It has been said that the search engines can either make or break your Internet business. This is more or less a true fact, so you want to do as much as you can to optimize your website and advertising to reap the benefits that the search engines can provide. You also want to take care not to do anything to get on their bad side.
To search engines, ‘content is king’. That means that it is not some technical mumbo-jumbo that you need to learn to appease them, it is just that you need to have good, original content. If they are going to send their customers to your site, they want to be sure that your site has ‘value’.
Maybe the saying should more accurately say ‘fresh content is king’ because when the search engine robots ‘crawl’ your site they are looking for new information. Initially when your site was built it was indexed according to the content, keywords, etc. Then they will check back every 30 days or so.
If the robots do not detect anything new, they will just exit, leaving you at the same place in the index as you were originally. The problem with this, is more than likely since that time, millions of new sites have been added to their index and your site is at the bottom of the index. (visualize a pile of paper with each new entry being added to the top).
You want your link to be on the first few pages of their search results, so that when people go to a search engine and search for your keywords they will see your link, click it and visit your site. (this is what is referred to as ‘free, organic traffic’). The best way to make sure your site has fresh content, is to either build the site on a blog platform or add a blog to the site – Much more simple to add a blog post (article) or page, than to try to change the site code, etc to make changes each month to create ‘fresh’ content.
Whenever you are at a social network, business forum or article marketing site, use your domain name in your signature to create a back-link from wherever you are, back to your site. Over time you should build hundreds of back-links to get the most ‘juice’ from the search engines; this is seen as indicative that you are active and engaged in your business, rather than just some site that sits on the Internet collecting dust.
One thing that will help you (and may be critical) is to have your site verified and submit a sitemap. This will ensure that the search engines can find you and easily access your site. You would do this by getting a free Webmaster account from Google.com. This used to be more or less optional but recently more importance has been attached to this function.
Now on the ‘what not to do’ list, you want to be sure that you do not spam your keywords – that is make it seem unnatural or clumsy to read (aka ‘keyword stuffing’). Just 1-3 times maximum, in a one page article (about 400 words) is enough, but not too much. Be sure to add the keyword in the title of the article or post.
You also want to be sure you do not spam your link by submitting it more than one time per month. If you are writing articles (posting) as described above, then you can submit the specific link to that article in addition to your regular site link – but again don’t do it more than once. Use those ‘Submit your link’ type gimmicks very sparingly if at all. You can be seriously penalized if anything unnatural like a sudden 200 links for your site starts appearing. The idea is quality not quantity.
