Once your site is up and running, you want to make sure the search engines and directory sites know about it. You can submit your site to places like Google and Yahoo!, but it’s very likely that they’ll find you through links to your site before they get to your site submission.

Sites like Google and Yahoo! rescan sites in their current database over and over again. How often depends on how much activity (fresh content) that site is producing. Chances are, if there’s a site out there that has a link to your site, Google will find that link and then find your site. That will probably happen before they actually get to your submission info. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother submitting the site, I just wanted to give you a little FYI.

One place you definitely want to submit your site to is DMOZ.ORG. This is a directory site, but unlike most, it uses actual people to review the submissions. You go to their site, find the category your site should be found in, then submit your site’s information. When an actual person working for DMORZ.ORG gets to your submission info, they go to your site and personally evaluate it. Places like Google has everything automated. If your site does get listed in DMORZ.ORG’s directory it provides you with a link to your site that carries a lot of value with the search engines. It may take a long time (even years, if at all!) before DMORZ.ORG gets to your site, but it’s definitely worth the submission. Just submit it and forget it.

You can submit your site to DMORZ.ORG here: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

There are a few different ways blogging can help your site’s appeal with Google. Google likes sites that are constantly updating their content. This shows growth and activity. A blog is an effective way to accomplish this. You can continue to offer helpful and useful information through short blog postings. This shows fresh content, gives more for Google to look at, and if you’re providing helpful, interesting and useful information to your customers through your posts, this will help develop return traffic to the site. If the information is good enough, other sites may start linking to your site as a resource for their customers. This helps to provide oneway links pointing to your site as a valuable resource.

Another aspect to blogging is that you can find blogs on other sites that you can contribute to by commenting on posts on that site. You can contribute information relevant to what the original post was referring to and always subtly reference your site in your comment. Maybe to a post you had composed on the topic, or other useful information. If you can add a link to your site, this is very helpful because, again, it’s another oneway inbound link to your site for Google to see.

WARNING: When you’re finding blogs on other sites to contribute to, make sure it’s a site that you would enjoy visiting, and being part of it’s “community.” Be authentic in your postings with valid and helpful information that sincerely contributes to the blog. If this is not the case, you will easily be recognized as a SPAMMER. The people who frequent certain blogs are very aware of anyone who is just there to spread their “brand.” So again, be sincere when contributing to any other source online. Otherwise you could experience very negative consequences. You really don’t want that. You’re trying to do good by your business and what may result from just trying to use someone’s blog as a billboard for your company could result in a lot of angry and bad press for your business. That’s kind of the opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish, isn’t it? Again this all just boils down to be authentic. (see previous post about this!

Anyway, get out there and start blogging!

SEO (search engine optimization) is important these days to help your site do better in searches on sites like Google and Yahoo, among others. The better your site does naturally in Google searches, the less you have to pay in advertising costs. However hiring SEO specialists to do the work for you can also be expensive. This just depends on how much competition you’ve got.

Here are some tips and information so you can do some of the work yourself (or at least ask your webmaster to implement these things), save yourself some money and hopefully help your site’s ratings with Google. Note that there are no guarantees that you’ll end up on the first page of search results, but your site will do better than if you don’t do these things.

Inbound Links

I briefly touched on this in an earlier post, but I can’t stress this enough: the more oneway, inbound links pointing to your site, the more Google thinks your site must be significant in your field. You want to avoid just setting up reciprocal links with other sites. Google just sees this as sites working together to try an manipulate the system. List your site with directory sites. This isn’t the strongest source, but it’s a place to start. You want to try and get sites that are related to your industry link to you. The strongest sites are Educational (.edu) or Government (.gov) sites. Site’s with those extensions are very valuable – mostly because they are hard to get. Maybe you know someone who has access to adding links to a college or school website. That would be a great resource. Anyway, I can’t stress this enough: oneway, inbound links are one of the most important thing you can do to improve your sites rankings.

I’ll be adding more tips soon. Be sure to check back often.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. What it refers to is, simply put, optimizing the pages of your website so that it has a better chance of ranking well with the search engines, and receive better results in relevant searches. Most website owners would like to have their websites appear on the first page of a Google search. This is great for business! Having the pages of your website optimized really helps your chances of this happening.

On-Page SEO

Some of the aspects of SEO include Keyword-Rich title tags, meta tags and copy (the text of your site). These are things that your website developer can implement when coding the pages of your site. This is “On Page” SEO.

Off-Page SEO

One of the most important thing you can do to really improve your site’s importance to Google is to have as many one-way, inbound links from other sites pointing to you. This indicates to Google (and other search engines) that your site is an authority in it’s field. It helps if these sites that link to you are in the same field as your site. For example, if you sell bricks, it helps if these other sites are related to “bricks.”

There’s a lot more to this subject than this post, but hopefully this gives you a little bit of an understanding on what SEO is and it’s importance to a successful website.