For those of you that have a web site - what are you doing to get it to show up in the first page or two of searches?  Do you index it yourself, pay per click, or    

Some info would be helpful.  Thanks

I never pay for this.  There are companies that say they can get you listed on the first page of results.  You should not use them.  Some can actually damage the reputation of your site.  Now Google does have a pay per click service that gets you listed and that is ok if you want to go that way.  I don't simply because this is not a commercial site.  

Puppets and Stuff often comes up high on the listing for a few reasons.  One when I first started the site Rose over at the Puppetry Home Page placed links to my site in several prominent areas of her site. This did two things. One since here site rating was already high it gave me a head start with search engines.  Second it got me noticed by the puppet community which  then got me listed on other puppet sites.  The more links you can get to your site from other puppetry related sites the better.

The content here is constantly changing since it is a forum.  Pretty much any time of the day I visit the site I can see that there are spiders crawling the site.  No not the ones that spin webs... well actually sort of.  Spiders are what search engines use to get the content of the web. They are programs that go out and grab what is out there. They really like text so don't just make your site pretty pictures.  Granted google has the image search but what you are looking for is a listing on the text pages. Also even with images the only way that google knows what the image is about is either by it's file name or by text content that is on the page it is on. My point here is that content is very important.  You have to stay on top of it and if it is not a forum like here then you need to be updating it at the very least a couple times a week.

Try to make your site unique.  I assume it is going to be about puppets so that is a start but don't forget that there are quite a few puppet sites out there now and the toy companies have caught on to the fact that they can sell their toys as puppets.  This kind of comes back to the content thing.  If there is a specific area of puppetry you focus on make sure to highlight it.  Details really help in your text to narrow down and define your site from all the others out there.

Also don't forget that many of the sites you may see in the first couple pages have been around for years. It can take time to climb the ladder.  

P.S.  I just remembered that Na was writing an article on here site about this. I don't think she has it up yet but maybe. http://www.puppetsinmelbourne.com.au/

Well said Shawn.  I have had my site for about 2-3 years, I think.  Boy, how time flies. Anyway...I've never paid to move up in the search engines.  It took about a year, but now my site come up pretty quick when searching on Blacklight Puppets, Blacklight Fabric, Puppet Eyes...etc.  I'd say about 90% of my new business this year has be from people searching for those type items.  Just give it some time.

I'm impressed, Na site comes up very quickly when searching on many topics related to puppetry.  Good Job!

Julie

I don't pay for advertising. I just update regularly, make sure I have good content, and it helps to be active on other sites (ie. here!).

My personal trick to getting in the search results is to write content *for* google searches. If I see someone searching on a topic that's interesting, or that nobody really discusses, then I write on it. Particularly if the search is popular. - If the topic is unique enough, you'll be at the top of the list every time. For instance, a regular question on Yahoo Answers was where to buy replicas of Avenue Q puppets. Nobody else wrote about it, so I did. That makes my site unique, as well as having popular content. I'd get maybe four or five hits per day on that article alone.

Making sure you have good keywords (popular terms, like "blacklight puppets") is a good idea too, because if you have some really unlikely words (ie "out of the box puppets" - even though it's your business name), it's low down on the list of things people might search for. Unless of course, they're literally trying to find your website because they know it exists already.

(Something I haven't mentioned here yet, is that the articles on my site are getting so popular, I'm moving all that stuff onto its own domain name, leaving my shop/blog/gallery for my current domain. The tutorials and articles are great, but a behemoth and a distraction from selling my own puppets. I'm hoping to turn the articles into its own sub-business. Four years on, and popularity has its issues: I'm currently using up 30mb of bandwidth, with 20 000 page loads per month)

My website simply defaults to being n the first page when looking up the name since most of the entries on the first page of things are me anyway.
In the past part of the decision of what pages were in what order was due to "bots". I'm not sure if that's still the case now or not. If it is still true, there's info you can put in the top part of your html which remains invisible to normal viewers, but these bots can read. Look up the term meta tags.

You're partially correct.

Yes bots are used to index the websites and report back to the search engines on what is new, what the site is like, etc etc. Yes metatags are used (although many these days say that the relevance to ranking is not high and you can easily get away with having a popular site without having proper metatags), however they're not the only measurement of a site.

Metatags simply describe the site's content in some way; it does not say how popular it is in terms of number of visitors, nor does it describe the level of activity on the site, etc. And spam sites can easily use these keywords to create a list of terms it hopes will get picked up by search engines and drive visitors to the site. Metatags are simply one of a number of things that can (should) be used to inform the search engines about your site.

"Vampirewombat" isn't a common term, so of course your site has a greater likelihood of being at the top of the results when you search for it; same with "puppets in melbourne" or "out of the box puppets". Having a unique name is necessary, which is why "Flickr" and other similarly weird names are used (that and all the good domain names have been bought up by now).