PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

Jeffrey Dorrian has some great tips to getting your new website noticed. I concur with all that he says, especially the observations about using link submission services.

It should be noted that his article only covers the tip of the SEO iceberg. There are many more aspects that need to be considerd, including keyword phrases, meta data, how the body copy of your site is written etc.

You have decided to take the plunge and put you business on the Internet. You have a limited marketing budget and want to promote your new site to attract new clients.

First, you are informed you will have to register your site with all of the search engines, which is a time consuming, tedious task. Some promotional sites claim to submit your site to thousands of search engines for a nominal fee. This seems like a bargain to you and you take advantage of this service. After waiting a few weeks you find this brings no additional traffic to your new web site and you can’t find your site on any of the major search engines.

Some accomplished SEO experts have a different approach. They will tell the novice web site builder that you never have to register your website with the search engines in order to indexed. How can this be? If you are developing web content for your site on an ongoing basis and getting links from other sites that themselves are being spidered daily, these spiders have to follow the links to your site. This is how the SEO experts get their sites ranked and spidered so quickly. One of the best ways is to join a well trafficked forum. These forums that have been around a while are constantly spidered by the major search engines. Once you have joined, post your knowledge or lack of knowledge regularly. Also, post links back to your site with keywords about your site in the anchor text. Find a forum that allows you to post links.

Alternate your anchor text. Link deep into your site changing the link target page regularly. Every time the spider follows the link it will pick-up one or more of your pages in its index. Sometimes this whole procedure can be accomplished in a few hours.

Another benefit to linking from a forum is that you are slowly building the number of links back to your site. These are the highly valued one-way links many site owners pay dearly for. There is some evidence that Google likes to have links pointing to its home page. If you are so inclined you might have a link from some of your pages directly to Google’s home page. I can’t see where this would ever hurt your search engine ranking. If Google likes being linked to, then why not link from Google to your site. Google has many forums which allow linking back to your site. Make sure your post is pertinent to the topic at hand and interesting and you will even develop some traffic from this post.

All of these hints can also be applied to other search engines that have forums and allow the same back-links. There are a number of huge web sites all over the Internet that get tons of traffic and are spidered every day, and they will allow you to follow the same indexing strategy. Most of these have been abused by marketers at one time or another but they still fulfill our purpose of getting indexed quickly. One of the fastest growing Internet communities is myspace. This should work quite nicely.

Jeffrey Dorrian is the soap guy. Really, that is my website http://www.thesoapguy.com He has been making premium olive oil soap for the past five years and now has customers in all fifty states. “This is a true inexpensive luxury anyone can enjoy.”

As a rider to the article, it also needs to be noted that despite your best efforts, it can still take several months to get listed in some search engines. Google in particular, due to its modified updating process, can see you waiting up to 6 months (as we did with our caricatures website.)

If you need help with meta data or copy writing for your website, feel free to contact us via methods at right.