If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Getting a company's name and products, or services, onto the first page of a genuine Google search isn't a trivial piece of work. In fact, there are four distinct skills that a search engine optimizer needs to possess. Most people possess one or maybe two of these skills, very rarely do people posses all four. In truth, to get to all four, people who are good at two of these need to actively develop the other skills. Now, if you are running your own business, do you really have the time to do this? Is this the best use of your time?
Specifically the four skills needed for SEO work are:
Web Design ? producing a visually attractive page
HTML coding - developing Search Engine friendly coding that sits behind the web design
Copy writing ? producing the actual readable text on the page
Marketing ? what are the actual searches that are being used, what key words actually get more business for your company?
Many website designers produce more and more eye-catching designs with animations and clever rollover buttons hoping to entice the people onto their sites. This is the first big mistake; using designs like these will actually decrease your chances of a high Google rating. Yes, that's right; all that money you have paid for the website design could be wasted because no-one will ever find your site.
The reason for this is that before you get people to your site you need to get the spider bots to like your site. Spider bots are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to trawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites. Some of the complex techniques used by web designers cannot be trawled by spider bots. They come to your site, look at the HTML code and exit stage right, without even bothering to rank your site. So, you will not be found on any meaningful search.
I am amazed how many times I look at websites and I immediately know they are a waste of money. The trouble is that both the web designers and the company that paid the money really do not want to know this. In fact, I have stopped playing the messenger of bad news (too many shootings!); I now work round the problem. So, optimizing a website to be Google friendly is often a compromise between a visually attractive site and an easy to find site.
The second skill is that of optimizing the actual HTML code to be spiderwort friendly. I put this as different to the web design because you really do need to be ?down and dirty? in the code rather than using an editor like FrontPage, which is OK for website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to develop, and just when you think you have cracked it, the search engine companies change the algorithms used to calculate how high your site will appear in the search results.
This is no place for even the most enthusiastic amateur. Results need to be constantly monitored, pieces of code added or removed, and a check kept on what the competition are doing. Many people who design their own website feel they will get searched because it looks good, and totally miss out this step. Without a strong technical understanding of how spider bots work, you will always struggle to get your company on the first results page in Google.
Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is the writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. The Google and other spider bots like Income, love text ? but only when written well in proper English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so spider bots can see it but humans cannot).
Spider bots are very sophisticated and not only will not fall for these tricks, they may actively penalize your site ? in Google terms, and this is sandboxing. Google takes new sites and ?naughty? sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6 months, you can still be found but not until results page 14 ? really useful! As well as good English, the spider bots are also reading the HTML code, so the copy writer also needs an appreciation of the interplay between the two. My recommendation for anyone copy writing their own site is to write normal, well-constructed English sentences that can be read by machine and human alike.
The final skill is marketing, after all this is what we are doing ? marketing you site and hence company and products/services on the Web. The key here is to set the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to you. I have seen many sites that can be found as you key in the company name. Others that can be found by keying in ?Accountant Manchester North-West England?, which is great, except no-one ever actually does that search. So the marketing skill requires knowledge of a company's business, what they are really trying to sell and an understanding of what actual searches may provide dividends.
I hope you will see that professional Search Engine Optimization companies need more than a bit of web design to improve your business. Make sure anyone you choose for SEO work can cover all the bases.
Every web designer knows getting into the Google index is at the top of the priority list when launching a web-site, but some web designers find the process challenging, even tricky. The majority will probably agree the most effective type of traffic is search engine traffic. Google users, and other search engine users, depend on relevant search results to obtain the information they're looking for - this type of traffic is the type almost all webmasters want. There's an excellent chance that close to 70% of all web site's traffic comes from Google or other search engines. Google usually does a good job delivering target results, so it's probably safe to say Google is doing their job effectively.
1. Establish Backlinks, Backlinks, Backlinks
This is relatively easy. Once your site is available and ready for launch, submit the main page to social networking sites. Here are a few to consider: Digg, delicious, sphinn, forums, dofollow blog comments, and any other social link sharing sites you may be a member of. If you're a member of a discussion forum, add your site's link to your member profile and signature. This is a great technique to get indexed because your site's link is placed on every page you've posted to on that forum. If you already possess an established and indexed site in Google already, just throw up a link to your new site from the established site. Try to avoid site wide links if possible. Backlinks (without the rel="nofollow" tag) will present the new site and its pages to Google's crawler - this is what we're going for. This tells Google the site exists, and unless there's a link to the new site on an already indexed site, Google's bot has no way of knowing the new site exists.
2. Google Webmaster Tools Wants Your Sitemap
Once signed up to Google's Webmaster Tools, login and add a site to your dashboard. Verify that you're the owner by adding the special meta tag or creating a file with the filename they provide. Now that Google knows you own that site, head over to www.XML-Sitemaps.com and follow the instructions on their site. Upload the uncompressed sitemap.xml file to your site's root directory, for example: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml. Back to the webmaster tools dashboard, under sitemaps, click add to add a sitemap for your now hopefully verified site. Sit back and let Google examine your sitemap. Check back a few hours later to make sure there weren't any errors. Providing a sitemap lets Google know your site exists, and which pages are important.
3. Continue Building Backlinks!
Site directories are a great way to build one-way, permanent backlinks. There are hundreds of thousands of free directories available all over the Internet. Continuous, slow development of backlinks is very helpful to a site's success. Once you're indexed, adding backlinks will improve your chances of survival and increase traffic. Submit high quality stories or information to Digg, add them to your delicious bookmarks, even stumble your pages. The process is tedious, but until authority is established and people start naturally linking to your site, keep establishing backlinks - they can't hurt your site.
So that's it. Sit back and wait. Hopefully Google's bot will visit your site via the Digg submission, or a forum signature, and start grabbing the site's content. If your server logs show the bot as a visitor, and the bot likes what was on the site, congratulations, you're golden.
Both Anil Yadav & Guy Jones are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Anil Yadav has sinced written about articles on various topics from How to Sell on Ebay, Debts Loans and How to Sell on Ebay. Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to web design, do please browse for more information at our websites.. Anil Yadav's top article generates over 18100 views. to your Favourites.
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