Start out right and your web site will be a star on the search engines.
New webmasters are especially suseptible to rumors and bad advice when it comes to
search engine optimization. These pages contain my advice for all 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.
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.
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.
Be sure your web site is ready for human visitors. 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. Test the
online version of your web site. If your web site is too large to check out every link by hand, use one
of the many automated link checkers like Xenu Link Sleuth.
Make sure your web site's main page has at least one paragraph of keyword-rich plain
text that describes your web 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. And put that descriptive
text as close to the start of the HTML file as you can. 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 most popular 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. 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.
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.
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 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.
Submit your web site 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 web site'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 manually 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.
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.
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.
Submit MSN/Live Search.
Again, there's no charge for submitting your site to Microsoft's new search engine Live.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. From the information I've seen,
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 judging on 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
anything, its 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 <META> tags. It
will use the "description" <META> tag if it is relevant to the user's search, and it
absolutely respects a "robots/noindex" or "robots/nofollow" <META> tag,
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.
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.
Call Richard L. Trethewey 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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