There are many way to see if you are being crawled. If you have a forum they often come preinstalled, or you can get a plugin which shows any bots currently on your website. There are also stats scripts such as awstats which show the number of page impressions from each different bot.
I am not quite sure I understand your second question. MSN and Yahoo normally index you on their searches within the week. It will automatically know what your homepage is from either index.html or index.php so there is no need to worry about that. Although it will index all of your site and dependent to what is searched it could bring up your most related page, this may not necessarily be your homepage.
There are several paid and free services which submit your website to search engines. This is all and well but in my experience they are very ineffective and often not worth bothering with. I don't submit any of my websites to search engines as the bots will find your site themselves.
You may not be indexed on google for up to 6 months. This is because their systems are a lot more complex to Yahoo and MSN. They measure a lot of thing and can hold you in a sandbox for months. We released a newletter a month ago about the google sandbox which you can find here -
http://www.webberscorner.com/showthread.php?tid=88
To improve your ranking there are several things you can do but the most effective in my opinion are links back to your site and continuously updated content. Also try to remain on topic throughout the site. I think the main reason for this is the 3 google adverts on your homepage.
Here is an honest review of your website:
- My first impressions are junk, spam, and adverts. I think the main reason for this is the excessive use of google adverts. I can understand you need to cover costs etc but try to limit the advertisement on the homepage. When I do click to other pages I am once again distracted by ads and struggle to read the content of the page.
- There was a topic started by me about should my website be able to appear at 800x600 and i think the general conclusion was yes, your website doesn't function properly and it wouldn't take much to fix it.
- On the homepage I think you need to seriously reduce the size of the image. It is far to big and slows the loading of the site. On the image you have 'explore >>'. I was assuming this was a link until I hovered over.
- The three boxes on the homepage do not work properly. I am using firefox and the images appear to be slightly out of align.
Overall you have a good foundation but I think the last few changes need to be made. I would strongly advise to rethink the amount of google advertisement and the structure of the page. At the moment the content just seems to be a blur and looks pretty boring. Maybe some images in between the text would be a good idea. Take a look at large sites such as bbc.co.uk. Nearly every article is attached with an image to catch people to read it.
Hope this helps
Dave.
