FREE!
FREE!
FREE!
FREE!
FREE!
FREE!
FREE!
FREE!
FREE!
Okay, so you’ve done all the work. It’s taken you a while but your shiny new website is finally online. You’ve put the finishing touches on it and are ready for some visitors. A day goes by and your analytics software shows nothing. That’s okay, just check where you’re at in Google. You’re not on the first page for your topic. No problem, second page is still good. Not there either? Third page. No. Fourth? Okay, type in the URL in Google. Not there? Surely you should show up for that.
You’ve now determined that Google isn’t finding your website. Easy, you have two choices. You can either submit your website URL to be indexed and after 6 or so months and you’ll show up… or you can find a site that is already indexed, get your link on it and when the search engine spider crawls that page it will follow the link to your site. You start emailing webmasters. You search “links page” in Google, look up the email address of the owner and compliment them and request a link exchange. After about 30 or 40 you get a reply. Great! The site has a Google Page Rank of 3. It’ll be indexed in the next week or so and Google will see your site.
Uh oh, what will Google see? You never realized that Google needs to be told what your website is about. But how do you do it? You need to focus on four main things. The Title Tag, the Description Tag, the Image Alt Tags, and finally the Body Content of your page.
- Title Tag – This is the tag in your html that looks like this… <title>This is where your title goes</title>. It tells search engines what your page is about and is what is going to be displayed on the search engines results page with a link to your site. It is important to include keywords about what the page is about. It should be 7-10 words.
- Description Tag – This is the tag in your html inside of your <head> and </head> tags which looks like this…. <META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”this is where your description goes”>. It is displayed under the title on the search engines results page and should hold important keywords about the page’s content.
- Image Alt Tags – These are html tags that should be added to every image on your website. They should describe what the image is to the search engines and should include important keywords.
- Body Content – Search engines love content and rank pages accordingly. If you build a website with fresh content that is updated continuously and includes many keywords related to what people will be searching for your site, you’ll do well.
Now you’ve optimized your Title, Description, and Image Alt tags and have written all about your products and/or services. You’ve included your keywords occasionally throughout the text and are ready for Google to see your pages. A week goes by and you do a search on your URL. You’re there! Now that you’ve done everything right you search one of your medium important keywords… and your #9. Well at least your on the first page, but how do you rank up?
To boost your website you need to become popular on the web. Every link pointing to your site counts as a vote and you need more votes that your competition. You search for more links pages, you search for related pages, you search through more links on those links pages. Next, you go to http://Del.icio.us, signup, and bookmark your site. You start creating content using blog services and http://Technorati.com it. You create and RSS feed for it. You http://Digg.com your story and try and get the word out. You email all your friends to go. Months go by and you’re constantly adding your website URL to everything online. You start writing press releases and distributing them for free on the internet with your URL tracing back to your website. You request links from everybody and build and build…
It’s been 6 months and you look at your analytics software. You’ve got a steady stream of visitors.
You keep your content fresh, don’t stop your link building campaign, make online partners… and it really starts to grow.