How to get your website to rank in the search engines.
Right now, all over the internet are little scripts written by the clever people who created search engines, commonly known as ‘spiders,’ or ‘googlebots’ or ‘robots’ or ‘crawlers,’ depending on which language you speak. They are industriously crawling the web and indexing information, searching your code for content and other keywords.
On your expedition into html, you should have come across these bits of code, so I shouldn’t be speaking martian any more.
The head of your page, that which lies between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags, should be <TITLE>a descriptive title for your page</TITLE>, this is what the robots are most likely to look at first. The description metatag <meta name=”description” content=”should provide a 2-3 line (250 character) description of your page”>. Lastly is the <meta name=”keywords” content=”separated, by, commas”> which should be the words most likely searched by your potential customers.
The body, which is the html page that lies between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags, is the most important part of the page to the humble robot, as it knows that this is what you are going to be reading.
So off he goes reading, reading, paying special attention to any formatted text like your headings, lists, bold and I have found especially from my AdSense ads, the links that you have on the page. I’ve found that on my pages with template links I get mostly ads for web design based businesses, on the auction tips pages for auction sites and so on, even when there was no metatags on those pages.
Pay close attention to how each page leads into another, so it is easy for your pet googlebot to find his way right through your site following all the links easily and quickly.
Make sure you make it easy for every part of your site to be accessed easily from another not just for your robot, but for your customers as well. To make sure they read through all of your expertly crafted copy, taking in all your ads, they need to be led through or else they will skip merrily off to the next site in their search for the information they need.
This is also an important factor in taking them through your copy, so that each paragraph flows into another, keeping up as much interest as possible to let people know you are here.
Letting everyone know you have arrived.
Once you have all these key robot friendly factors down, you will need to submit your website to the search engines to be indexed, this make take a up to a month with some of them. They need to be able to find you, that way when you type in your business name at least, you can see that you are actually part of the world wide web. There is a list of the major search engines in the sidebar that still accept free submissions.
What about that automated site submission thingy?
By now you have probably seen at least a million ads that claim to submit to 4 billion search engines every day for you, for a set fee of course. The truth is there are probably only around 15 – 20 search engines that bring in 99.9% of traffic for all of the searches made on the internet, so submitting to them all is simply not necessary. Lycos and Excite for example are powered by Yahoo!, and AOL is powered by Google.
Even if you don’t submit to these two major search engines that power the 10,000 sites they claim to submit to, the crawlers are going to find you anyway, submitting to them will just speed up the process.
But I’m still 458th in a google search, how do I get to the top?
The quickest and easiest way to promote your website is through reciprocal linking, that’s where you agree with another webmaster of the same sort of genre as you to exchange links, so that people visiting your site will visit their site and vice versa.
Get your thinking cap on.
One of the ways Google rates your importance is by how many sites link to you. There are over 100 Google Ranking Factors to consider, an important one being your base of ‘good’ links as this is important for your ‘Google Page Rank’. The more quality sites that link to you, the higher your page rank. The higher the page rank of the person who links to you, the more important google thinks you are, clear as mud?
Google considers some sites very important, say, government or academic sites, if they link to you then you must be very important as well. Each link to you counts as one ‘vote,’ the more important your ‘votes’ are, the higher Google will rank you in a search.
One vote from a page with a pathetic page rank is worth almost zero to nil, so when searching for applicable sites to ask nicely to link to you, you are going to need to know their page rank. The Google ToolBar which is free to download with the new version of FireFox tells you high how Google ranks them and has a host of other features as well.
The list of free business directories not only helps with your google page rank, but gets your name out to other New Zealanders for free. For a huge list of international directories listed by popularity, check this site out. Remember the higher the directories page rank, the more important they are.
The ones to go for are those that let you choose a description of your site in the name enabling you to use your keywords. If you sell personalised pet mats, you want those keywords to be the link. This is very important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Having ‘www.personlisedpetmats.com’ is ok, but it is far better to have ‘Sue’s Personalised Pet Mats – For All Your Pet Mat Needs’ linking to you.
This tells search engines that your site is linked to these keywords and when a search is made, with enough of these keywords in your linking to you, your site will start to come up in the search engines.
When looking for sites to link to yours, try to make sure that the content coincides with yours, as a link from a cats website to your pet mats is going to count for more than a site about bedspreads.
There are many different directories that are created for specific types of website, so if your website is about music, type in “music directory” or if you are searching for a community directory type in “palmerston north directory,” if you live in Palmerston North that is. =)