This is the first time that I am really getting into this side of web design, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

1. How long does it typically take a for a spider to find a new website on its own?
I have some meta keywords and descriptions, but the site is pretty small and I will only have a few outside links pointing towards it for now.

2. Does your host have any kind of bearing on where, how fast, or how high you get listed? - Such as, if I buy hosting through Yahoo!, does that improve my chances of being listed in a Yahoo search?

3. Do domain extentions such as ".us" versus ".com" impact SE listing in any way?

4. Does frequently updating your web site actually help your ranking?

If you know the answer or have a link to where I could find the answer to any of these questions, that would be a big help. Thanks.

1. anywhere from 5 minutes to years. Never if there are no links to the site.

2. No

3. No

4. No

Originally Posted by chrishirst

1. anywhere from 5 minutes to years. Never if there are no links to the site.

2. No

3. No

4. No

Thank you for the reply. I'll see what I can do to bolster the number of links to the site. Thanks again.

An easy way to get a link so your site can get spidered and indexed is to add a link in your signature here.

I disagree a little bit about frequently updating your site. if you mean just changing the content on a given page then I agree it's not going to necessarily help with seo. It would mostly depend on the content which could be either good or bad. It might get your site spidered more often, though more spidering doesn't mean better rank.

If you mean adding new pages to the site as the frequent updating part then I think it can help in ranking. I think there's evidence to support that a larger site can have an easier time ranking than a smaller site though in the end I think it will be more about the content on the page in question and the links pointing to the page in question.

The best way to build a website is to build it for the people that will be viewing it and not the search engines. If frequent updates will benefit your visitors then you should update frequently. If the updates are just for the purpose of search engines then don't make the updates.

Originally Posted by vangogh

An easy way to get a link so your site can get spidered and indexed is to add a link in your signature here.

I disagree a little bit about frequently updating your site. if you mean just changing the content on a given page then I agree it's not going to necessarily help with seo. It would mostly depend on the content which could be either good or bad. It might get your site spidered more often, though more spidering doesn't mean better rank.

If you mean adding new pages to the site as the frequent updating part then I think it can help in ranking. I think there's evidence to support that a larger site can have an easier time ranking than a smaller site though in the end I think it will be more about the content on the page in question and the links pointing to the page in question.

The best way to build a website is to build it for the people that will be viewing it and not the search engines. If frequent updates will benefit your visitors then you should update frequently. If the updates are just for the purpose of search engines then don't make the updates.

Thank you for the advice. My main concern right now is that it comes up in a search. I am confident that over time the ranking will imrove based on the content of the site. But as it stands now, unless you know the exact url, you won't find it in any search. Even if it's at the very bottom of the list, it still stands a better chance than if it is not making the list at all(which it is not).

Frequent update may help you to get more keywords . If you're listed in DMOZ and Yahoo! DIr. you have more chanced to be crawled.

The frequent part is a little gray as Google does list it in it's patent application as one of the things it looks at when it is putting together the information about your site into it's index. I have a feeling the more frequent you update your documents the more often the spider will return but not increase you page rank or how close to the top of the index you are. However, if you think about it, Google wants the most relevent information at the top and if you change the content on the pages more frequently it could be perceived that you have more up todate information in your pages and therefore get a better ranking. But that just a guess on my part.