There are a lot of rumors that go around the net that all you need to do is submit your website to thousands of search engines and traffic will immediately start avalanching to your website like never before. The problem with those rumors is that they simply are not true.
Ranking high in the search engines and collecting traffic as a result is a fairly complicated and time consuming process. It will take some work and dedication, but the end result can be rewarding. I will attempt to summarize the concepts of search engine marketing and help you get your start today.
I think it is safe to say we all know what search engines are. Just go to Google.com for an example. You type words, it finds related web sites.
As an advertiser, you should instantly see the potential in using search engines as a tool to get traffic to your own site. And in fact search engines are a very powerful marketing tool that can prove very helpful if properly utilized.
The first mistake most newbie marketers make is to submit their site to search engines without ever optimizing their web page. Now in order to be able to optimize your web page, you must first own the web page.
Search engine optimization is a detailed, lengthy process that would be to difficult for me to get into complete detail here, so I’ll leave it up to you to do a little research of your own to learn how.
I will still leave you with the most crucial tips to get you on your way and to keep you from making fatal mistakes.
What is more important to optimize?
a) Meta tags
b) content
c) both are important
In my opinion, both are important to attend to, but even more important than optimizing your meta tags is optimizing your content. Most of today’s search engines (especially the largest -- Google), focus more on your content as a guide to relevancy than your meta tags. It is not bad to optimize your Meta tags with a good description and keywords, but just remember that even more important is your content optimization.
Review your web site content and look for creative ways to strategically add into your content the keywords which you are focusing on reaching. For example, if you are targeting the keyword “Internet marketing,” you will want to ensure that the phrase “Internet marketing” appears frequently within your sites ad copy. The more it appears, the greater your chances of being listed high are. Yet be sure to do this within reason. Your website is made primarily to read by humans, not search engines.
Of course, as I said meta tags are still an important issue to attend to as well. While Google may not use meta tags much at all as a guide to relevancy, some other popular search engines still do.
Meta tags are the html tags in between the tags of your html, found at the top html of your web page.
For example…
[meta content="" name="description"]
[meta content="Your Keywords go here" name="keywords"]
[meta content="" name="author"]
Note: The [] tags are used instead of the <> tags.
In the above example the [title] tag is a description of your site that will appear on the browser taskbar at the top of browser. This description should accurately explain your site, but it should also be rich with your most important keywords.
In the [meta name=”description”] tag, you will want to include a short description of your web site. This is what appears as your description when you appear in the search results on some search engines. While this description should be rich in your targeted keywords, it should more importantly accurately describe your site. If you write a description optimized with keywords, but that doesn’t make sense to humans, no one will click through to your site.
The [meta name="keywords"] tag is where you will type your targeted keywords, separated by a comma.
In the [meta name="author"] tag, you will want to include a short description about yourself, the author. Make it accurately describe you, but also don’t be afraid go ahead and puff yourself up a little bit.
Let me guess what you’re thinking now?
You’re wondering what keywords you should use and how you should choose them.
Well, the best advice is to keep your keywords targeted and narrow, rather than broad.
For example, rather than using the broad search term, “network marketing,” try using a less searched, more targeted keyword like “network marketing training.” Even while narrow, targeted keywords get searched less, you will be competing with less people for the top spots and will end up with a higher position under that keyword and ultimately more traffic in the end.
Go to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ for a cool tool to help you choose your keywords. You type in a broad search term, and it suggests narrow search terms.
The other optimization tip to keep in mind is link popularity. Again, this is especially a factor with Google, but since Google is by far the most used and accounts for about 70% of all Internet searches, it is wise to focus on being optimized for Google most of all.
Link popularity has to do with how many other pages there are on the Internet with links to your pages. The more pages linking to you and the greater the link popularity of the pages linking to you, the greater your link popularity will become.
Many people believe they can solve this problem by simply submitting to thousands of Free For All (FFA) link sites and instantly have thousands of sites linking to them. But the unfortunate truth is that Google and most other search engines can recognize and ignore the links to your site which reside on FFA sites. So the point here is, don’t bother wasting your time submitting to thousands of FFA sites because it doesn’t help you.
What does help your link popularity is taking the time to submit your site to all the major web directories (such as www.dmoz.org).
These sites are credible and have a high link popularity rating, which will only help your link popularity rating in the end. A good site to go to for a listing of all the biggest and best directories to submit to for traffic and increased link popularity
Developing key partnerships with other web sites is the other way to increase link popularity. You can find other web pages that you would like to be linked to and swap links. You create a page on your site with links to only a select few web sites and they do the same There are many other optimization tricks and the more tricks you use the better your chances of ranking higher will be, but just remind yourself not to get to obsessed with search engine ranking and remind yourself that there are other advertising methods to attend to.
Get your site basically optimized and submitted to start off, then come back and tweak it over time. After you have finished your optimization, you are now ready to submit to the search engines.
Although you may be dazzled by the chance to submit your site to 400,000+ search engines (or other such offers) with one click, please remember one thing… That although there are thousands of search engines out there, only a handful really matter.
The truth is that a handful of the major search engines account for about 96% of all search engine traffic. So it is quite obviously more beneficial to focus on getting submitted to the major players, rather than all the thousands of little ones. With that said, let me suggest that you throw automated search engine submission tools out the window right now and submit manually.
After all, only a handful of the top engines even matter and you will almost always see better results with your rankings when submitting manually. In addition, when you submit manually, you know it’s really getting done. So what are the top search engines that power thousands of other search engines and account for about 96% of all search engine traffic?
1) Google (http://www.google.com/addurl.html)
2) FAST (http://searchservices.lycos.com/...)
3) Inktomi (http://searchservices.lycos.com/...)
4) Teoma (http://ask.ineedhits.com)
5) AltaVista (http://av.ineedhits.com/)
While Google may be free to submit to, others like Inktomi, FAST, Teoma and AltaVista cost money to submit to. My advice would be that unless you have spent some time on optimization and know that your site is going to do well on the search engines; don’t spend the money on paid submission engines.
The only advantage to the paid submission engines is that there is usually not as much competition on them because they aren’t free. However, you can use a little known trick to get on the paid submission engines free. What you do is find someone else with a website already listed on these engines and get them to list a link to your site on their site. Then, when the Inktomi, FAST, Teoma and AltaVista spiders come to crawl their sites, it will find your link, go to your site, and add your site to their index.
