Beginners - Getting Listed In Search Engines
|
Once you have your web site complete and ready to be listed you need to take a slow step by step approach to get listed in the search engines. If you do it right the first time and then build on that formula, your profits and your site will benefit in the long run. Those willing to spend the time and put these techniques into practice are the ones that will benefit and are more likely to be successful.
1. Your first page is where search engines will start and making sure that this page is fully optimized is one of your first goals. What's optimization your ask? It's making your site as search engine friendly as possible. You will also see people refer to this in the short form of SEO.
Your first step is the TITLE TAG. This is one item that search engines look for to start getting information about what your site is about. It is also what search engines will show above a clickable line on their results page. It is also a major consideration of where you will rank when certain inquiries are made of the search engine. TITLE TAGS are one of the major things to concentrate on and to make sure that you get it right. Doing so will result in not only better placement in the search engine, but enticing descriptions will also result in more people clicking on your link and visiting your site.
Take a look at what your competition is doing in order to get some ideas for your site. To see their TITLE TAG go to their web site and in IE or Netscape click on View then Source and you will be able to see their TITLE TAG. Don't copy theirs, but let this help you get some ideas for your own site.
2. Putting keyword phrases into your pages - Finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages and knowing the right keywords to use is very important because your site should provide people with what they are looking for. A free program to help you can be found at: http://www.goodkeywords.com Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like Yahoo, Google, Teoma and other services like Alexa. Using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward. Just remember...don't over do it or you will be penalized.
3. Writing your web page copy - Your next step is to incorporate those keywords into the copy on your web site. This is extremely important as search engines need to see these keywords on your page so they can then analyze these words and decide where your site should be listed in their categories. Write your content around the keywords and use them as many times as possible, keeping in mind though...that it is not just a search engine that is reading the copy but also your visitor.
4. META TAGS - Meta tags provide search engines with information about the content and purpose of a Web site. A Web site that uses meta tags to the best of their ability will appear more often in search results and will also be seen closer to the top on those search results. Many people feel that stuffing keywords into the meta tags will help improve their rankings. The original idea behind meta tags was to give a way to classify the web site. The problem now is that many engines don't consider meta tags to be as relevant to the ranking, therefore they give them less weight overall because of the keyword stuffing techniques used. That's not to say that you still shouldn't use meta tags, just consider to use them for what they were originally intended - that is to give your site an accurate title and description with a few keywords (3 or 4 phrases max) outlining what the page, or site is about.
5. ALT TAGS - The ALT tag or 'alternative text' is an attribute of the IMG tag. (Any graphic on your web site) An ALT tag should be included for every image within your web site. The ALT tag provides an alternate message to your viewers who can't see your graphics. Without ALT tags, images on a web site are meaningless to these users. If you will be using a graphic menu systems for navigation, these alternate messages are an especially important aid to users without the ability to see your graphics. Adding an appropriate ALT tag to every image within your web site will make a huge difference to the accessibility of your web site. Also, for those who use Yahoo and Google image searches, your ALT Tags can be very important and will help bring traffic to your site. Take for instance one of my sites - http://www.spasoftheworld.com I have loads of graphics of different resort spas and the graphics all carry the name of the resort. People looking for information on this resort may easily end up at my website because I names a picture with the name of the resort.
On the reverse side, ALT TAG stuffing, which is using the tags in an image to hide keywords will rarely help a site's position. If you can insert a key phrase into the image description then by all means do so. Remember that Alt tags do usually count towards your overall keyword density so it's better to have relevant keyword alt tags rather than something like "image01.gif".
6. Linking - with more search engines coming online every day, search engines are looking for ways to serve quality links to visitors. This is where linking to other sites and having them link to you becomes important to both you and the search engine. People who assume that the more inbound links to them will help them, are very wrong. This may have been true at one time but not today. Search engines need to give quality results. One way they have of rating your site is by the quality of inbound links to your site. Therefore sites that are closely related to your site and that link to you will help boost your popularity in search engines. With Google this is a huge issue in how you rank with them. Having a hundred links from all sorts of site may result in hurting your ranking and you may be viewed as a link farm.
7. Spiders - A search engine is a database that has been put together by spiders. Spiders scour the Internet going through pages and recording information available on web pages. Spiders then give the information to the database and the database feeds the results. Theoretically, the web site should show up in the search results the next time the engine updates. It is important that all links on your site be active. A dead link may prevent a spider from doing your entire site.
8. Robots Text file - Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named "robots.txt" (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider (download). This system is called, The Robots Exclusion Standard.
9. FLASH - This has to be one of the top mistakes a web site owner can do to hurt their search engine rangkings. Good content will win over flash every time and getting visitors to your site is what you are trying to accomplish. The only thing the search engines will be able to see when visiting a site where the first page is all flash are the title tags and links. In most cases that will not be enough. Over and over it's content rich pages that will get you the rankings you need. You may have to decide between getting a high ranking or having a "pretty" entry page. Remember that you goal is customers and sales. It might be kewl the first time you visit the site but when you have to go there over and over again it becomes very annoying not to mention that people on dialup must cringe when faced with such a page. They often give up because of the length of time it takes to load.
10. Don't expect results overnight. It takes time to get your ranking up there, even with paid inclusion. You may start out with a low ranking when you are first listed but as you continue to optimize your site and build "relevant" links you will start to see a gradual climb. As you wait for your rise to the top, concentrate on building as many relevant links as possible. Beside increasing your ranking you will be surprised at the number of referrals that you will received from those linked pages.
Jean Sutherland has successfully run her own ezine for over 6 years and has a subscriber base of 35,000. Her ezine is geared to people doing business online and beside offering free software, it also provides traffic & marketing tips, informative business articles, free ebooks and computer tips for those trying to work online. http://www.emailpromotions.net
|
|
|
From Corpora To Matching
Making effective use of the Internet is increasingly about creating better and more intelligent applications and search engines. Here is a brief introduction into how search engines work:01) Define the corpus, search space/data;02) Separate the corpus into documents;03) Generate features for each document;04) Generate a representation of each document;05) Study the feature/vector space;06) Cluster documents;07) Reduce dimensionality;08) Accept input Queries;09) Find the cosine angles against the query vector; 10) Find the sought vector column;11) Output results to user in some way;Each document in a corpus (database)...(related: Seo)
Whats With The Competition? Ever Heard Of Cooperation?
I attended the SES Expo in San Jose, CA the other day. It was an hour from my home in Larkspur, CA just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Along the way I was thinking this would be really neat to see, a lot of companies doing the same things really, and to see how they play together.What a shock. Same old tech business, competition running rampant, and it was really apparent at the iP******* booth where I met a guy who asked m...(related: Seo)
Anchor Text Optimization
Anchor Text (also called phrase linking) can significantly improve your web pages relevance in the search engines. Optimized or keyword rich anchor text can help your web site gain positioning in the search engines as well as help drive better targeted search traffic.What is Anchor Text?Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text that you see on the page, here is an example:To read more about search engine optimization techniques, check out my Search Engine Optimization blog.Here the words "search engine optimization" are hyperlinked to the hidden URL of http://seogirl.blogspot.com/. The words, visible, "search engine marketing blog" is the anchor text.Anchor text should be used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. If you use the example above, "Search Engine...(related: Seo)
Search Engines From A Webmaster Perspective
By now, virtually every webmaster has heard or read that the major search engines are responsible for 80% or more of the traffic received by most web sites and that most searchers never look beyond the first 20 - 50 search results. Not surprisingly,...(related: Seo)
3 Deadly Search Engine Marketing Sins
My inbox this week provided glaring examples of three all too common rookie search engine marketing mistakes. What you could call three deadly search engine marketing sins. Starting with=> Inadequate Keyword ResearchHey!...(related: Seo)
13 Tips For Good Search Engine Placements
When used properly in combination with other basic search engine tactics, these tips can help to dramatically improve your placement with the search engines and increase the traffic to your web site.1. USE KEYWORD FILE NAMES: By naming your html file relevant to your keywords, you can gain a slight advantage. This is a relatively minor aid so don't go overboard with it.2. AVOID USING ROBOTIC SUBMISSIONS TO THE TOP SEARCH ENGINES: When submitting your web page to one of the top 8 search engines, try to post your page manually rather than using any automated software or sites that post for you to get into the prime search engines. Many people believe that over 70% of your hits will...(related: Seo)
Soliciting Search Engines
As your guide operator through the web, search engines are invaluable when used effectively.You don't have to be able to create a search engine to use it, and their interface is designed with that in mind.Here are some quick considerations that should help any domestic trade.1.If searching for a regional product, use a regional engine. If you live in Sweden and want information on ...(related: Seo)
Search Engine Ranking - What Works Now
The methods employed to increase your search enginerankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you haveprobably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tellyou - the time has come to face your website! A high searchengine ranking for your website is so essential that if youhave the slightest desire to actually succeed in yourbusiness, there is no way you can continue to avoid thisissue.At least 85% of people looking for goods and services onthe Internet find websites through search engines such asGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pagesfor high search engine rankings is to attract targetedcustomers to your site who...(related: Seo)
All About Links -- Interview With Link Building Expert , Bob Gladstein
Julia: Welcome Bob. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions about link building. I'm going to jump right in ask you why Web sites need links?Bob: There are a number of reasons to have links pointing to your site. But let's start with the reason they were created in the first place. The original purpose of the Internet was to enable the sharing of information. For example, if a scholarly paper existed on a server at the University of California, and a professor at Oxford wanted to read it, the Internet made that instantly possible. Now, if the Oxford professor had a paper that referenced information from the UC paper, they could link directly to that other document rather than just quoting from it. So a hyperlink was intended as a way of connecting data, ideas, an...(related: Seo)
Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks
- Use text links, avoid image links.
- Anyhow, if you have used image links, then always make sure to put your keywords in the alt tags.
- Put your prime keywords in text links and always insure to put a short descriptions of your website/page in minimum of 20-30 words or more if allowed.
- In text links if you are not allowed to add descriptions then always try to put a short descriptions in title tag. E.g.: < a href =" link-exchange.html " title =" Link Exchang...(related: Seo)
site-map - Copyright © 2006 | You can send your articles and get links. Contact Webmaster | All Rights Reserved. | Seo