Tech Talk: Getting Others to Find Your Site

By Dave Rutledge

The Internet is a vast and ever growing place, with tens of thousands of new site additions per day. With the ever-expanding competition it can be hard to separate your site from the rest. Most ways of boosting your site in the search engines are free, and just require a little bit of time. So lets explore common and easy ways of boosting your site ranking in the search engines.

Code it right: This is one of the most important, if not the most, ways of successfully making sure the search engines index your site. Properly done and optimized coding not only allows for fast loading time, but also makes the search engines able to read and index your site. Search engines “see” your site as a text browser would, with little care of graphic and design elements. With this fact such ways of site design like flash navigation, images that hold your content, and other content elements being controlled by design elements are a way of the past, and can hinder your site search engine ranking.

Research and register a fitting domain name: Now this is a very important step for both search engines, and the end user. If you can’t say your domain name over the phone with little fuss, then the end user most likely will not understand the domain name and never visit the site. Also with the updating to search engine technology sites are now being penalized for certain actions, and a domain name that has nothing to do with the content of the site could be reason for penalties against your site in the search engine rankings.

Keyword placement: Placing keywords that are relevant to your site activities is important to allow the end user that is searching for your services to find you. Do not over do it, and place too many of the same keyword, or irrelevant keywords or search engines may penalize you for keyword spamming.

Search engine submission: Although the search engines will find you eventually, it can be a long time for them to know your site exists. Your web designer should be submitting your site for months after launch, or you can do it yourself by using Google, Yahoo, and the other search engine submission tools. Do not over submit your site and spam the search engine submission tools as that may get penalties placed against you by the search engines. A good rule of thumb is to submit your site after new articles or updates, or once every few months.

Links exchange: The development of a links exchange can allow you to exchange links with like sites, which drives traffic from one site to another. The other bonus of such systems is that search engines, primarily Google, look at one site linking to another as a vote for that site. This “voting” system brings up your site placement with the more links you get. Also bigger corporate sites, or sites with high ranking, that link to you acts as a major vote for your site.

Lots of articles with relevant content: Simply put, the more relevant content that you have on your site the better. What’s relevant content you ask; well that’s content that pertains to your site activities. The more content you have, the more large and robust your site is, the more it forces the search engines to index your site under more listings. Also for the end user they can read your articles and content, which keeps them coming back to your site, and promotes a longer visit. If you can, add some kind of content once a week, or at the very least a new article per month. If you don’t add new content to your site, you take the risk of the search engines dropping your site from the rankings all together.

Research the methods, and revamp: After all of your methods are in place, do your research, and fix any problems and tweak your keywords. Of course your web design or hosting company should be providing you with tools to view your site statistics to make this job easy. If your site statistics tell you that people are using a specific keyword, or sets of keywords, to find your site then find a way to include that keyword in your articles. If you notice that the search engines aren’t indexing your entire site, then you may need to fix the coding or replace your Flash navigation with plain text. Constantly research your site placing with the search engines, tweak and revamp your site, and hopefully you should be working towards the better and bringing up your site rank.

David Rutledge is the Owner / Manager of Dreamlab Digital Design Studio. Visit their website at http://www.dreamlabdigital.com  or call (250) 961 - 0932

Email | Print | Facebook | Twitter | Digg | Del.icio.us