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How to promote your web site

Before you launch your web site

There are a number of crucial first steps that if taken properly will help place your company much higher and faster and for a longer period of time in the web search results.

• Know who is searching for you and how
• Provide high-quality content on your pages -- especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do.
• Do not use unethical means to promote your web site or you can be penalized by Google and other search engines. (see below)
• It can take 3 - 6 months before you start to see results, so do it right the first time
• If you can not bookmark a web page, then the search engine crawlers can not index it either and people can not search for it
• How to find a search engine expert
• Why am I not listed in Google?
• Choose keywords wisely

If your web site does not employ the practices below, please call or email us today for a free quote and some advice.

How do I optimize my web site?

So what do I need on my web pages to be considered "quality" by a search engine? Generally they are the same things that are usefull and impress us:

• The page is relevant to the terms being searched for
• The page is considered an authority about its topic
• The page is part of a site with lots of content pages
• The page has a lot of good and useful content
• The page has been around for months
• The page loads quickly
• The page doesn't have broken links
• The page isn't filled with cheap keywords

So good seo ranking usually means:

• Creating many content-rich pages, fast-loading pages, with the words you want to rank for on the page and in the <TITLE> tag, and
• Getting links to your pages from other web sites, especially from pages similar in content

That is 90% of it right there. Of course there are more details, and that's why there are so many articles on this site. But that is an honest summary of Search Engine Optimization in a nutshell.

Many webmasters approach SEO the wrong way. Don't focus on tricks and any keyword, but focus on the quality of the page and the entire web site.

Technical details on how to get listed in Google

The details below show how to promote your web site on Google. They certainly hold true for Google, but you will also find them to be true of the other major search engines as well.

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site, which is the best way to ensure you'll be included in Google's search results. Even if you choose not to implement some or any of these suggestions, Google will rank you lower, or not at all, if you do not follow their "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

Design and Content Guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical Guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session ID's, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session ID's or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the crawlers. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html for a FAQ answering questions regarding robots and how to control them when they visit your site.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.

When your site is ready

• Once your site is online, you can submit it to Google etc. at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!.
• Periodically review Google's webmaster section for more information and other trusted online industry sources.

Quality Guidelines - Basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a web site that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

References

Google Guidelines.