- Proofread your website: There's no point in marketing it like crazy if it has silly errors in it. Make sure it's ready for the professional world.
- Register a great domain name: Find a domain name that has the type of business in the name. Ie, a dog walker might register www.sanfranciscodogwalking.com.
- Add your site to local searches: Most of the search engines have local search functions, and you should definitely appear there. Visit www.local.yahoo.com, www.local.google.com, and www.superpages.com to list your site.
- Register your site with search engines: Submit your site to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and directories (DMOZ).
- Build links: Ask other related sites to link to your site. You'll have better luck if your site offers solid resources, tools, or tips for readers. Also submit to related directories.
- Write articles: Write articles about topics relating to your site, and publish them on your site. Also submit them to as many article directories as you can find. Just do a search for "Article Submit".
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
How to market your website in simpler ways
Monday, September 22, 2008
SEO optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO also search optimization) is the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic search listing and thus increasing the volume of traffic from search engines.
SEO is one of the key Web Marketing activities and can target different kinds of searches, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Sometimes a site's structure (the relationships between its content) must be altered too. Because of this it is, from a client's perspective, always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimization when a website is being developed than to try and retroactively apply it.
Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.
The term 'Search engine friendly' refers to a website that has been search optimised.
Getting indexed
The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.[21] Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.[22] Yahoo's paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors.[23] Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review.[24] Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.[25]
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.
Preventing indexing
To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.
As a marketing strategy
Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site.[34] However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator's goals.[35] A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site's conversion rate.[36]
SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.[37] It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.[38] A top-ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org[39] has reported, "Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines." Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.
Legal precedents
On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing's claim was that Google's tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google's motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing "failed to state a claim upon which relief may be granted."[46][47]
In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. Kinderstart's web site was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007 the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend, and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses.
SEO Tools
SEO tools stands for search engine optimization tools and these are tools created (usually by webmasters) for webmasters to simplify some of the work needed to optimize a website/URL with the search engines. One of the most spread seo tool on the internet is the backlink checker which checks how many backlinks point to one specific link. Another popular tool is the Pagerank checker which checks the Google Pagerank of a webpage.
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