Showing up in the natural listings of the search engines is
no easy feat. The search engines change the criteria that
they use in their algorithms regularly. However there are
a few accepted principles that the experts agree you need
to do in order to have a chance of appearing in the natural
search engine listings.
Submit Your Website to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. These
are the biggest and most important search engines. They all
have a section on their website where you can submit your
website. You should submit to each of them, one at a time.
Never use a service that says they will submit your website
to hundreds of search engines. The search engines do not
like when people auto submit and they will not index you
if you do it. Don't waste your time with every little search
engine, the ones mentioned above are the biggest and cover
most of the Internet.
Try to get other websites that are relevant and that already
appear in the search engines to link to your website. You
can do this by offering to exchange links, or offering them
something else of value such as a recommendation or testimonial
on their website.
You should try to use the keywords people search on to find
a website like yours, in the content of your website. It
is important to strike a balance between having important
keywords and still making sense to the reader.
Customize your meta tags. Meta tags are invisible tags,
or code, embedded in your web page which are read by the
search engine robots to learn more about the content of your
website. The jury is out on how beneficial they actually
are, (some say not at all) but it certainly does not hurt,
and probably helps a lot, to follow the proper protocol in
order to help your website get listed. The main meta tags
you need to think about are language, author, title, description
and keywords.
Even after you do all of the things above, there is no guarantee
you will get listed on the first couple of pages of the search
engines. Your chances of getting listed on the first page
for certain keywords depends on many factors, such as how
competitive your topic is, the quality and quantity of the
links going to your website, how long your website has been
live for and some factors that change all the time. You should
at least show up under the title of your website though,
which is important for most people.
There are ways to show up on the very first page of any
search engine but you have to be willing to pay to do so.
This method is known as "pay per click" or "sponsored listings".
Sponsored search is for serious Internet marketers only.
It is for people who want to get more traffic and are willing
to pay for it. You need to know that you will get a return
on your investment or be on so few keywords that the small
amount you will pay is acceptable to you.
Most search engines do allow you to pay to appear on a page
next to the natural listings (usually the right side of the
page in little ad boxes to get your message across to people
browsing the Internet). These listings usually referred to
as sponsored listings cost you money every time someone clicks
on them to get to your website. The good news is that you
only pay when they click and not just for the ad appearing.
This is commonly referred to as "pay per click" (PPC) advertising.
There two major players in PPC and they are Google and Yahoo.
We do not recommend that you waste your time with any smaller
players. Google and Yahoo cover most of the Internet because
in addition to their own sponsored listings they syndicate
to many other websites and search engines.
Robert Hirscheimer is the President of
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