Search Engine Submission, Ranking, Link Popularity and More

Information courtesy of Entheos.com

Web site promotion is the most important step in making your business succeed online. To help you promote and maintain your web site, we hope that you will find these articles, guidelines and tips useful.

Some people mistakenly believe that as soon as a site is on the Internet, the search engines will automatically index their site and people will start visiting their site from Day 1. This is not true. Once your site is live (i.e. uploaded and accessed through the Internet) you need to concentrate on web site promotion. This is the step that will really give you a powerful Net presence. It's easy and it's fun so let's jump right into it.

Let's start with the basics
There are many methods that you can use to promote your web site. But one rule remains the same. Make sure that your web site is 100% ready to be submitted before you begin with promotion. You don't want to give anyone a chance of rejecting your web site and you don't want to disappoint visitors who come to your site.

1. Submitting to Search EnginesThe first and most important method of promotion is submitting your web site to search engines and directories. The webmaster fills out a form that tells the search engine or editor (in case of a directory or site) to visit and index the suggested site.

1. Preparing your web pages - Meta tagsYou must submit your web site only after you have prepared your web pages for the search engines. This means you have to insert appropriate meta tags on all your web pages (keywords, description and title).Preparing your web pages for effective web site promotion leading to high search engine ranking

2. Web site OptimizationFor your site to score high with search engines, you will need to optimize your web site (improve your HTML, load time, browser compatibility and other factors to cater to search engines). Only after optimization should you submit your site.Web Site Optimization - Using Free Web Site Analysis Software to improve your site

3. Finally, it's time to submit! After optimization, it's time to submit your site. We recommend submitting to all the major search engines, since search engines generate approximately 90% of web site traffic. Top search engines have a form for site suggestions. A link to this form can usually be found from the home page; it may say "Add a site" or "Suggest a URL." You can jump to our article which has links to all submission forms and tips on submission, so you don't have to spend hours looking for them.Click here to see a list of major search engines and their submission pages

2. Submitting to DirectoriesOnce you have submitted your web site to all the top search engines, it is time to submit your site to the important directories, like Yahoo, Looksmart, AOL etc. Submitting to Directories is different from submitting to Search Engines as human editors review your site and accept or reject your site according to its quality. Before submitting to Directories, you need to make sure that your site is 100% ready. You also need to carefully follow their guidelines while you submit your site.Click here to read more about submitting your web site to directories.Note: There are a number of free search engine submission tools available but I suggest that the first time you submit your web site, do it manually. And never use these free tools while submitting to Directories. This must be done manually. Don't worry, submitting to search engines is very easy. It's only preparing your web pages with the appropriate meta tags that takes time.

3. Other Internet Marketing TechniquesYou need to know that web site promotion is an ongoing process, as there are thousands of web sites being added every day and the competition is getting tougher by the minute! Most of the sites listed on the search engines are getting lost as there may be 100 -10,000 other web sites in the same field. We all know that most people don't look at more than 2-3 search result pages. The web sites that are not found in these pages are lost in the competition. New promotion techniques are coming out every day to get around this problem. We will discuss these new promotion techniques soon. Some of them are as follows:

1. Link PopularityThis is a very important Internet marketing technique which is rapidly gaining importance. The term "link popularity" refers to the number of sites that are linked to your site. Search engines check your link popularity and based on how popular your site is, give you a higher ranking. Try getting as many quality links as possible to boost your search engine position. Read more about link popularity and ranking high in the search engines.

2. Writing Quality ArticlesGet visitors flocking to your site by writing quality articles. Write articles that are related to the content of your site. Most people come to the Internet for quality information. Articles build your credibility and reputation and your visitors may use your services in the long run. You also get more links to your sites through this method.

3. Publish your own ezine or newsletterEzines (or e-mail newsletters) are the latest buzz for marketing on the Internet. Everyone is talking about how you should publish your own ezine to increase traffic, hits and sales. Popular ezines usually give current information and resources that will keep subscribers informed and updated. Ezines are also a great way to keep in touch with your visitors.

4. More Internet Marketing Tips Coming Soon! We will continue to update this page so don't forget to bookmark it for your future web promotion endeavors.
WEBSITE PROMOTION TIPS AND ADVICE
After trying out various strategies, tips and tricks given in many promotion sites we've come up with a few important tips and advice that have worked well for us. These tips would help you get a better listing, position and ranking in the popular search engines. They are simple to follow and are guaranteed to give you good results. Lets go through them right now!

1. Quality Site with Quality ContentThe first and most important rule is to promote quality sites. Don't waste your time promoting junk sites. It won't pay off in the long run. This is honest talking here. You must be willing to spend time developing a quality website, if you want your promotion efforts to pay off. The first month you won't do too well but as you keep adding new pages, getting new links and updating your site you will see your hits increasing over the months. Your site will get more traffic as time goes by. Also don't underestimate the importance of small websites. Once they come to your website and they like what they see they will usually link to you with a good review. I can't emphasize enough on building a quality website. If you have a good website you will definitely get a lot of traffic over time. Important Tip: While we are on the subject of content here's a very important tip - Try to come out with something original or slightly different from what your competitors are coming out with. Write articles related to your field of experience and focus it on specific topics. For e.g. If we were to write on 'website promotion', we would have thousands of sites competing with us in the search engines. Whereas if we were to write on 'website Promotion Tips and Advice' we would have a better chance of ranking high in the search engines. Now visitors would come to this page and through this page they may go to our website promotion page or services page. The idea is to write something a little different from the norm to draw visitors to your site. There's no use writing a great article on what others have already written about. It will only be lost in the search engines. I'd like to share a personal experience here. When we first launched Entheos I wrote this entire website promotion guide on very generic and common keywords. I made these great pages on search engine submission, meta tags, link popularity etc. - keywords I was sure people would search for. What I didn't realize was that there were thousands of sites offering what I had written about, as a result of which my pages never came up in the first few pages of search engines. Though they were good pages they failed to bring traffic to Entheos. I then changed my strategy and wrote articles on slightly different topics - like Google Tips 'n' Tricks, Altavista Tips and boy did we do well in the search engines. They got the 1st position in the search engines and resulted in an increase of traffic. I wrote these articles because I just learnt of some new tips after a lot of experimentation and research and I was just dying to share them - the rest is history!
2. Meta Tags While preparing your meta tags don't use generic or common keywords, try to use a combination of keywords and see if you can make them different from your competition. This would give you a better chance with the search engines. Try to come out with something different and you'll probably do pretty well. Tip: The golden rule for effective search engine submission is that all your important keywords should appear in your title, description, content and alt tags of your web page. This increases your keyword density and helps in boosting your ranking with the search engines.

3. Concentrate on the Big Search EnginesGoogle is my favorite search engine so I've really been concentrating on our listing, ranking and links here. Its brought us the most amount of traffic (more than 40 times the other search engines - no kidding!). Google brings in a lot of traffic because it takes keywords from the content as well as the meta tags resulting in a good chance of getting ranked high when searching for unique keywords. Also it gives a lot of importance to link popularity so getting many quality sites to link to yours can get rid of a lot of unwanted competition. Focus on the search engines that are sending you the most amount of traffic - understand their strategies, study their sites, visit forums and get as much of information as you can to tackle them. Contrary to popular belief Excite, Lycos, HotBot, Direct Hit don't send much traffic. Google by far is the Best.

4. Get Like-minded Sites to Link to YouThis is the key to high search engine ranking and
placement. Link Popularity means how many sites link to you. The idea behind link popularity is that other sites will link to you only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. Google uses this concept while ranking websites. Get quality sites to link to you and you will get a good ranking in Google. This is also a great way to bring traffic to your site. Usually sites that link to us send us more traffic than the popular search engines.

5. Be Patient - Traffic increases over timeBe patient. Don't expect miracles to happen overnight. Promotion is a continuous process. You need to continue to update your site, add new articles and resubmit to search engines. Over time you will see your site coming up in search engines, getting better placement and sending you more visitors. Check your ranking every month. Be involved in the promotion process. Check your website statistics to see which sites are sending you the most traffic. Work on getting new sites to link to you. Tweak the pages that are not sending you any visitors.

NEXT WEEK: Writing for the Web & Words that sell!