Optimising your web site for search engines and submitting it is one of the most basic and important elements of your Internet presence. Almost every business with a web site aims to be "Number 1 in the Search Engines".The problem is, of course, not everyone can be Number 1, and it's become a very competitive business.
As a web site owner, you now have two methods: Natural submission (the old-fashionedfree submission method) and Paid Submission - sometimes called Pay Per Click (PPC) using tools such as Overture, Espotting and Google Adwords. This article deals with natural, free search engine submission.
Step 1: Content. Success or failure of your site at this stage depends on two things: Keyword selection and content. A good many people forget that search engines are geared to find the best content for a search, so before you even start to consider keyword selection, make sure your web site is worth visiting! If you read our other articles such as E-mail marketing, you'll find this is a recurring theme. Make sure your site is frequently refreshed with great content, otherwise all the tricks, software, wizards or strategies in the world won't fix your problem!
Step 2: Keyword selection. So lets say your web site is packed full of really useful information, it's now time to select the keywords you want your site to be found under by search engines. The trick here is to guess (or better still research) which key words and phrases your prospective customers will use to find you. Then you need to check them over for KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index). This is one area where "tricky" software and services such as wordtracker.com can help. This little service is invaluable in that it can help you to find the keywords relevant to your content that have the highest KEI (ie: the most popular and effective keywords).
Step 3: Meta Tag Optimisation. This is the part where you take your web pages, content and keywords and try to knit the whole thing together in a way that will cause the search engines to rank you highly. The first elements you need to look at are your "Meta Tags". These are special HTML tags found near the top of your page code that help search engines determine what the page is about. There are three that are particularly important: Keywords(obviously), Description, and Title. They look like this:
<meta name="description" content="xxxxxxxx">
<meta name="keywords" content="xxx,xxx,xxx,">
<TITLE>XXXXXX</TITLE>
(You, of course, will replace the "xxx" content above with the correct information for your web site!)
The <title> tag is the most important one. During the last decade, more and more people have been tempted to "trick" search engines by putting irrelevant information in the keywords tag, so search engines have responded with increasingly sophisticated algorithms which place much more emphasis on the "title" tag and the relevance of the body copy (more on this later). Consequently, the most important thing to do is to make sure that your keywords are prominent in your page title.
The keywords themselves need to be listed in the keywords tag section, separated by commas:
eg: <meta name="keywords" content="web design, web site design, web developer, e-commerce web design">
and sprinkled throughout your description. Remember, your description is often displayed with your site title on search engines, so make sure it makes sense, and of course encourages the surfer to click through!
eg: <meta name="description" content="UK Web design company, e-commerce and e-mail marketing specialist and web site promotion agency">
As I mentioned before, the search engine "spider" is also looking for "relevance" and will rank your page higher if it finds your keywords in the body of your page, so make use of the "alt" and "title" tags for images and links respectively, eg:
<a href ="http://somesite.com" title="keyword link">Link</a>
<img src="image.jpg" width="100" height="100" alt="keyword in title here">
Step 4: Body Copy Optimisation. This is where relevance really comes into play. Nowadays, search engines won't set much store by the information in your meta or other tags unless they also find a good smattering of your keywords (in sentences that make sense!) in your body copy. A couple of things to remember here are firstly, search engines read from the top left of your web site to the bottom right. So, make sure your key words are loaded towards the top right and again (this is for the relevancy check) they should appear in a slightly higher density near the bottom of your page. Secondly, also pay special attention to any headings and sub headings in your copy. You should, where possible, make use of "H" tags for your headings as search engines treat these as important and will look for keywords and relevancy in your titles, eg:
<h1>Page Heading with Key Phrase Here</h1>
Step 5: Search Engine Submission. This part you should only start thinking about once you have completed steps 1-4 above. There are two ways of doing this and two schools of thought to go with it, plus the inevitable arguments for and against! The cheapest way is, of course, to visit each search engine in turn, find the "submit a site" link, and fill out the form and submit. A more expensive but easier method is to use a site submission tool such as WebPosition from WebTrends. This will save you tons of time and the program is packed full of features to help you optimise and check your site. However, many argue that search engines don't like these tools and try to block them or reduce their effectiveness. No one can tell me if this is true or not, but since these tools cost money and it's not that much harder to submit manually, I would tend to leave the tools alone and do it myself. And as we've said many times before on these pages, software and tools are no substitute for time, hard work and talent!
