Optimisation Techniques
Optimising your presence on the Internet
The next step now is to optimise your website to become visible
and generate traffic. In addition to this simple procedure Page optimser also
provides tools and
resources to optimise your website in both the development stage and
post development marketing stage. Optimising your internet business in respect
to SEO is key to success. By already optimising your web pages in the
development stage your pages should be primed to optimise your presence
on the Internet by following the next few steps.
Directory Submitions.
Unlike Search engines directory's are checked by people in turn
they make excellent referances for the search engines and our a major factor in
the ranking process. First and foremost get listed for free in the
Open Directory Project
Google seems to heavily favour sites and pages listed in the ODP. Include as
many of your most important keywords within the title and in the description
that you submit to the ODP.The minimum requirement is to make sure that each
page has plenty of useful, unique content that is relevant to the category to
which you are submitting. Do not continually resubmit your site to the ODP,
un-reviewed sites are listed in order of a single submission date when you
resubmitting your site a new submission date is allocated and it automatically
moves back to the bottom of the queue and excessive submission may get you
tagged as a spammer. The ODP is voluntary and some categories have long
backlogs. Instead of resubmitting you should go to the ODP forum
www.resource-zone.com/ where you can ask about your submission although they
will not be able to track your specific URL they will be able to answer any
concerns. The only way to see the progress of you site will be by checking if
it has been listed yet and the only way you can guarantee listing is be having
unique content, the sites are included in the ODP not for the webmasters
benefit but for the visitors as this is what gives it its accreditation and
what separates search engines from directories. The only positive advise to
give on this subject is compare your site with others in the same category that
have been listed and if you really have to resubmit do so no more than once a
month, perhaps you will have more luck in a similar but different category with
a shorter waiting list. Dont panic being excluded in the ODP will not prevent
you from getting top rankings although for the ten minutes of your time it
takes to submit it, is certainly worth the effort.
Yahoo is anouther major player but at a premium cost, Non-business related
sites can be submitted for free at
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html . The best is to look around
for directory's related to your topics these could be for example a
University's website. Other free for all catagory directories have little value
DMOZ and Yahoo being the exception.
Search engine submission.
Get your site linked to as many search engines as possible, (these
links about cover the major seach submission sites, Dont worry if you dont get
them all they tend to cross referance each other) Submit manualy using the
following links. Trust me this is all you have to do nothing more! Automatic
submissions apart from costing you for the software can have a negative affect
and are often a waste of time or worse, spamming scams to collect you email
address.
Use these links to submit you URL
AltavistaLycos (No need to submit url to Lycos
there results are populated by Ask and Google Adwords),
Ask You will
need to ping "http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of
your sitemap here.xml",
MSN
AOL (No need to submit url to AOL
there results are populated from Google's Organic and Adwords)
Clusty ,
Submit your URL to Google
If you followed the advance on key word placement and content in the web page
development section the google crawler will lap up your website. Once your page
is has been detected by a search engine , a "robot" or "crawler" will read your
site and build a set of database indexes based on words or phrases that it
discovers.
What not to do: Do not submit redirected pages you
could be tagged as a spammer. We have expermented with multiple submissions
although it doesnt hurt it equaly doesnt help. Avoid the automatic submission
options they tend to be ignored.
Top tips: Sign up to google webmasters tools, Use a
sitemap and update often to get regular crawls.
Link Popularity
External Links to your site can be valuable when they come from high ranking relevant sites this is currently one of the major factors in page ranking. Links are usually achieved by offering a service, article or tool that will make the site linking to you look resourceful, If you dont offer them anything you will most likely just be wasting your own time.
Be careful of being blacklisted for link manipulation this is a relatively new and is a real danger this usually comes from opt in practices and automated Link Exchanges. Link ranking works something like this, links on a high ranking page get a shared value of the page rank assigned to that page so a single link on a high ranking page would have a higher value then several links this is why webmasters are reluctant to point potentially valuable links to a low ranking page. This has resulted in the marketability of links as a potential income and therefore not something usually given away for free. Although adding links to blogs and the like may help a little, I would think of better ways of spending your time most blogs use a no follow tag this means you should only use this method to attract visitors as search engine spiders will treat such links as advertising and not pass on page rank. If you have many sites you could Cross-link them so you higher ranking pages give your new pages a boost. The best method to get links is by networking and communicating with other webmasters in your field. A good way to find contacts for links is to use the "link:" search on google on your keyword competitors. Find who links to them see how the link is displayed and either approach them for an exchange, tell them about your great resourse they could link to or even offer them money if you feel a link there could pay off. Embedding a link in a tool resource or other form of feed that you offer freely to webmasters. Syndicate articles with a link back in the resource box. Offering a link exchange on your own page will invite other webmasters to join however this process is slightly outdated and thought of as a waste of time. You should never have more than 100 links on a page. Over 10 and the outgoing value starts to drop, over 100 and the integrity of the page becomes questionable and may loose rank.
Regular updates.
Updating your pages regularly gives the impression of a eventful
newsworthy site this will increase you ranking and increase crawl activity on
your site this is reflective of active blogs and regularly updated news/ media sites,
rss feeds do not have this effect but can be a attractive option for the
visitor when time is a premium.
Relevance.
Another high ranking measure is the ease at which your site can be
automatically categorised and in turn the relevance of your sites content in
retrospect to its adopted category. The general consensus that "linking" is a
major player distracts the importance owed to this aspect, although linking is
a excellent measure for popularity, its not the most reliable source as it can
easily be manufactured. Try looking at it from the perspective of the spider
developers thinking alone the lines of "Cause" (a variable) and "Desired
Effect" (a constant).
There are many Optimising tools available if you wish to progress beyond this basic point, however if your page is really well presented and you've followed these basic steps it will promote itself. I would recommend to progress to this level first to see how your web site takes before infusing your cashflow, however be patient this should take about two to three weeks before your even listed. If it take longer give us a shout so we can spot what your doing wrong
Now we know your out there, move on to part 5 Marketing your online business