Good Stuff Happens in 1:1 Meetings: Why you need them and how to do them well
Tips on Increasing Your Exposure on Search Engines
1. Getting waylaid in researching search engine optimisation
or spending time looking at what others do can be a waste
of time when trying to improve your website.
2. Now that's probably a pretty rich statement to be put in
an article about precisely that subject, so I'll explain what I
mean.
3. The very fact you've created a website means that you
want people to visit it - no point opening up shop and
having no one popping in. Whether you're creating a
website for a small organisation or for a major
concern, unless you just want family and friends to see it
you're going to have to find a way to get it noticed.
4. In the world of the internet this means being found on
search engines so that when someone searches for 10 inch
widgets your site shows up pretty high in the search
results so that they choose to come to your site to see
what you have to offer.
5. So how do you get your website up high in the results?
Surely that means studying the art of SEO and learning the
skills of keyword stuffing, getting backlinks, article
writing, blog posting etc etc etc? Unfortunately this is
where a lot of people go wrong. The resulting website may
be technically correct, but won't get you any visitors.
6. Although there are others, Google is a good measure of
what gets you pole positions on any major search engines.
Google is constantly refining how it ranks websites, and its
goal is to promote websites that answer users search
queries in a meaningful way. To do this they try to weed
out websites which exists simply to get large amounts of
traffic with the aim of making as much money as possible.
Obviously making money is the important factor for most
websites, but only a few years ago people constructed
websites to a formula. These sites contained very little
genuine useful information and were little more than
portals for adverts and could be replicated easily making
money for their owners, but not often creating a useful
user experience.
7. If a person is searching for information on 10 inch
widgets, they don't expect their first result from the
search engine to be a list of adverts for other sites which
vaguely refer to the search term. They might want to find
a site selling them, or a site explaining what they are.
Google want to make sure people use Google as their
search engine, so they want to make sure that users get
useful, meaningful results for their search terms. As well
as using algorithms, Google also employs people who
manually check the search results brought up by various
search terms.
8. So, what do you do to make sure your site is one that
Google will want to give a high ranking too? If your site is
on a unique subject then your job is easier as you won't
have too much competition - you will have a much harder
job if the subject matter of your site is going to put your
competition at hundreds of thousands. It's not
impossible, but you will need to put more thought into it.
9. The first lesson to learn is that CONTENT IS KING. If you
cannot express your thinking in words, if you cannot write
grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs and
cannot spell (you can't always depend on the
spellchecker!) then unless you have a partner working
with you who can, you will not get far with producing a
successful website. You have to have unique content on
your website - although you can re-publish articles such as
this one (with the correct credits back to the original
author), reproduced articles should not be the whole
content of your site. Even if the subject matter of your site
is the same as hundreds or thousands of others, if you can
find a new way to present that information then you will
have a better chance of rising above a lot of your
competitors in those all important search engine results. A
10. So why haven't I mentioned keywords? If you are writing
about a subject naturally, your keywords will probably fall
into place as a matter of course. In fact, by not doing
keyword analysis you may well find you have stumbled on
a combination of words which are often searched, but
relatively unique. It is important that any written content
on your site flows, and is easy to read for a human -
visitors won't stay long on a page which is so stuffed with
keywords that it's hard to understand any points being
made. However, once you have written your content it can
be useful to check on the keywords you are using, and find
if there are any variations that could attract more traffic.
11. Make your website for a human being, not to with the
search engine results page in mind, and you'll have visitors
who stay on your site longer as it's interesting (Google like
sites that people stay on, rather than realising quickly
there's nothing interesting there and moving away).
Visitors may well advertise your site for you - adding a
Facebook Like button, or Google +1 button allows visitors
to alert their friends to the great content on your site.
12. Once you've got a site you can be proud of, that's the time
to start looking at ways of attracting more traffic, by
exchanging links, writing articles and optimising your
pages. But make sure your website have something good
to offer first.