Five Simple Ways To Make the Search Engines Stand Up and Take Notice of Your Website

By Donna Knight

You’ve got a hot new website with all the bells and whistles: cool Flash presentations, eye-catching colors, informative text, easy-to-maneuver layout, and an interesting topic. You think your site is amazing, and you know that others will agree with you. If only they know it existed.

How do you let others know about your site? How do you make yours stand out amongst millions of sites? You can spend lots of money on advertising, but that’s a catch 22. You can buy expensive advertising because you haven’t made any money yet. So what do you do? Make search engines work for you, that’s what!

You want your website to be a shining star on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AltaVista – That means getting at the top of their results for your targeted keywords. The higher your site is in a search results, the more visitors you will get. The science behind getting a top rank on search engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Don’t worry, though – even if SEO is referred to as a science, you can still get good results without hiring a $5000 a month SEO expert. You just need to follow some simple steps, and before you know it, your site will have more visitors than you can shake a stick at.

Here are five tips to maximize your search engine ranking on as many search engines as possible:

1. Content is more important than appearance.

Do you want to share your knowledge on a subject that you have authority on? Do you want to sell your products? Do you want to build an online shrine for your favorite actor? For whatever topic you have chosen for your website, make sure you give useful information. Search engines determine relevance of the sites listed by work by scanning sites for keywords. All they care about is the text on your site. They don’t care about your high-tech flash or other graphics. In fact, most can’t even see flash. Rich content is much more important than rich colors. While graphics on your site should be professional-looking, they are not as important to visitors as you think they are. Nice graphics may impress people once, but great content makes them come back. There’s a common saying that you should live by: content is king!

2. Master your topic

If you know your topic well, you will already know what questions people have about it. The keywords people use to search for information on search engines are related to the question they have about it. When you are maximizing keywords on your site, try to picture what keywords people will type into a search engine when looking for that particular topic. Make sure your site gives answers to those questions. If you are selling a product from your site, keep in mind people search for information. If your site feeds their hunger for that information, they will be more likely to buy your related product.

3. Learn from other people’s success

Take time to browse and read sites that get lots of visitors and have the same topic as yours. Take note of any recurring phrases in these sites’ text. These phrases are most likely keywords. Incorporate them in your own site’s content. Don’t saturate your site with keywords, though. You can actually get penalized in your ranking for having a keyword too many times on your site. A 3% keyword density is enough.

In searching for the right keywords, use Overture’s keyword tool at http://inventor.overture.com. This tool tells you the actual keywords and related keywords people actually did search for last month. The benefit is you’re no longer guessing in your keyword research. Your prediction about what people will search for is based on historical information about real searches people have performed.

4. Submit…and re-submit

You will never get a certain job if you don’t send in your application for it. The same thing applies to SEO. If you want your site to be recognized by search engines, then go out of your way to register your site with them. After a couple of weeks, search for your site by putting in the keywords you used in your content. If your site is still not coming up in the search results, don’t give up. Just re-register and resubmit your site. It can take as many as 6 months to get listed in some search engines despite your best efforts. This usually happens because a lot of submissions are done on a particular day.

5. Constantly update your site

Google recently released information on the algorithm they use for ranking. One thing they mention is rank can be boosted by having constantly updated information. This is not only true for Google. Yahoo also will re-visit sites with constantly updated content more often. If you add a blog and post something to it–preferably keyword-rich content–search engines will like your site even more. Blog software that many expert bloggers use is WordPress, which you can get at http://www.wordpress.org.

I have to admit that tip #5 is the most valuable tip. Even if the content on your site is mediocre, constantly updating it will make the search engines take notice and keep paying attention to your website.
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Donna Knight is a Website Promotion Specialist and
Website Builder. She has built over 200 websites and
helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time in your online marketing efforts, visit her Internet Marketing Tools blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com
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Copyright (C)2005 Donna Knight. All Rights Reserved.
Permission granted to post this article in newsletters,
free ebooks or websites as long as the article and resource
box remain intact.
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