Search Engine Marketing for your Business
Let People find Your Business
Search engines are still the biggest and best way to get traffic to a website. There have been many strategies developed by webmasters to boost search engine rankings and get their websites seen. Some of these strategies worked when the Internet first became popular, but as online technology evolved, many of the search engine techniques no longer achieved results.
In order to optimize your website for search engine rankings, you should have a basic understanding of how search engines work. Programs called web trawlers, also referred to as “spiders,” are constantly searching the Internet to capture and index material for search engines. There are certain aspects of a web page spiders pay attention to, and others they ignore. Also, some web page aspects are given more value than others in determining where the page will be ranked.
Following is a brief overview of the components of a web site page, and what each component means to search engines:
- Page title: This is the series of words that appears in the top bar of a web page in a browser window. For example, Google’s home page title bar reads “Google” or “Google – Microsoft Internet Explorer” (or the name of another browser program). Search engines give greater weight to page titles than page content, since it is assumed the title bar describes what your page is about.
- Meta tags: Your website’s meta tags are invisible to Internet users, but not to search engine spiders. These are keywords stored in your web pages’ HTML template that describe the purpose of your website. Today, search engines concentrate less on meta tags than they used to, because many webmasters loaded their meta tags with keywords to boost their rankings, which often produced irrelevant search engine results.
- Subtitles: Subtitles are any words or sentences that appear emphasized on your web page, often the titles or subtitles of articles. Subtitles are usually more important than regular content, but less important than page titles.
- Page content: This refers to all the text that appears on your website. Search engines index either full or partial text on web pages and assign relevance for searches according to the keywords they identify.
- Links: Anything hyperlinked to another location on the Internet bears some weight with search engine spiders. Including links on your pages can help to boost your rank, but it is better to have inbound links that point to your pages from other websites.
- Update frequency: Websites that constantly add fresh content and new material are indexed more frequently and ranked higher by search engines.
Because the hundreds of millions of active websites out there are constantly competing for Internet search engine rankings, and most search engines strive to index sites in a fair and unbiased manner, no one is certain exactly what search engine spiders catalogue and index. However, there are things you can do to improve your search engine ranking and get your site noticed.
Though it is true that your website will eventually be catalogued by search engines, the process can take months—or years—if you just “let it happen.” You can get your website listed faster by submitting the information to search engines yourself.
Each search engine has a different method for submitting pages for inclusion in their listings. Many of the major search engines either have a months-long wait, or don’t allow submissions at all—Google, for instance, relies entirely on its web crawlers to construct its search engine database. You can find detailed information on Google’s search engine process here:
http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=745&topic=356
Despite this fact, it’s a good idea to get your website listed on as many search engines as possible. This will not only increase the likelihood that search engine users will find your site; it will also create more links leading to your website across the Internet.
Before you start submitting your website to search engines, have the following information prepared:
• The name of your website
• Your business name (can be different from your website name)
• Your complete URL (http://www.mywebsite.com)
• A brief one or two sentence description of your website
• A longer one- to three-paragraph description (not all search engines
require this information)
• A list of keywords and key phrases relevant to your website
It is possible to submit your website individually to a number of search engines. However, there are many free search engine submission programs that will automate the process and submit your information to multiple search engines at once. Here are a few multiple search engine submission programs:
SubmitShop.com – www.submitshop.com/freesubmit/100engines.html
Ineedhits – www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/submit-free.aspx
SubmitExpress – www.submitexpress.com/submit.html
1 2 3 SubmitPRO – http://websitesubmit.hypermart.net/freesubmit.htm
You can find many more through – you guessed it – search engines!
Keywords are still an important part of search engine science. You need plenty of relevant keywords on your web pages in order to have a shot at the top of the rankings. However, it is important to remember that placement counts when it comes to keywords.
Search engine spider programs are smart, and getting smarter all the time. They can tell when your website’s keywords are not relevant within the context of your text. This is the reason the practice of keyword stuffing no longer works. Remember keyword stuffing? It resulted in an abundance of websites surfacing at the top of search engines that read something like this:
“If you want to make money, you can make money with our make money program exclusive to make money online. Your make money product is guaranteed to make money when you want to make money…”
Intentionally loading your website with keywords to get the attention of the search engines will get your site ignored, or possibly even banned. It is important to work your chosen keywords naturally into your web copy so they make sense where they’re placed.
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