Website optimisation

[skeletonkeys]

Hi all,

I know I don't post here very often, but you've always been very helpful in the past, and there's actually too much information available on this subject for me to make any sense of it! So I wondered if someone with experience could tell me how I could optimise my website so that it appears higher in search results on major search engines, especially google.

The site is www.barcodeproducts.co.uk, and we sell barcode printers, barcode labels, barcode readers, and generally everything to do with barcodes, yet when someone searches for 'barcodes' on google, the site isn't even in the top 100 results, and even I couldn't be bothered to look any further, as potential customers certainly wouldn't. Once upon a time we used to get a lot of customers citing google as the place they found us, but that has since dried up.

Any advice you could give on this subject would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks in advance,

Keys

[Vigo]

Theres software as well as internet services that provide means to accomplish what you seek.

You can search for free services that do it for you or submit webpages yourself. You'll notice that on the homepages of certain search engines like yahoo or excite- theres a "submit webpage" button or something similar. Google uses spiders to search out webpages so I don't think you can submit pages to them.

To get your page higher on the list though, you'll most likely need to pay/donate to those search engines to get higher priority. The software you can purchase to submit your website may also claim to get you a higher priority.

As far as what you can do coding wise- I don't think you can do anything else beyond the META search lines.

[Statica]

You do need to use good meta tagging, and a good robots.txt file in your root directory. Spiders like Inktomi and Googlebot wont even bother with your site without them.

[skeletonkeys]

It seems our site doesn't have any of these measures to improve it's search engine rating....

I think I can write meta tags easily enough, do I put a set on every page or just the homepage?

Any advice on what software I can use?

failing that, what should I put in a robots.txt file?