Search Engine Optimisation Tips

Search Engine Optimisation Tips

There is a big difference to submitting a normal website to search engines compared to CMS sites or even ecommerce websites. Different rules apply, and don’t let anyone tell you that submitting to 3,000 search engines for a one of payment will do the trick ……. it hasn’t in the past and never will.

1. Listing with the top search engines and indexes.

There are thousands of search engines, portals and directories on the internet today. Many search engine companies will promise to list you will 13,956 search engines and re submit you every hour for 10 weeks for $40. It’s rubbish…… it was always rubbish. The internet doesn’t work like that.

Try this – concentrate on 3 search engines this week and commit to submitting your web address. Then next week pick out another 3, and so on. So today, start with Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

To be honest – these search engines have such good crawling software that as long as you ahve a link coming from somewhere – they should be able to find and list you.

What you will find over time is that this gradual submission strategy will be rewarded. We’re touching on sandboxing here and a few other rouge theories, however with 8 years in the search engine optimisation business, we can say that there is a fair amount of truth behind these. (More on sandboxing and search engine submission conspiracy theories later).

2. Are meta tags useful?

We need to talk about this. There is much talk out there in forums by “search engine experts”, claiming that meta tags are a strategy of the past.

12 months ago, Google was able to obtain its description of your site from the content on your page, so therefore, optimisation specialists deemed meta tags useless. Despite the fact that so many other major search engines NEED these tags.

Not only this, but Google realised that the meta tag was actually a useful piece of information and decided to start including it. So for any sites that has the right meta tag information , Google will display this as the sites description in their index. If a site does not have this meta data – Google will use site content or infornation from Dmoz to determine the best keyword set to match with the indexing process.

Our thought here is simple…… stay in control of your own site and use Meta tags. Decide what description you want to display under your title tag.

3. Best way to get your site listed.

Everyone has their own theory and methods. After all, the search engines keep the exact algorithms closely guarded. As a result of this – we are left to some degree to our own devices or look to search engine specialists using magic formulas. The truth be told, the search engines give us more than enough information about what to do and what NOT to do.

Problem is ….. it’s usually difficult to find, or long winded or doesn’t provide the one definitive answer (and can be incredibly boring). Not to mention, we as busy business people, don’t have time to be analysing every search engine and each requirement.

For example; MSN give this wonderfully simplistic explanation on how to do well.

“MSNBot is the MSN Search Web crawler that automatically crawls the Web to add information to our search index. MSNBot crawls the Web by looking for links within websites. So one of the best ways to ensure that MSNBot can find your website is to include valuable content that other sites will want to link to. ”

“Right” you say …… “I thought I was already doing that!”

Well then, what about this from Google.

“Google is a fully automated search engine that employs robots known as “spiders” to crawl the web and find sites for inclusion in the Google index. Since this process doesn’t involve human editors, it’s NOT necessary to submit your site to Google in order to be included in our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed aren’t manually submitted for inclusion. ”

“OK … so do I or don’t I submit my site?”

At the end of the day – there is no quick fix. If you want to succeed and compete, you need to spend the time to read, analyse, put it into practice, then analyse again. Lucky you have all that time on your hands. (For those that don’t, and want to succeed,