SEO 1 : First Steps to Search Engine Listing

So how do you achieve tangible results from Search Engine Marketing? Begin with good design and simple search engine optimization. Go through your content page by page and scrutinize every word. You need to prepare your content in order for it to be effective. Here are a few pointers:

  • Select five or six top keywords or phrases to emphasize.
  • Be specific: try to imagine what words your "buying" customer will type in the search box.
  • Check through each of your pages and ensure that these terms appear in:
    • The title
    • The meta description
    • The meta keywords
    • The content (Most important!)
    • Make sure you make good use of header tags as these will be regarded by some engines as a good indication of content and thus more relevant.
    • Include text links if you are using graphics for navigation.

Where should you submit your site ?

After you have your web site content and programming optimized, it is time to start your submissions to the search engines. We have gathered relevant information and a few tips to help you with your search engine marketing campaign.

As of this writing, the following are the most relevant places to submit your website:

  • Google
    This is the most important search engine for most sites. Many of the larger search engines and most of the smaller ones use the results of Google for their listings. - http://www.google.com
  • DMOZ
    Little known but worth its weight in gold, DMOZ is the 'open source' human-edited directory that literally powers thousands of sites all over the world. Just find the right category and submit your site. It takes a little while to get listed, but pays its way a thousand times over. - http://dmoz.org/
  • All The Web -
    This search engine site and the FAST technology weredeveloped at the Norwegian Institute of Technology. One product, FAST Mobile Search, is the world's largest, most comprehensive index of the wireless Internet, with more than 10 million pages. - http://www.alltheweb.com
  • AltaVista -
    AltaVista is consistently one of the largest search engines on the web, in terms of pages indexed. Its comprehensive coverage and wide range of power searching commands makes it a particular favorite among researchers. In addition to crawler-based web page matches, it also offers news search, shopping search, multimedia search and human-powered directory results from LookSmart. - http://www.altavista.com
  • AOL Search -
    AOL Search allows its members to search across the web and AOL's own content from one place. The main listings for categories and websites come from the Open Directory. Inktomi also provides crawler-based results, as backup to the directory information. - http://search.aol.com
  • Ask Jeeves -
    Ask Jeeves is a human-powered search service that aims to direct you to the exact page that answers your question - http://www.askjeeves.com
  • HotBot -
    HotBot is a favorite among researchers due to its many power searching features. In most cases, HotBot's first page of results comes from the Direct Hit service, and then secondary results come from the Inktomi search engine, which is also used by other services. It gets its directory information from the Open Directory project. - http://hotbot.lycos.com
  • Inktomi
    The Inktomi engine powers msn, …do you need more convincing? And now it is part of Yahoo as well. It's just $40 to list, and worth it if your site doesn't sell something too general. - http://inktomi.com/
  • LookSmart -
    LookSmart is a human-compiled directory of web sites. In addition to being a stand-alone service, LookSmart provides directory results to MSN Search, Excite and many other partners. Inktomi provides LookSmart with search results when a search fails to find a match from among LookSmart's reviews. - http://www.looksmart.com
  • Mamma -
    Mamma is a leading name in Web searches that providing end-users with a powerful and user-friendly Meta-Search Engine. - http://www.mamma.com
  • MSN Search -
    Microsoft's MSN Search service is a LookSmart-powered directory of web sites, with secondary results that come from Inktomi. RealNames and Direct Hit data is also made available. - http://search.msn.com
  • Netscape Search -
    Netscape Search's results come primarily from the Open Directory and Netscape's own "Smart Browsing" database, which does an excellent job of listing "official" web sites. Secondary results come from Google. At the Netscape Netcenter portal site, other search engines are also featured. - http://search.netscape.com
  • Yahoo!
    Listing a business website with Yahoo! costs $300 annually, and they don't even guarantee you'll be listed! It is important that your website have no errors or broken links and that the submission be done correctly....no refunds are given if your site is rejected! Most businesses listed with Yahoo, however, continue to list with Yahoo! because their increased traffic is worth it. http://yahoo.com/

 

And now for Step Two...

Return to Search Engine Marketing

 

 

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