to buy AdWords to increase your exposure on Google, AdWords work very well if you put some thought into creating relevant and to-the-point ads. You should also claim your business page on Yelp.com and mention your Yelp page when you send "thank you" notes to your customers.

By the way, what's your web site and business name? If the name is too generic that may be another issue.

My site manager has a option I just can't figure it out. I then decided to ask the Live Support...the guy didn't help at all.

He said if I wanted to be included in search listing I would have to pay for those services...I wasn't aware of that.

I'll try going to Yahoo an Google directly, how or where do I look for this at?

I wouldn't bother with Yahoo. You can submit your site for free to Google using the following link (look in the top right corner), but don't expect much:
http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html

To start creating Google text ads with AdWords, visit this site:
http://adwords.google.com

Google text ads work by "buying" certain keywords, so your ad will appear when people search Google for those keywords. You can also restrict your Google text ads to only appear to users within a certain geographic area.

I just finished getting my site up and running. Fortunately I have a friend who runs a successful web based business, and he looked at my site and helped a lot with the keywords and search friendliness of it. First, you have to submit it to google (like posted above). This means that google will put it on their list of sites to check out, and perhaps include in their listings. This can take up to two months, so be patient! Second, the key words. Wedding cakes, birthday, whatever, your location. The higher up on the page your key words are, the better, but if it's too repetitive google will block it out. (so no repeating stuff over and over in the hope of bumping up your searches). You don't have to pay to get on google, that's just a service they're trying to sell you, you can do it all yourself.

Starting out small, I chose not to go for fast and furious site hits. I'd rather pick up business as I was able instead of having to turn down too many and run the risk of them not having the opportunity for their business in the future. If you are set up to handle vast amounts of business, go with spending the extra money on adwords and other search helps.

At this point, just getting them to be able to find it would be a plus, yes?

I sent you a couple of PMs (sorry if they seem repetitious...I couldn't remember what I had included in the first PM).

Thanks for all the help, I was able to submit the site to Yahoo! YAY!!

I wasn't able to submit it to Google. I don't understand how to verify it. Can some explain this. It has my site an it's set on verification method as Meta Code...what do I from here?

Thanks so much!!

Ok, never mind! I thought I had submitted my site to Yahoo,,but no!! I don't understand how to verify..that makes No sense to me...please help. I am at my wits end...

I may be wrong, but unless it's a www.blahblahblah.com, google won't verify it...like if it's http://blahblahblah.ipage.com. Not sure what your's is...so, if it's something like that that may be why.

you can still do the local search pages and others that I mentioned in the PMs regardless of your site's url.

Good luck!

yahoo takes a few days to verify...you won't be able to search for your site immediately.

I know many people have the skill and knowledge to do this themselves, but I paid one of those companies to optimize my website and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Within DAYS (less than a week) of being optimized, I was getting calls out the whazzoo. I always ask "How did you find me?" and the calls were all "I just searched for blah blah blah".

One of the calls I rec'd within days was from the Macy's regional office in St. Louis MO. They were looking for a caterer for special events at their Indpls stores. That one call more than paid for the optimization fee I paid with all of the bookings and events I ended up doing for Macy's.

I began getting more and more corporate inquiries, which was in our game plan (to break into the corporate catering/cake world).

Just putting up a website takes a LOT of time for your site to be picked up in the searches. Optimization is the way to go.

Either find a friend who knows how to do this or bite the bullet and pay to have it done.

The absolute BEST advertising dollar I ever spent.

You've opted not to share your website for whatever reason. This morning, I decided to search for various things in an attempt to find your site. I used Yahoo and do believe I found it...

if they include the -tn it'll come up. otherwise, they'll be shopping nj

also, there is at least one other business in your state with the same name and when searching, it is very close as well.

on bing, your site is 6th on the list of links that come up but I have to add tn or tennessee when searching. I can't just search the name alone....too many results for me to sift through.

I used MainStreet Hosting. If you search "optimization company", they are the #1 listing that comes up.

Wow, Jason, sorry to hear all of that. One of my (many!) nicknames is "Debi Does Data" because I track absolutely everything and keep it in data/graph format, so I could actually view my documentation to know how people found my site. And the response of "I just searched for ......." definitely took a spike after the optimization. I was also able to watch my progress move my site from the 4th or 5th page to the first page.

I had a good experience with them.