July 31, 2010

Getting Found By Search Engines

How do the search engines really find your website content?

If you want to start getting natural search engine traffic, being discovered by the search engines is the very first step to get the ball rolling. There are several ways to get discovered by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing and the best part is that most of them are free. Let’s talk about the old ways of getting discovered and some of the new upcoming trends.

Submitting your website or page. Back in the day this was the most common way of getting discovered when he had a new website. There was actually a big line in front of you at all times of those who had already submitted their sites and were waiting for Google to crawl their sites before yours could have its turn. It was not uncommon to have to wait 2 to 3 weeks to be found by the major search engines.

Site map submission. Site map is a map that the search engines can follow once they get to your site to continually uncover new and fresh content. When you make changes to your site map, it is important that you submit the site map back to the search engines so that they can recommend you to consumers on the web. If you use WordPress, there is a great plug-in that will do this for you automatically called XML-sitemap.

RSS and Atom – Search engines want to find pages that worked really links to other pages within your site. So they started to crawl your RSS feeds or atom feeds. These are the content tools that are automatically updated when you some of the new story or at a new page on your blog. This is a great way to get discovered and a great way to update your readers.
Social Media – the explosion of social media sites has really changed the way and time frames of being discovered by search engines. But sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others are starting to get more and more attention from search engines like Google because they represent a growing trend in the Internet.

One-way links. If you go on to a highly traveled website, and comment on a blog post, leave your backlink to your site,search engines can find you this way as well. When I crawl that page again, they’re going to see your link and follow it to your site. This is a great way not only to get discovered but to build valuable backlinks to your site and improve your SEO.  Word to the wise, don’t spam your links.

Article marketing. If you use any websites like Ezinearticles.com or GoArticles.com, you can also get discovered and valuable quality backlinks from the site as well when you contribute original, well-written content. The same concept applies to article marketing as it does to one-way links, but this is just another way of getting your links out there.

Being discovered is the first step of getting your site to that place that you want it to be. Lots of readers a lot of traffic. If Google doesn’t know that you exist, they’re not going to send you any business. I’ve seen several websites over the years, actually more than several, that have been on the web for years and years, but still had not been indexed by Google. Needless to say, those sites are probably not getting very much traffic if any at all. Don’t be one of the sites, get indexed right away and start building for your future.

Your Business Needs SEO

A good website can be a valuable tool for any type of business. If you are a traditional offline business then it can be a marketing tool to show potential customers your products and services or for online based business then it is critical to your entire business success.

HAve you suffered for the dissapointment of putting blood sweat and tears into a great company website, getting it live and then finding nobody comes to your site. If your trying to boost online traffic the your efforts need to be focussed on the mighty Google.

If you are a big brand then you may be lucky enough to have large volumes of people searching specifically for your brand and company website. If on the other hand you are not such a major brand then your going to get the best results in gaining new business by ranking well on Google for generic search terms relating to your business.  For example, if you ran a credit card comparison website then ranking for a term such as compare credit cards would be important.

Google and other search engines use a complex algorithm to decide who ranks where in search results. Google and others try to pick the most relevant and high quality websites for the search term. For the main search results you can’t pay Google to place you in a certain position but you can make your website more attractive to Google through a process known as search engine optimisation or SEO for short.

Many web designers fail to understand search engine optimisation when they build a site so you may need to learn some skills yourself or employ the services of a search engine optimisation company.

The process of SEO involves researching what your potential customers are actually searching for online and making changes to your site structure, page titles, headings, content and more to ensure each page is relevant to the keyword terms you want to rank for. It’s also important to build up quality inbound links to your website to support your status as a useful resource.

Don’t expect overnight results with search engine optimisation, it takes time but the long term rewards can put your business ahead.

Article by Richard at Brisbane internet marketing firm Quantive.

SEO and Website Designers

As the internet has become increasingly sophisticated, the various professional fields in the internet marketplace have become more and more specialized. In each area there have been massive leaps in complexity, usability, design and technology.

Even just a few years back, there were relatively few separate specialties for people who work within the arena of the internet. These days there is a vast multitude of ways in which people can specialize online. These professionals include:

Web designers,Information architects,Google Adwords campaign managers, various types of program and software developers and last but not least, SEO services.

In my experience, most web designers these days don’t even know how to include Search engine Optimization in the sites that they design and build. There is ample proof of this; it is visible easily every day by just taking a look at what is out there. Websites that have either no or empty Meta tags no headline tags and in some cases no title tags! What is frustrating about this is that all of these are extremely easy to include.

So where does that leave the buyer? It leaves them with a website that will no doubt look fantastic; however the chances are that few will ever see it. Let alone become customers of whatever service or product the site is offering. This seems to be particularly true in the case of websites that contain a lot of flash, it looks great, but it is heavy in the browser and as it is purely images, the search engines cannot read it, even if there are words as the words themselves are rendered as images not text.

Therefore, when shopping for a website designer, be aware that though most will have the words ‘SEO’ or ‘Search engine Optimization‘ somewhere within their marketing or sales material. Take the precaution of checking that they actually know what that means, many don’t. The way to check it out is to look at sites they have already completed – particularly their own. Check to see if it has Meta tags such as the keyword and description meta tag, check to see if their title tags actually have something useful in them not just ‘welcome to company XYZ website’.

These things are simple for anybody to check out. The title tag is easily visible to you as you open the site in your browser, you will see it on the very top of your screen. To double check the other items you will need to view the source code, you can do this in Firefox by clicking on ‘View’ then on ‘Page Source’. This will show you all the code of the site, the meta tags should be near the top just after the the title tags.

Finally, take a look to see if the website has headline tags. Between them should be the main title of the page, including the keywords that you want people to find your site with.

Article by Johnathon Black