By the way, advice on my site is completely free of charge (and subject to the Terms of Use http://www.mcbuzz.com/about-this-site/privacy-policy-and-terms-of-use ), but anyone who feels inspired to do so is encouraged to donate to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society – and Team In Training – two excellent charities dedicated to research and treatment of blood cancer. My wife and I are volunteers. More information here: http://ironmanbuzz.com
You can donate here: http://pages.teamintraining.org/wa/nbhtri09/mmclaren

This puts a “noindex, nofollow” value in the meta robots tag, meaning that robots or “web crawlers” (aka “spiders”) were doing as they were told and not collecting any information from your site to include in their index.

If your WordPress site is not showing up in search results, this is the first place to look.

Now that your site is being indexed, you might consider changing your “permalinks” setting to “Year, Month, Day, Post Name” or Custom (with just the year and the post name – /%year%/%postname%/ ). You’ll find this under Settings > Permalinks. (Note that on a site hosted on WordPress.com, permalinks are turned on automatically. You don’t need to do anything.) This creates URLs that are search engine friendly, like “http://www.mcbuzz.com/2008/blog-seo-tip-1-put-primary-keyword-in-your-post-title/” instead of “http://www.mcbuzz.com/?p=346″.

There are also WordPress plugins that optimize your site for search. Here’s an example: http://semperfiwebdesign.com/portfolio/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

A good resource for more info about the META ROBOTS tag is the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html

If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to figure out how the Google Analytics code is getting into your pages. You don’t want more than one copy of the code on your site.

Did you install a plugin for this? Do you know if you have GA account? Do you look at your site stats using GA? If you can’t figure out how the code is getting in there, let me know and I may be able to look into it. You would need to give me access to the files on you web host server.

Thanks again…I hope this will get me indexed / in the google results, do you think this will be about a week?

Given the amount of content on your site and the length of time you have been posting there, this is surprising.

My first question is this: Is your site hosted on a third-party host like GoDaddy or Yahoo! etc. ? If so, who is the host?

I wonder if there is a robots.txt file somewhere that is telling robots not to index your site.

That leads to another question: In the WordPress Dashboard under Settings > Privacy there is an option called “Blog Visibility”. Check to make sure that the radio button next to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” is selected. Is that the case?

NOTE ADDED LATER: Well, I think I just answered my own question. Sorry. I should have checked this in the first place, but if you View Source (view the source code) for any page on your site, you will find the following meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ near the top of the page. This keeps your site from being indexed.

The most likely reason this is in your pages is that the radio button mentioned above is not selected. Change that, and you should be good to go.

If that radio button IS selected, let me know. Something else is responsible for putting that code into your pages.

Once we clear this up, you can use the other suggestions I made already below to get your site indexed more quickly, and to get a better ranking in search engines once it is indexed.

It sounds like you may have created a Google Webmaster Tools account. Have you done this? Have you submitted a sitemap.xml file to Webmaster Tools?

Here’s how to do that:
http://www.mcbuzz.com/2007/web-marketing-tip-3-submit-xml-sitemap-to-google/

Also, I notice that your site has no Categories other than “Uncategorized”. That is probably not keeping your site from being indexed, but it certainly would not hurt to create some informative categories and assign them to posts. You can start by Editing the “Uncategorized” category by changing it to something else, like “Recordings” or “CDs” or …?

I usually recommend using just one or maybe two categories per post. You can use tags if you want to add additional descriptive terms.

I see the script for Google Analytics on your pages, but it appears near the top of the page. Do you know why it’s there and not in the footer.php file just before the closing body tag where they recommend putting it?

Finally, I am surprised there are not more sites linking to your site. When I do a “link:” search on Google I see two links:
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Adavidhill.org

Do you know of others that link to your site?

One of the best ways to get your site indexed is to get other sites to link to it.

Ask a few of your friends to include a link to your site somewhere, preferably not on a blog in the comments because these links typically use a “nofollow” that tells spiders not to follow the link.

Do you have accounts on any social media sites? Many of those will allow you to create a link to your website. These links are great for search engines.

Examples:
http://twitter.com
I definitely recommend starting a Twitter account. Link to your site from your profile. Use your real name in your profile. Looks like http://twitter.com/davidhill is taken. Is that your profile or someone else? I still recommend using DavidHill in your username – like DavidHillMusic or something else with DavidHill in it. My Twitter username is http://twitter.com/mcbuzz but if I had it to do over again, I would use MarkMclaren or Mark_McLaren

Other sites that let you link to your website from your profile:
http://linkedin.com
http://biznik.com
http://delicious.com
http://youtube.com
http://flickr.com
http://vodpod.com
http://friendfeed.com

Let me know your answers to these questions and try doing the things I recommend, and then we can see where you are in a week or so.

I have entered my site at different places – including the google listing, according to their report i have no errors/dead links/problems – and I have a top-level domain…davidhill.org – and it still does not register as a result when I enter it into google as a search. It does ask me if i mean davidhill.org with the link – I click theough and i have wikipedia…. I am flummoxed – and I don’t know where to turn…I am sure I am missing something obvious – but don’t know what.