| Easy SEO 2/2 |
 Then find industry hubs for your niches. Search for "cooking articles" or cooking directories and some of the results will be directories that exist to help people find cooking related articles. Also try using words like "organization" or "non-profit" with your keywords when you search. In some cases you may have to pay a small fee for an inbound link, but if the site in question is a relevant and trusted source, the cost of that link could make sense. You can also find bloggers related to your niches; send them a great article or resource and they may create a new post and link back to you. Here's a simple approach: Go to Technorati, type in a keyword, find blogs related to your keywords, send them an article, and see if you can get a link back to your page. Some visitors will find you simply by clicking on that link, and at the same time Google will rank your page higher. Note: Some services automate the process of link exchanges. Exchanging links with non-relevant sites may provide a short-term boost but will catch up to you in the long run, and Google can eventually penalize you because almost all of your inbound links are irrelevant. For example, pet-related sites shouldn't link to cooking-related sites, plus you won't get many visitors from those irrelevant sites. Pay particular attention to getting links from directories. Trusted directories include sites like Yahoo Directory, botw.org and Business.com. If you have quality content you can often collect links from major directories. Check Out Your Competitors Search for your keywords and check out the pages that rank highly. How many times is the keyword used in the text? How is the title tag written? Which keywords are in the URL? You can also see how many inbound links your competitors have. On Yahoo, enter the text "link:www.(nameofsite).com" and you'll see all inbound links to that page. Those same sites may also be willing to link to you. If multiple pages ranked in the top 10 have links from similar sites, go after getting those links first ? those sites are probably trusted sources. Google will eventually find your new website, but you can speed up the process. The best way is to get inbound links from trusted sites; when Google crawls those sites it will follow that link to your site ? and you'll get noticed. You can also submit your site directly to Google for crawling. Using the basic Site Submit can take months; a better approach is to submit your site at Google's Webmaster Central. You'll have to add a small piece of code to your site's HTML code so Google can verify you are the owner of your site, so your programmer may need to help you. (The process only takes a few minutes, though.) Your pages will then be crawled and hopefully indexed in days instead of weeks or months. Yahoo also has a site submit process. Search "submit site" on Yahoo and you can get details on free site submissions as well as paid submissions and submissions to the Yahoo Directory. Google looks at a variety of factors for ranking your pages. Content is important, but don't add new content just to get Google to visit. Why? Your site needs to provide good resources for your visitors. Build your site for your audience and you'll naturally do the things search engines want and you'll rank better. For example, many of the hugely popular blog sites don't focus on SEO; they concentrate on their audience and on getting exposure. As a result, they have a lot of links and the search engines rank them highly. Search engines want people to find what they are looking for; build your site with your audience in mind and over time the search engines will reward your efforts. To find out how often your site is crawled, enter "site:www.(nameofyoursite.com)" on Google and you'll see all your pages Google has indexed. The "cached" link next to each pages indicates the last time that page was cached. (On average it takes about two weeks for Google to check out non-dormant sites and re-rank pages. Some sites are indexed every few days; some major sites get updated multiple times per day.) Check this every day and you'll quickly determine how frequently your site is crawled. At the same time you'll get a sense of how well your entire site is performing. If you have 400 pages and only five are indexed, you likely need more inbound links and optimization on the non-indexed pages. Then make intelligent changes to improve your page rankings. Change your title tags. Change the content so your keywords are featured. Add internal links where appropriate. Get more ? always get more ? relevant inbound links. Rinse and Repeat Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. To drive traffic to your pages, make improving your site an important part of your weekly routine. Get your basic site structure right, keep collecting relevant inbound links, and provide good resources for your users... and the search engines will love you.
|
