You’ve invested a lot of your hard-earned money into getting a beautiful, functional web site created for your business. Now what? Is your phone ringing of the hook, or is your email box full from web site leads yet? Unfortunately, this probably isn’t the case with your new web site.
In this article I will explain how you can help search engines find your web site faster - and what things you should avoid doing so you don’t get blacklisted by them or so your web site content doesn’t become invisible to them.
Factors that WILL HELP your web site get found by search engines:
- Age of your web site address - older web sites are seen as more credible by search engines.
- Link popularity - search engines act like a high school: the more friends you have, the more popular you are to them. Get your link on as many local directories, industry specific directories, an individual web sites as you can.
- Number of pages on your web site - the more pages you have, the more content you have and the more interesting you are to search engines.
- Update your web site often - search engines forget about sites that aren’t kept up-to-date. Every so often, edit the text and photos on your site. Better yet, provide new information often. You can create an on-site blog, provide a list of articles of interest to your visitors, write news articles or press releases (and archive them), keep an events list or calendar, and update your photo gallery. It’s also a good idea to summarize new content in your site on your home page - providing links to the new content.
- Submit or resubmit your web site to search engines - when major changes are made to your site, like a redesign or a new page. At the very least, submit your site to a category in the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) - this is what powers Google.
- Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and keyword implementation - this is a very involved process, but some quick tips are:
- Use specific keywords - not general keywords (example: use “organic landscaping service colorado springs”, not “landscaping”)
- Include lots of relevant text copy on your site - and break it up with headers (h1, h2, h3…), bulleted or numbered lists, and linked text.
- Paid search engine inclusion - you can buy ads if you have the budget. Sometimes it is also helpful to buy a paid directory listing with Yahoo (approx $300/year)…even if you don’t renew after that first year.
Factors that will WON’T HELP your web site get found by search engines:
- Keyword spamming - search engines can tell if you are using your keywords excessively and may penalize you for doing this.
- Laying out your pages using tables - any text you put in your tables will be scanned last by the search engines…so design your pages using div tags and stylesheets instead.
- Embedding your text inside images - search engines can only read editable text, not images. If you have to put text in an image, then specify the “alternate text” for the image.
- Dynamic navigation menus that use JavaScript - search engines don’t read text in JavaScript. Create your menus using stylesheets instead.
- Flash and frames content - the text in flash and frames is not easily read by search engines.
- Lengthy page titles, keyword metatags, and description metatags - there is a maximum length for each of theses items, so keep them concise.
- Multiple web sites with duplicate content - doing this can get one or more of your sites blacklisted from the search engines.
- Redirecting one web site address to another web site address - by using anything but a 301 redirect.
- Multiple pages on the same site with duplicate content - search engines consider this spam, so come up with unique content for each page, and write a unique page title for each page too.
- Sharing web server space with a site that has shady content or a questionable reputation - there are tools online you can use to look this up, or you can contact your web site hosting provider to get a list.
- Broken links - check all your links to make sure they lead somewhere.
- Spelling errors - search engines frown upon misspelled words.
- Invalid code - validate all your code to make sure it is compliant with W3C standards.
Tags: Search Engine Optimization, search engine ranking, search engine results, search engine submission, seo