How to Put Your Small Business Website on The Search Engines
by Mario Sanchez
One of the most frequent questions small business owners ask me
is: I've designed my website, now, how do I get it on the search
engines?
Actually, having your site indexed by a search engine is not
that difficult. However, making it rank high and appear in the
first results page is. Let's start with a brief explanation of
how a search engine works:
Search engines store billions of pages in an archive called
index. When a search engine conducts a search, it doesn't really
search the web: it searches the index. Search engines add web
pages to their index through the work of a "search bot", a
powerful software program that "crawls" the web regularly,
following links and adding to the index all the pages it finds.
So, step number one is to make the search bots find your page.
You can do this:
a) by directly submitting your page's URL to the search engine,
or b) by placing a link to your page on another page that is
already in the index.
There is strong evidence that method (b) is the most effective.
Now, lets suppose that your page is already in the search engine
index. How do you make it rank high? The different attempts to
answer that question have given birth to a whole new discipline
called Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization
(SEO) involves following a series of techniques to increase the
relevance of your page for certain search terms or keywords.
You must decide in advance what are the keywords you believe a
user will type in the search engine window to find your page.
This is probably the most important step in search engine
optimization: if you pick keywords that nobody uses, or, to the
contrary, keywords that are too common (too competitive), your
page will never be found.
The keywords you chose must be used often in different parts of
your page, like the title, headings, sub-headings, and your page
copy. The more your keywords appear on your page (without
"over-stuffing" your page copy with them), the more relevant
search engines will consider your page to be for your selected
keywords.
Now, you may be thinking that this SEO thing is too easy: you
could just manipulate a few page elements and you would be all
set. The search engines, however, are smarter than that. To
avoid this kind of potential abuse, search engines rely heavily
on links from other pages. In a nutshell, the more links to your
page from quality pages with content related to your site you
can get, the higher your page will rank. In other words, you can
have a great page, but if nobody is linking to it, you will not
achieve high search engine rankings.
That's it.
In summary: chose the right keywords, utilize them often on your
page, and get as many links as you can from quality pages
related to your site's content, and you will be on your way to
high search engine rankings. The rest is just time and patience.
While the goal of this article is just to give you a quick
overview of what Search Engine Optimization is, you can further
explore this topic by reading this Do-It-Yourself Search Engine
Optimization Tutorial. If you found this article useful, you may
also want to expand your Search Engine Optimization knowledge by
reading Aaron Wall's SEOBook
(http://www.accordmarketing.com/seobook/ ).
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You can freely reprint this article provided that you include
the following resource box:
Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who focuses on
Internet marketing and web design topics. He publishes The
Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing
collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips
and resources. You can freely reprint his articles on your
website, ezine, or ebook.
About the author:
Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who focuses on
Internet marketing and web design topics. He publishes The
Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing
collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips
and resources. You can freely reprint his articles on your
website, ezine, or ebook.
