efforts the big day came when you finally published your website
on the Internet. You are now ready to show your website to the
world. But, with over a billion pages vying for traffic how do
you make people visiting your site?
Web promotion is an on going process. There are many methods of
promoting websites, but, the first and foremost step that you
have to take to generate traffic for your website is to submit
your site to major search engines and directories. For most of
the sites search engines are the primary source of first time
visitors.
How important are the search engines? Data show that more than
80% of Internet users find the sites they're looking for through
search engines. Over 57% of Internet users search the Internet
everyday. Up to 450 Million searches take place in a day and
most interestingly, 55% of all Internet purchases originate at a
search engine.
Before you start submitting your website to the search engines,
you have to understand that you want your prospective audience
to find you when they search for a site similar to you using
specific keywords. Now, you know that when a person runs a query
on a search engine for a website, usually he looks no further
then first three pages of relevant results. You have to figure
out a way how to get within those three pages. Better even if
you can get yourself within top ten search results. Considering
that a query usually delivers millions of pages — this is not an
easy task!
As the search engines want to deliver most relevant pages at the
top, they use highly sophisticated and complex algorithms to
rank websites. But the main aspects, that they consider in order
to optimize your ranking position, are your targeted keywords,
relevancy of the site contents and value of the links that are
pointing to your site.
Keywords
Target the wrong keywords and either you don't get any visitor
or you get the visitors that you really don't need. How can you
figure out which are the right keywords for you?
If you are confused about the words that you should target to
get the best result, start your search from one of your
successful competitors' website. Check the source codes of the
Index page of the website. It should not be difficult for you to
figure out what are the keywords that they are targeting. Since
a broad keyword like computer, textile etc. generates millions
of search results, you have to try to find words as specific and
as segmented as possible.
For example: if you are a textile company that sells fabrics and
one of the best selling items of yours is jeans fabrics let's
see what should be your targeted keyword. A query on Google
shows that the word "fabric" brings 5,640,000 results. Way too
much for you to even try get at the top! The next search of
"jeans fabric" gets 148,000 results. Still a lot! If stonewashed
jeans fabric is one of the items that you sell, let's see what
we get from a query on it. Just 602 results! Well, this is a
number you can deal with! Now if you use a few proper
optimization mechanisms, chances are there that in no times you
may get yourself on the first ten of this search result.
If you know the broad keywords that you should target but don't
have any idea how to make it more specific, use this little tool
from Overture to show you what queries people make relevant to
this keyword. Click here for the tool.
Place keywords in right locations
For search engines the page title is the most important part of
the page. Make sure that you use your targeted keyword over
there. For the previous example your title may look like:
'Supplier of Quality Stonewashed Jeans Fabric'.
Use your keywords in different forms in Meta tags and
Description. Use singular and plural variations of the words.
Since search engines also look at the content of your page, try
using keywords in your headlines and don't forget to mention
them in the first paragraph of the page.
But do not over do it! If the search engines feel that you are
over using a word to lift your ranking, they may consider it as
spamming, and block your website from their listing.
Content is the king
According to research, the primary reason for people to be on
the Internet is information. People want information, quality
information, lots of it and in most of the cases for free! This
is the reason why the search engine spiders are created to look
for good, relevant textual contents. If you are looking for a
top position on a specific search, your website must have
quality relevant content.
If yours is a website that only sells product or services, you
may ask, how can you possibly have enough content? Apart from
detail description of the products or services that you provide,
you should also emphasize on the benefits of the products. If
you have related to your products articles, whitepapers etc. you
must post them on your site as well. It's important to post
quality information related to your products or services as this
also position your website as a knowledgeable leader in your
respective industry and create interest among your audience to
revisit the site.
Try renewing information on your site on a regular interval.
This, as well, will increase repeat visits from people and the
search engine spiders.
Submission to search engines
Once you are ready to submit your site to search engines, all
you have to do is to go to the relevant search engine site, fill
up the form there and submit. You can do it manually for each
search engine separately or you can use programs to do it
automatically. If you miss a search engine, you don't have to
worry about it much, as the search engine spiders or "Bots", as
they are also called, constantly look for new websites to index.
However, it's a good idea to submit to the major search engines
and directories regularly. You should also resubmit your website
to the search engines in order to expedite the process of
indexing after each significant change you made to the site.
