Building an Effective Website – Pt.7

• Aug. 11, 2005

In this series of articles, we decided to go back to basics when getting into the web space.

 

In Part 1, we were introduced to a fictional company that wanted a website.  In Part 2, we went into more detail on the site, including picking a domain name while part 3 gave some tips on picking a web host.  Part 4 dealt with some issues which arise when picking a designer, and in part 5 we introducing writing for the site.  In part 6 we looked at some considerations for improving the sites performance by getting input from others.

 

In this, the final of the series, we look at getting your site into the engines.  What do you need to do in order to get noticed?

 

The first thing I’m going to tell you is that it will take time – a lot of time in fact.  But that doesn’t mean that once the site is submitted you sit back and wait.  Far from it.

 

But first, to the submission:

 

Submitting is quite easily, actually.  In fact it’s far easier than it was a few years ago.  It wasn’t too long ago that we had to submit every page of a website.  Now, however, all you need to do is submit the home page and let the crawler do the rest.

 

So the first places you want to go are MSN, Yahoo! and Google and submit the homepage to these sites:

 

http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

 

But wait, your job isn’t done yet.  Since there’s no way to submit to Ask Jeeves, currently, you need to request a few links.

 

So what you should do is look for directories which pertain to your industry.  A simple search for your industry name plus “directory” should return a few sites to which you can submit your site. 

 

You will also want to submit to the Open Directory Project (ODP).  While the ODP has been a problem in recent months, in that it can take months to get included, a submission is still recommended as other sites do use the ODP results.

 

In addition there are close to 300 other websites which use the ODP directory on their listings.  That means once you are accepted by the ODP your results will appear in those other 300 sites as well.

 

Another directory you should consider is Business.com – submitting to this site generally costs an annual submission fee, but could be well worth it.

 

Finally, perform a Yahoo! Directory submission.  Again, there is a fee, but it’s worth it.

 

So by now you should have submitted or purchased a few links, and submitted your site to the main engines, what next?

 

The answer boils down to 2 ongoing steps – content and links.

 

You need to keep growing your site by adding new content.  While I would recommend a page a day, this is out of reach for many people, so aim for a page a week of good quality content.  Remember, a new page only has to be around 400 characters.

 

Also, you should research links.  We have a great article on building quality links which you should read.  But don’t be too discouraged after you read it.  While it can be an extremely time consuming process it is none the less necessary to the success of your site.  If you can set aside an hour or 2 per week, or even hire someone to do it, its well worth the investment.

 

While you wait for the engines to index your site, be sure to check your visitor logs daily to ensure that the crawlers are visiting it.

 

Look in either the “browser” or “spider” section of the site for Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp and MSNBot.   If possible, try and figure out which pages they are requesting.  Because you want to be sure they can effectively navigate the site without roadblocks.

 

Sometimes you need to re-run your log reports to filter all traffic but the crawlers, so if you can do this and know how to then I’d recommend it. You could do this monthly for the first few months, just to be sure that the site is getting properly indexed.

 

And, be sure to keep checking the engines.  You can use the query “site:yoursite.com” (without quotes) on most engines to see if the pages are getting indexed.  I would recommend checking every day following the day you submit to the engines. It shouldn’t take too long to see the pages start to appear in MSN, followed by Yahoo! and then Google.

 

Finally, there are other things you can do:

 

For example, Google has a new program called Google Sitemaps, through which you can submit an XML sitemap of your site.  You can get more information about Google sitemaps on their site here.

 

And there is also Google Local (and Yahoo! Local) to which you can submit your site.  This is a great submission to do, especially if your business is geographically targeted (like the sample heating company I introduced a few articles ago).  By creating a Google account for yourself, you can then submit your site to Google Local and include things like your business hours, telephone number and payment options available.

 

The Google Local listing is quite helpful because many times Google will display local results ahead of regular organic results, so if you have a Local listing, you could get traffic a lot sooner with Google than if you have to wait to get indexed normally.  You can get more information on Google Local here.

 

So if you have followed my suggestions in this and previous articles in this series, you should know have a fully functional website which you are happy with, that should help increase your business.

 

And remember that the web is cyclical.  That means you will want to revisit your site in a year or so to see if it needs any improvements.  Perhaps visitors to the site have made some great suggestions for improving the site that you can incorporate.  Of course you don’t have to wait for a whole year, but you should consider a redesign every 12-18 months if it’s within your budget.

 

Rob Sullivan

Head Organic Search Strategist

Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition

Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing