I hope to be able to have time to ellaborate on this topic in the near future, but for now I have composed a few bulleted points to keep in mind when trying to get natural search engine listings. Afterall, this is the best kind of advertising for your business- FREE. They are in no particular order and all equally important.
- Have about 300 on-screen words on your website’s main page (index page). Images and Flash cannot be read by the search engines- for the most part. We have noticed that some Flash is starting to get indexed when it contains text and embedded correctly. The text should contain your top 7-10 keywords.
- When selecting keywords do some research as if you were one of your own customers looking for your product. Don’t try to target keywords that are too broad, nor so specific that they have no traffic.
- Don’t try to conquer the world before your own neighboorhood. Work your way out. Start local, then regionally, then nationallyand finally internationally. You will be surprised just how well you will do locally.
- Make sure your website includes an HTML “sitemap” and that there is a link to it on your index page.
- Make sure you have a Google formatted (XML) site map and make sure that you have registered your site with them using their webmaster tools.
- Make sure your website code has all of the proper HTML elements. e.g. META tags and properly formated.
- Bury javascript inside Javascript (.JS) pages. Search engines read ALL of the text on your website. Having unneeded words (even in the code) will convolute the importance of your primary keywords.
- Don’t waste time with tricks. Just write complelling interesting content forcused on “here’s how” not “buy now”. If people like what you have to say, they will linnk to your website or quote you.
- Stay active on the internet and participate in industry discussion forums, community portals and other sites where you can obtain a link pointing back to your website.
- Start your own blog and or forum like this one. Hopefully, someone will begin to link to your own content. Ideally, so will search engines.
By following this basic advice you will see an in crease in traffic to your website and increased visibility in the search engines.
