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Once you have the content generated, here is what you can do to
have your site found more often by new visitors:
- Use Google Sitemaps to see how Google sees your site, when it
was last updated, whether you have any problems on your site,
etc. You also want
to provide a sitemap for your visitors.
- Get involved in communities relevant to the content of your
site. Visit their forums and mailing lists, and help other people
by answering their questions, posting links to your site if they
contain information relevant to your replies. Usually you are
allowed to have a signature, where you can link to your
site. However be aware that more and more sites implement a new
link attribute
rel="nofollow", which tells Google
(MSN, Yahoo and other sites) to not count those links to your
site's ranking credit. This is to avoid comment spam.
- The head section of the document should include meta entries
for
keywords and description. Though
it's been said that the keywords meta entry has little or no
weight with Google, but is still useful with other search
engines. Also make sure that the title of the document includes the most
important keywords and phrases, as Google gives a heavy weight to
those. The keywords need to be included in the H1 and H2 header
entries, and also once in bold, once in italic and if possible in
the URL.
- Spell check your content. Google doesn't like when misspelled
words are used, as it tries to auto-correct search words. Some
sites use misspelled words to get more traffic to their
site. e.g., "hign paying keywords" instead of "high paying
keywords"
- It's been said that sites containing valid XHTML are favored by
the search engines. But it should at least use valid HTML. One
other thing to make sure is that your site is readable by
non-graphical browsers, such as Links and Lynx. Blind users use
those to browse the Internet and search engines favor sites that
are useful to more people. In fact search engines see your site as
text, so things like javascript, DHTML and Flash may make it hard
for the search engine to crawl your site.
- Publish articles on other sites relevant to your expertise.
Make sure that those articles link back to your site. I'm somewhat
weary about submitting my articles to other sites, since then I
end up with a duplication problem and a chance that a search
engine would penalise duplicated content sites. Hopefully it
somehow knows where the content has appeared in first place. But I
don't want to take chances. So may be submitting unique articles
which don't appear on my site is a much safer strategy.
- Sometimes your site competes with many other sites for the
same keywords. Rather than optimising all of your site for the
same keywords, try to find less competitive keywords and optimise
some of your pages for those keywords. There are both commercial
and free programs to help you do that.
- Learn from your competitors. Go to Google and search for the
competing keywords, go to the first few sites with high page rank
and analyse those sites, see what they have done differently than
your site. Granted the site might be just very popular and linked
from many other sites, but more often than not reading through the
source code of the site can tip you off how to do better. You can
find out which sites link to that site by searching Google for
link:yoursite.com and you may want to try to get your
site listed on those sites.
- Since it's not enough to have a high ranking for your front
page (Google gives different page ranks to different pages), once
your site is established you should try to get other sites to link
to other sections of your site as well. For example if you have a
big site and you can identify segments which are different from
each, try to raise a page rank for the sub-directories
corresponding to those sections.
- Have each page linking to several other pages on your site
(crosslinking). That should be especially helpful for balancing
the page ranking across different pages of your site, and of
course it should help your visitors to find related content on
your site.
- Try to include a few outbound links to high quality sites in
every document. That indicates a quality connection between your
document and others sites that Google already considers to be
quality sites. When linking to those sites, try to include the
important keywords in those links.
- Analyse your log files and see who refers to you the most. Try
to find more similar sites. The referral information also reveals
the keywords used to find your site. Often you find new keywords
that you haven't thought of when targeting your site. By using
those newly discovered keywords you can create more content that
targets the unexpected traffic even better.
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