I am not a SEO expert nor am I a professional internet marketer. I am the proprietor of a website and I have had much bad advice and made many wrong turns in the process of setting up and running my site. I am experienced in what does and does not work if you are on a tight budget and desperately trying to get your site listed and ranked.
The reason that I am writing this article is because so many people are being ripped off by so called "experts" who claim to get results within weeks. This is not the case and if you go to any real expert they will tell you so. I do not have all of the answers but what I am giving you is unbiased and based on my own experience (mostly bad!!).
Popular myths.
Are you fed up with false promises from people who say that they know what they are talking about when it comes to search engine optimisation? There are so many people claiming to be experts and almost always they tell that there is a secret to making your site search engine friendly.
What is this so called "secret"? In answer, there isn't one! They say this to get your attention and make you feel that this not something that you can do yourself. In reality you should be able to do most of it yourself, relying on web developers or marketers to sort out coding issues.
If all of these "experts" were to be believed you would part with a huge chunk of cash. What really are you paying for? The answer would be, not much!! It is true that coding issues really need to tackled by experts. It is not true that there is a secret to how to get a good page rank. It is also untrue that any professional can guarantee you top 10 listings or that they can do anything to improve your ranking overnight.
The Truth.
OK, what can you really expect from expert intervention. What you can expect is a long-term strategy for marketing and planning your site layout. Why do you need this? Because it is more important than anything else as you will need to take time to get your site listed well and ranked highly. It is impossible to get your site ranked within weeks and listed well. You will notice that I refer to these as two separate issues. This is because they are not entirely the same thing. Being well ranked does not necessarily mean that you will be highly listed, but it does help!
The Strategy.
The strategy used to help your site would follow (roughly) this pattern:
Meta tags are essential for search engine crawlers as they read this information and us it to determine the content of your site. Your meta tag should be consistent throughout in order for it to be thoroughly effective. You should not spam keywords by using them excessively and titles, headers and descriptions within the meta tag should be consistent with the content of your page. If you have keywords in your meta tag (which you should), you should make sure that it is included in the content of your page as this makes it relevant to the crawler and will help your site page ranking.
In order to get your page rank up and get your site listed well, you will need to make sure that your site has plenty of good and informative content that is original. You will also need to update, add to and alter the information on a regular basis. This makes your site more attractive to the search engine crawlers and has the effect of boosting your ratings with these programmes.
When you have done all of this, you will need to list your site with as many directory sites as you can. It is always best to list your site with directories that ask you to place your listing in a specific category as this gives additional importance to the information that you have submitted. It is not necessary to list with sites that you would need to pay for any submission. Stick with free advertisements first as this makes your efforts cost effective. If this does not give you the results that you are looking for you can always look at paying for your inbound links at a later date.
Place all submissions carefully as you can damage your page rank if you list your site in non-related directories or categories. Be very wary about reciprocal linking. Most will do nothing for your page rank, in fact they can quite often damage it. It is always better to approach companies that are similar to yours in order to link to them. This is because your site will have something in common with the site that you have linked to and so it increases the relevance of your submission with any crawlers that trawl the site. Always get expert advice on this issue if you are not sure.
Be very careful about listing your site with the "add your site to 15,000 search engines" companies. They can do more damage than good. Constantly listing with Google or Yahoo can cause them to take your site out of their directories so caution is needed. It is better to use just one or two of these types of site, then check after about three months that you are listed on Google and Yahoo. This gives them time to include your site. It would be better to list your site yourself than to leave it to other people (or programmes) to do it for you.
Always try to list on well ranked directories first as they will help your page rank further. This is because for each site that you list on, you take a small percentage of their page rank and assign it to your own page that you have linked to. It is vital no to use auto submitting programmes that list your site on hundreds of site in one hit until you have already established yourself over a few months. This is because your site may be "sand boxed" by the search engines. They do this in order to stop spam sites setting up and then disappearing when they have spammed everyone. A lot of directories will not accept submissions made by the auto submission programmes.
There is a lot more that can be said about search engine optimisation, but suffice to say there is no real secret. The only thing that really needs expert help is coding and possibly meta tags as these need to be consistent. You should only do these things yourself if you know what you are doing as you can do more damage than good to your site. We hope that this article helps you avoid the pitfalls that we have found in the process of starting this business. Good luck.
Author: Steve Collins
Date Written: 03-05-06
http://www.regencyexpress.co.uk
RSS Feed (xml)
No comments:
Post a Comment