My site has gone live, but it's not showing up on search engines when I type in the name of the site or any keywords. Is there a reason for this? It's called An Enduring Love. But it's not coming up. Is this a server question or am I suppose to ask it here?
Dana
When I search for the url, it shows up. It doesn't show up on the first page of a search for "en enduring love" or "an enduring love fanfiction" but google at least knows it's there.
There are several reason why your site may not be showing up and none of them have anything to do with the server or efiction. One, it's very new. As you get more content, your search engine ranking will improve and you'll show up higher. However, your site name is pretty generic so you may never show up near the top.
To improve your search engine ranking add a meta tag in the header.php or extra header.php with a description. Right now your description is showing up as your disclaimer because it's not defined. You can also add a meta tag for keywords but search engines largely ignore them now.There are other things you can do, but this will help the most.
Just give it time...you'll start showing up soon.
How exactly do I add a meta tag? To be honest I don't even know what one is. Can I add a meta tag and keywords? If so how to I do both? I don't know how to do either to be honest. Can someone explain to me the process of doing this?
Dana
I want to apologize in advance. I thought I posted this in the general help forum. I can't believe I made this mistake! Ack! I told you I wasn't good at forums! 🙁
Sorry!! Please forgive me 🙂
Dana
Yes, the main thing is that you have to wait for the crawlbots for the various search engines to come by. There's no way to predict when that will happen, but if you're curious about whether that's happened yet, you probably have access to some kind of log that tracks who's viewing your site. When I look at these, usually I find lots of entries for bots crawling, which are fairly obvious because for browser it will say something like "Yahoo Slurp" and so on.
The meta tags are HTML tags which allow you to give information about your site. Any basic HTML tutorial on the web will tell you about them. I'm not sure how to add/adjust them for eFiction, other than they'd probably be contained in header.php. You may have to add a second header, like Carissa suggested. Several people have done this, so I would suggest looking in the mod discussion & development board to find more information.
Does anyone know how to make a new header?
Like, I said, do a search and you should find all the threads on this stuff. Particularly I think this thread will help you, which I found by searching "meta tags": https://efiction.org/forums/index.php?topic=5780.0
