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 3184 S. Chestatee Street, Dahlonega, GA 30533 • 706.482.0078 |
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Search Engine Optimization and Website Promotion
META TAGSMeta Tags used to be the "thing" for getting search engines to categorize your site during their travels through your site. Now only one major search engine (Inktomi) uses the meta tag information. Keywords in the text of your pages and anchor text (the text associated with links) are what most engines are considering important. We've stopped worrying about the meta tags (though we still use the description meta tag) and pay more attention to content and links.
KEYWORDSKeywords - the words that users use to find your site when using a search engine - are a commodity in today's Internet market. You need to be smart in your usage of keywords (especially if you are paying for ads and "clicks" - hits on your site). For instance, instead of just "guitar", you may want to use "Fender guitar" as a keyword in the text of your site - the second instance is more specific.Keyword density is another issue - if you don't have enough content and the right density of keywords related to your site, you won't be found. Have too many keywords without enough other content and the search engines will avoid you like the plague. NOTE: A couple of free keyword and SEO tools: Good Keywords and WebCEO. NOTE: If you have a large site, a sitemap helps search engines (and users) find more of the information within your site.
SITE SUBMISSIONTwo options - free or paid submission. Paid services offer to increase your rankings in the search engines. This is expensive for the small business owner and other methods work as well or better. Besides, how can they guarantee that your site will be in the top rankings? Drawback to both methods is the flood of e-mail that seems to follow along with using either free or paid submission.Site submission is not a one time deal - search engines "spider" their way through sites every so often but submitting the links again helps insure that your site gets "refreshed" in their databases. Submitting too often WILL get you banned from most directories though. Also consider that there are really only a handful of "major" search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) that will really drive traffic to your site. Past that the others are not really of much benefit.
LINKS TO YOUR SITEBesides search engines, we like to find other places that take link submissions that RELATE to the site - professional organizations, community sites, networking sites, etc. Networking works and the Internet is no different - the more contacts (links) that relate to your business, the more likely people will see your site and this leads to more business.Some other sources:
CONTENTThe site has to have some content! Search engines go through and look for WORDS! People need SOMETHING to come to your site for. "Stickiness" is the key. Blogs are proving useful for many websites to accomplish this and to provide fresh content.
POPULARITYThis is the hard one - how do you make visitors come to your site? Content is part of it but they need to know it exists - good ol' advertising in all of its forms (radio, newspaper, word-of-mouth, etc) MUST be used to get people to the site.All of these factors come into play in make a site work for your business. Also note that the "rules" are constantly changing - Google and Yahoo have both recently made changes to their algorithms and everything’s up in the air again - what works today may not work as well tomorrow. NOTE: This article didn't cover the Website design factors that come into play - Flash, frames and some scripting make it hard (if not impossible) on search engines; depending heavily on graphics with little text give search engines little to go through. Also note that SEO is an ever changing bit of "magic" - the constant changes at Google and Yahoo push that point home. We'll update our notes here from time to time.
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