Get Your Website Found
There are many strategies to raise your search engine ranking. You can use ad campaigns, affiliate programs and more. There are vendors out there who offer to manage this for you. But before taking that leap, be sure you take advantage of the many no- or low-cost "organic" methods to increase your ranking first. Work with a website designer like UmeWorks who keeps these in mind while building your website. Here are some tips to raise your website's search engine ranking:
SELECT YOUR DOMAIN NAME CAREFULLY
Choose a domain name that has your keywords in it. In the traffic school business? How about trafficschool.com.
".com" not available? Try .biz or .us. Careful: .org's are for non-profit organizations.
Made a mistake? You can register additional domain names and point them to your site.
You've heard of location, location, location for real estate. Links are king in organic search engine optimization. The more relevant incoming links you have, the better.
How do you get links?
- BUSINESS DIRECTORIES: Get yourself listed in many of the free or low-cost business directories, such as Merchant Circle, Xing, and Yelp.
Words of caution: Many of these sites allow customers to rate the vendor. If you use this method, you will need to monitor and manage your listing to address any negative feedback your business receives. - ONLINE INDUSTRY DIRECTORIES: Search for your industry's online directories and add yourself to those. For instance, UmeWorks is listed with online website designer directories.
- DMOZ Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. Inclusion is not guaranteed and it takes a while to get listed, but Dmoz listings are provided to AOL, Google, and other websites directories and portals.
- MAP/ LOCAL ONLINE DIRECTORIES: Is your business heavily reliant on local geographic customers? Be sure to use location directories like CitySearch.com, Yahoo Local Business, YellowPages.com, SuperPages.com, Anywho.com, etc.
- BUSINESS AND SOCIAL NETWORKING: Take advantage of business and social network sites. Sign up and create a profile for yourself, and include the name of your business and a link to your website in LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Plaxo, etc.
- YOUTUBE: Add a call-to-action video at high traffic site YouTube. Get folks interested and send them to your site to learn more. Better yet: syndicate your video for many high-valued links to your site - because video links are given higher priority by search engines. Contact UmeWorks now to add a video commercial to your site now for only $799. And we can syndicate it for you too for more high-valued incoming links to your site.
- CHAMBER OF COMMERCE: Join a local chamber of commerce that has a member directory that you can include a link to your website. Also upgrade your listing in ChamberBusinessSearch.com.
- BUSINESS NETWORKING GROUP: Join a business networking groups that has a website that lists their members and can link to your webiste. You will also benefit by extending your marketing reach through your peer member referrals. If you are in the Los Angeles South Bay, check out South Bay Network Group.
- REQUEST LINKS to your site from related businesses, organizations, and friends.
OK, IT'S NOT JUST LINKS - TRAFFIC COP WANTED
Why do you want incoming links? Because you want traffic. Highly visited sites, get higher ranking.
STRATEGICALLY PLACE KEYWORDS IN YOUR WEB PAGE
- Check your copy - Have your website design and/or copywriter be sure to include your keywords in the headers of your content. (Get Your Website Found" is in header tag on this page.)
- 1st 25 words - Be sure your keywords are there!
- Page titles - See those words on the tab when you're browsing the web? Be sure each page has a title that is relevant to the content and contains your keywords.Limit your page title to 64 characters and put your keywords at the start of your title.
- Meta description - Have your web designer add a strong description with your keywords at the start of your meta description. Limit your meta description to 200 characters. This is what viewers see, for instance in Google and Bing, describing your site. So make it enticing to compel the viewer to click your listing in the search engine results.
- Web page file names
- Image file names - careful needs to be relevant to your content too!
- "Alt" tags are descriptions of your images for the sight impaired. Describe the image accurately, but use keywords wherever you can.
- Link tags
- Proximity - If you are relying on a combination of keywords (Long Beach), then the site that has the two words close to each other (Long Beach is a beautiful city.) would receive a higher ranking than when they are far apart (I long to go swim at a South American beach.)
E-COMMERCE STORE OWNERS
- List select products on eBay and let folks know you have more similar items at your website.
- Add your items to Google Product Search.
FRESHNESS COUNTS
While established websites rate higher, search engines also like content that is kept up-to-date and current. Old and stale = BAD. Brand new = BAD. Established and updated frequently = GOOD. That is why Blogs are all the rage right now. Why? Content is updated often; perhaps daily.
Need help with your paid ad campaigns and advanced inorganic SEO? Contact UmeWorks for our SEO partner referral.
UmeWorks will be adding more tips soon to help you GET YOUR WEBSITE FOUND!