Promote Your Website through Search Engines Part I

By Nowshade Kabir, Rusbiz.com


Promote your Web Store

After spending substantial time and efforts the big day came
when you finally published your website on the Internet. You are
now ready to show your website to the world. But, with over a
billion pages vying for traffic how do you make people visiting
your site?

Web promotion is an on going process. There are many methods of
promoting websites, but, the first and foremost step that you
have to take to generate traffic for your website is to submit
your site to major search engines and directories. For most of
the sites search engines are the primary source of first time
visitors.

How important are the search engines? Data show that more than
80% of Internet users find the sites they are looking for through
search engines. Over 57% of Internet users search the Internet
everyday. Up to 450 Million searches take place in a day and most
interestingly, 55% of all Internet purchases originate at a search
engine.

Before you start submitting your website to the search engines,
you have to understand that you want your prospective audience to
find you when they search for a site similar to you using specific
keywords. Now, you know that when a person runs a query on a search
engine for a website, usually he looks no further then first three
pages of relevant results. You have to figure out a way how to get
within those three pages. Better even if you can get yourself within
top ten search results. Considering that a query usually delivers
millions of pages — this is not an easy task!

As the search engines want to deliver most relevant pages at the
top, they use highly sophisticated and complex algorithms to rank
websites. But the main aspects, that they consider in order to
optimize your ranking position, are your targeted keywords,
relevancy of the site contents and value of the links that are
pointing to your site.

Keywords

Target the wrong keywords and either you do not get any visitor
or you get the visitors that you really do not need. How can you
figure out which are the right keywords for you?

If you are confused about the words that you should target to get
the best result, start your search from one of your successful
competitors' website. Check the source codes of the Index page
of the website. It should not be difficult for you to figure out
what are the keywords that they are targeting. Since a broad
keyword like computer, textile etc. generates millions of search
results, you have to try to find words as specific and as
segmented as possible.

For example: if you are a textile company that sells fabrics and
one of the best selling items of yours is jeans fabrics let us see
what should be your targeted keyword. A query on Google shows that
the word "fabric" brings 5,640,000 results. Way too much for you
to even try get at the top! The next search of "jeans fabric" gets
148,000 results. Still a lot! If stonewashed jeans fabric is one
of the items that you sell, let us see what we get from a query on
it. Just 602 results! Well, this is a number you can deal with!
Now if you use a few proper optimization mechanisms, chances are
there that in no times you may get yourself on the first ten of
this search result.

If you know the broad keywords that you should target but do not
have any idea how to make it more specific, use this little tool
from Overture to show you what queries people make relevant to
this keyword. Click here for the tool.

Place keywords in right locations

For search engines the page title is the most important part of
the page. Make sure that you use your targeted keyword over there.
For the previous example your title may look like: "Supplier of
Quality Stonewashed Jeans Fabric".

Use your keywords in different forms in Meta tags and Description.
Use singular and plural variations of the words. Since search
engines also look at the content of your page, try using keywords
in your headlines and do not forget to mention them in the first
paragraph of the page.

But do not over do it! If the search engines feel that you are
over using a word to lift your ranking, they may consider it as
spamming, and block your website from their listing.

Content is the king

According to research, the primary reason for people to be on
the Internet is information. People want information, quality
information, lots of it and in most of the cases for free! This
is the reason why the search engine spiders are created to look
for good, relevant textual contents. If you are looking for a
top position on a specific search, your website must have quality
relevant content.

If yours is a website that only sells product or services, you
may ask, how can you possibly have enough content? Apart from
detail description of the products or services that you provide,
you should also emphasize on the benefits of the products. If
you have related to your products articles, whitepapers etc.
You must post them on your site as well. It is important to post
quality information related to your products or services as this
also position your website as a knowledgeable leader in your
respective industry and create interest among your audience to
revisit the site.

Try renewing information on your site on a regular interval.
This, as well, will increase repeat visits from people and the
search engine spiders.

Submission to search engines

Once you are ready to submit your site to search engines, all
you have to do is to go to the relevant search engine site,
fill up the form there and submit. You can do it manually for
each search engine separately or you can use programs to do it
automatically. If you miss a search engine, you do not have to
worry about it much, as the search engine spiders or "Bots",
as they are also called, constantly look for new websites to
index. However, it is a good idea to submit to the major search
engines and directories regularly. You should also resubmit
your website to the search engines in order to expedite the
process of indexing after each significant change you made to
the site.

About the author

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO
of Rusbiz.com. He has Ph. D. degree in Information Technology.
Dr. Kabir has over 12 years of experience in International Trade
and has worked as an advisor to several government projects.
You can contact him at mailto:nowshade@rusbiz.com,
http://ezine.rusbiz.com/