Posts Tagged ‘search engines’
Once you have built or started to build your website and have used the on-page optimization techniques from this guide you are ready to get your website listed in the search engines and to start your climb in the search engine rankings.
There are two major approaches to getting links that you control. You can do it yourself for free or you can spend money on services that will help you do it or do it for you. Right now we are going to learn how to do it for free and once you start making money on your sites you can think about paying to reduce your workload and amplify your efforts.
Your first step is to get your newly optimized site listed in Google quickly. This will give you a confidence boost by seeing that your site is listed and will be the foundation for improving the ranking later. I’m focusing on Google because you can get a new site listed in Google in days or even hours. It can take many weeks with Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN), but once you are listed in Google you will eventually get listed in the other search engines.
Assuming you don’t already have websites that are listed in Google your fastest way to get listed it to do a little social bookmarking. That means listing your pages on sites that people use to share links and bookmarks. There are many of these but I’ll suggest a few that I have had good results with. Go to three or more of these sites and setup a free account then add at least one good quality page from your website using link text that contains the primary keyword for that page:
StumbleUpon | Digg | Delicious | Google Bookmarks
Diigo | Propeller | Yahoo Bookmarks
These links will get Google to visit your site and get it listed. They will also be a start in getting the links that will help you get good search engine rankings. There are many more social bookmarking sites. Listing your web pages in then is quick and easy especially once you setup a free account. I recommend that you register with one new social bookmarking site every time you have a new page to promote. For a nice list of social bookmarking sites visit any post on this blog and click on the small icons at the end of the post.
Once you have your own websites that are listed in Google you can just add a link from them to your new site to get it listed. If you have a blog there is even a little trick I’ll share in a future newsletter message that can get you listed in Google in minutes.
Golden Take-Away: Use social bookmarking sites as one fast and easy link building tool.
Before you even think about getting your website ranked you need to have content that is of value to users. Take it from someone who wasted a lot of time and effort trying to get sites ranked and trying to make money from AdSense with junk sites. It does not work. If your site has nothing but duplicate content and republished articles forget it. This may have worked at one time, but the search engines have wised up.
The search engines, especially Google, work very hard to make sure when a user does a search they find something of value that is relevant to their search. Search results are their product and they will do everything they can to provide a quality product. If you provide useful, original content and follow the suggestions in this guide the search engines will reward you with high rankings and the traffic that is the result of those rankings.
This does not mean you have to be an expert and prolific writer. You just need to have something to say that users want to hear. I have many small one to five page sites that rank very well. They have unique information that is of value to the target audience. It is true that you will usually get better rankings and more traffic with bigger sites, but it is OK to start small and build more pages when you start seeing some results.
Golden Take-Away: Try to find a problem that users need a solution to. The greater and more urgent the need the more anxious users will be to read what you write and perhaps buy whatever you are selling. If your content is original and useful the users will be happy, the search engines will be happy, and you will be happy.
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