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Prepare Your Website
For Search Engines

Start out right and your website will be a fast track to good rankings in the search engines. New webmasters are especially suseptible to myths, rumors and bad advice when it comes to search engine optimization. This page contains my advice for all new webmasters, but especially for the webmaster who is new to search engine optimization and rankings. About 90% of what you need to know in order to do well in the search engines is contained on this first page. Just keep in mind that overnight successes in SEO are rare. More....

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When Your Car Is Broken,
You Call A Mechanic

If your website is "broken" in the search engine results, and you can't tell how to fix it yourself, you should call in a specialist because he's trained for the job. He knows what's wrong and how to fix it. Doing it yourself is not always the wisest choice. You can end up wasting time and losing sales by taking weeks or months trying to learn what I already know about search engines. Be smart and start getting more targeted traffic now by ordering my Search Engine Optimization Service today! You can also request my FREE Search Engine Evaluation. I'll tell you what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, and how I can help your site get its fair share of search engine traffic.


Preparing A Site for Search Engine Sumbission

Ideally, these are steps you should take before anyone or anything - whether human or search engine spider - ever sees your web site. But, even if your site has been online for quite a long time already, its never too late to start working on search engine optimization.

  1. Be sure your web site is ready for human visitors. The first thing I recommend is to add a robots.txt file to your site that blocks all search engine robots from your site. Create a text file containing the following:

    UserAgent: *
    Disallow: /

    Then save this file as "robots.txt" and upload it to your site's root directory. This prevents search engines from examining your site while it's still under construction. Just remember to remove this block when you are ready to open your site by simply removing the "/" from the "Disallow:" line. If your site is already in the search engines, skip this step.

  2. Next, once you have your site completed or nearly so, double-check that the links all work and the pictures all appear on the page when you access your web site over the Internet. Don't rely on the copy of the site on your own computer because some files may be on your computer, but not on the server. Test the actual online version of your website. If your website is too large to check out every link by hand, use one of the many automated link checkers like Xenu Link Sleuth which makes it simple to find broken links.

  3. Make sure your web site's main page has at least one paragraph of keyword-rich text that describes your site's topic or purpose to give the search engines a clear understanding of your site's contents. The reason for doing this is that search engines can't read text rendered in graphics, such as graphical rollover buttons. The World Wide Web is full of free HTML validators - programs that will scan your web pages for properly-written HTML code - so use them to your advantage. The best HTML and CSS validator is the W3C Markup Validation Service. You'll often prevent problems before they start just by letting one of these programs do their own special kind of spell-checking on the HTML code of your webpages. Browsers are built to tolerate a high level of HTML errors, but search engine spiders can be a bit fussier. The search engines don't give you extra credit for valid coding, but a stray < symbol or a missing quotation mark in your HTML code can cause a search engine spider to skip an entire section of your web page.


  4. Get Other Web Sites To Link To Yours. The World Wide Web's basic foundation is the hyperlink. Exchanging links with other web sites is a legitimate part of any early promotional program, so you need to prepare a page on your web site where you will put links to other web sites. Make sure there is a link on your web site's main page to this new links page. Once this page is installed you can contact the webmasters of other web sites and offer to exchange links. The best place to start is to visit other web sites whose topic is related to yours - even if they are direct competitors. These links will pay off in many ways, but links are vital to your success with search engines. In fact, once you have another web site that links to yours, the major search engines will probably find you on their own. You do not want to make link exchanges with every site on the Internet, so don't go overboard with them. Focus on sites that are related to yours and you'll do well. See my Building Links article for details.

  5. Use Unique and Relevant Page Titles. The <title> tag is the most important piece of real estate on a web page. Not only does it carry a great deal of weight in the rankings, it is the first things that users see when your pages appear in the search results. So you need to make sure that every page has a unique, keyword-rich title that will entice users to click on the link. Rankings are not your real goal. Getting users to visit your site is the real goal. Go ahead and include your site name in the title, but the rest needs to be unique for every page. Get into the habit of making unique and attractive webpage titles and you'll have better results every time.

  6. Submit your web site to free online directories like The Open Directory Project A listing there will help with search engines, but obviously the listing itself can generate traffic, too. Glaciers are speed demons in comparison to The Open Directory Project's speed of processing of submissions, but the entry there can be valuable enough that it is worth the effort. However, never resubmit your site to The Open Directory Project. If you resubmit your site, you are essentially starting over at the end of the queue in waiting to be evaluated. So submit it once and forget it for at least a year.

    Also seek entries in other directories like JoeAnt, Jayde - The Business-to-Business Directory, and GoGuides. In highly competitive businesses, a listing in a paid directory like Yahoo! can be worthwhile because of the contextual setting of these links. Search engines are moving toward analyzing the origins of links as well as the <a>nchor text for relevance to searches.

  7. Submit your website directly to the major search engines. Never pay for services that offer to submit your web site to thousands of search engines. Their use can actually impair your website's search engine ranking, and they often turn out to be a major source of SPAM in addition to being a complete waste of money. If you submit your site to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, you've covered the sites that account for well over 90% of the search engine traffic on the Internet and none of them charge for submission to their search engine index. Search engines normally find new sites through links on other sites, so your submission may be superfluous, but it can sometimes get your site crawled sooner than it would otherwise. So take the 5 minutes to submit to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live.

  8. The best place to start is submitting your site to Google. If you have at least one other well-ranked web site that links to yours, you should see a visit from the Googlebot within a week.

  9. Yahoo! Free Submission. Yahoo! also owns Alta-Vista and AllTheWeb, two modestly popular search engines, and also supplies search results to Hotbot.com. So if you get into Yahoo!, you're also in these other engines.

  10. Submit MSN/Bing Search. Again, there's no charge for submitting your site to Microsoft's new search engine Bing.com.


If Google finds a link to your site on a well-ranked page that is already in their index, you might be listed in as little as 24 hours. Once the Googlebot has passed through your web site, you might be given a highly-positioned temporary listing. Google sometimes gives newly-discovered web sites a short period of enhanced visibility (listing plus high ranking) to see if actual human beings will want to see the web site based on the entry, rather than Google's ranking algorithms alone. It is not unusual for new websites to seem to disappear suddenly as Google periodically recompiles their master index. It doesn't mean you've been banned or penalized, it's just part of their process. New sites can often spend several months maturing before they really start to rank for their targeted keywords. The best course is to keep adding fresh, original content to your site, and to keep working on getting links from other well-ranked websites whose main topic is related to yours.

As I mentioned above, Google doesn't pay much attention to most <META> tags. It will use the "description" <META> tag in the text that is displayed in the search results if the description is relevant to the user's search, and it absolutely respects a "robots" <META> tag set to "noindex" or "nofollow", but the "keywords" and "revisit" <META> tags are ignored. The Desciption <META> is also used to determine the uniqueness of a page - an important issue for Google in many ways - so don't simply copy and paste your Description <META>s on every page. Make it unique, compelling, and relevant to the page content or don't have one at all.

Finally, it's a very good idea to enroll in Google's Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools console provides you with an enormous amount of information about the performance of your site in their search engine. You can see the keywords people use to find your site, which pages are linking to your site, and any problems Google is having with your site. They also provide you with several handy tools for enhancing your site. As your experience grows, you'll find this service to be increasingly valuable.


If you want your site to rank higher in the search engines, my Search Engine Optimization Services can give your website what it needs to get your fair share of search engine traffic quickly, without disturbing your design, and without breaking your budget.

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Call Richard L. Trethewey in Minneapolis today at 612-408-4057 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Central time to get started on your new website design package or search engine optimization program today!


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