Search Engine Optimisation

When marketing your web site one thing that should not be over looked is the traffic to be gained by having your web site visible to the search engines.

Search engine optimisation or what is also referred to as search engine positioning is the process of submitting your web site to the search engines, monitoring where your web site ranks for relevant keyword search terms (or search phrases) and modifying your pages so that your web site comes up in the top results for relevant search terms.

A major hindrance to having your web site indexed by the search engines can be the structure of your web site and the programming code used to build it. Search engines read HTML code and index the words on your page. Web sites that have more graphics then text do not rate well, and sites written in code other then HTML may have problems.

Another problem can be that your web site has dynamically generated pages, that is, pages that are generated from a database. Dynamically generated pages are something commonly used to publish web sites with large amounts of data. The search engine spiders can be trapped in the way these pages are created and thus are programmed to steer clear of them. Most search engines are working on ways to overcome this, Google being a leader in the field.

The first thing you should do whether you decide to optimise your web site or not, is to submit your web site to the search engines. This can be carried out manually via each search engine (click here for a list) or you can get software that can do this for you. There are many services advertised that offer to submit your web site to thousands of search engines. They do work, but are often collecting your email address to sell or distribute.

The way to get your site indexed or included in many search engines is to make sure you submit your site to the major search engines (about 10 of them). Most of the smaller search engines are just reusing the major search engines' indexes. The traffic flow from other small search engines is probably not worth the concern.

Once you've submitted your web site it's probably wise to find out if your web site appears in the top results for keyword phrases relevant to your site. This is when you're best to have software that can run a number of searches through all the major search engines.

You're also going to need to start learning how to get those results higher, learn the reasons why your site did not get indexed and so on. Once again there are many software packages that can help you do this and and numerous newsletters and web sites with advice and free information.

It all adds up to time required to carry out these tasks.

Like many organisations on the web, you may be better off finding a search engine optimisation specialist to do this for you. What has been agreed by many successful web ventures is that the time and money spent on search engine optmisation is worth the results.

Links & Resources

Clickz Today - This part of the Clickz site has a search engine optimisation column full of helpful advice, updated SEO news and a good newsletter.

Link popularity check - Find out what sites link back to your web site.

Promotion Guide - Contains a lot of useful search engine tips and tutorials as well as links to many other resources

Web Position Gold - Search engine optimisation software for submitting, monitoring and building optimised pages plus a free helpful monthly newsletter.

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