Part 4: Optimisation Techniques

Optimising your presence on the Internet

Page optimser provides tools and techniques to optimise your website in both the development stage and post development marketing stage. Optimising your internet business is the key to success. By already optimising your web pages in the development stage (part 1) your pages should be primed to optimise your presence on the Internet.

Directory submition.

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 you specific URL they will be able to answer any concerns.

The only way to see the progress of you sight 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.

Don’t 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 a a premium cost, Non-business related sites can be submitted for free at http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/ . The best is to look around for directory's related to your topics these are mostly University's and the like. The free for all catagory directories have little value with exception to the two big fish.

Search engine submission.

Get your site linked to as many respected sources 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, automatic submissions apart from costing you for the software can have a negative affect.

Altavista,

Lycos (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",

A9 ,

MSN,

AOL (No need to submit url to AOL there results are populated from Google's Organic and Adwords)

Clusty ,

Gigablast and

Yahoo .

Submit your URL to Google

If you followed the advance on key word placement 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.

Do not submit redirected pages you could be tagged as a spammer. Pageoptimiser has expermented with multiple submissions although it doesnt hurt it equaly doesnt help.

The webmaster cant help it if their pages are popular and people recommend them to search engines however to avoid webmaster spamming and competitors attempts to ban sites multiple submissions make no differance, however avoid the automatic submission options they tend to be ignored.

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.

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 so as to limit sabotage from competitors.

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 although how long this will remain profitable is in the hands of the algorithm developers.

Although adding links to blogs and the like may help a little I would think of better ways of spending your time.

If you have many sites you could Cross-link them so you higher ranking pages give your new pages a boost.

The best way to find contacts for links is to use the "link:" search on google on your keyword competitors find who links to them and approach them for an exchange.

Offering a link exchange on your own page will invite other webmasters to join however again keep it moderate over kill is never a good thing.

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 give 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 new sights, 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, categorising and relevance 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 befor your listed.

Now we know your out there, move on to part 5 Marketing your web publication.