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.
