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Submitting a web site to a search enginei.e. registering with the search engine is obviously a necessary step to let them know of your website's existence. But how will the search engines rate your site? Where will they place it in the list of results when Internet users do a search? Is it sufficient just to submit your homepage to as many search engines as possible? This article discusses what you can do to get good placings with the search engines.
In order to get people to find your site on the World Wide Web, it takes a lot more than just submitting your site to the search engines. It's a matter of working out what keywords (or phrases) your target audience are likely to type into the search engines when they are looking for sites like yours, and working those keywords into one or more pages of your site. When choosing these keywords, you have to make sure you are not competing with too many other websites while making sure that a sufficient number of people from your target audience are utilising those words. In addition, the search engines (or the spiders they utilize to index the pages) take various other criteria into account.
The Criteria Search Engines Use To Rank Pages
This varies so much from search engine to search engine. Factors such as how many repeats of different combinations of keywords occur on the page (the page you choose to submit), how close they are to the top of the page, use of meta tags, alt tags, your link popularity and much more besides, are all taken into account differently across the engines. It would be an extremely daunting task to keep a hold of all the subtle differences, which change on a regular basis anyway, without some help. Fortunately, there are packages available which take care of all of that for you. A market leader in this regard is WebPosition Gold . This product will pop up again and again in this article, because once you know which keywords you would like to optimize for, it provides valuable help when you go about working the keywords into your pages.
Choosing Good Keywords
You may well know from your own marketing research or from intuition what keywords people are likely to type into the search engines when looking for sites with your specialism. On the other hand, you may need some help or verification of your choice. There are products out there which will do this. You can try the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Better still, Alcander Ltd. can throughly recommend WordTracker . Wordtracker is better because it is more accurate, not biased to one search engine and it breaks down its results for all the variations of a word. Most importantly it rates keywords' effectiveness so you do not end up choosing keywords which are too competitive (in terms of how many other websites are battling for top positions with those words) or too niche (not used by a sufficient number of Internet users). Remember that Wordtracker does not know your target audience, so only you can make the final decision on which keywords are right for your site.
Although the Overture tool is useful, Wordtracker goes much further and gets around Overture's limitations.
Optimization of Pages
Once you've selected your keywords, you'll need help with ensuring that the words are built into your pages in an optimal way. This is where a product called WebPosition Gold provides invaluable help. Though Alcander does not recommend doorway pages (which WebPosition Gold mentions a lot in its help), the product is still excellent for helping you optimize existing pages and develop new information pages . The product has inbuilt knowledge of the algorithms used by the search engines and uses this to make suggestions on how you could refine your pages to get you better rankings. It does this per search engine, per keyword. As long as you restrict these principles to designing pages of good, original content and do not duplicate the content then you can you will find that WebPosition Gold will contribute immensely to the success of your website. Developing multiple doorways pages, each page designed for a different search engine, counts as duplication even if the pages are subtly different.
Submitting Pages to the Search Engines.
The major search engines take a dislike to the use of automated methods of submitting pages. Alcander recommends you do this manually. You can submit your site for free to many of the search engines, e.g. to Google, to AllTheWeb and to Altavista to name just three.
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