3foldComm

Your company’s website is up and running! However, can anyone find it?

The issue: when you type in a few keywords in Google search that match what your website is offering, it falls on page 10 of the search results.  How do you get your site higher on search engines like Google?

The old methods include meta keywords, paid links, keyword stuffing, but these worked best in 90′s and early 2000′s. Search engine algorithms have changed, so your SEO strategies have to as well.

While there are dozens of technical tweaks that should be made on the site itself – sitemaps, internal linking, content optimization, site speed, etc. – what matters most now are content and inbound links. Here are a couple easy web-based ways to help boost your website in the search engine results.

1. Content. Remember, sites aren’t listed in search engines, pages are. Search engines crawl those pages looking for relevant information to match with keywords. Search engines have one job, and that is to find content for searchers. They don’t care what your site is about or what you want it listed under, they want to offer the best search results for their customers.
2. Directories. Submit your site to directories. An example of a Site Directory is DMOZ, otherwise known as the Open Directory Project. Any site owner can submit their site to this directory and it is all based around categories such as Health, Business, etc.  Each top level category is broken down into smaller/more focused categories.   For instance, many nonprofit sites may be found through the top level category Society, then broken down by Organizations.  The DMOZ directory is handled by volunteer editors that update the various websites submitted  through the various categories.  DMOZ partners with AOL Search and Google.  Yahoo! also has a site directory, but they charge $299 to be a part of their directory.
3. Inbound links. Choose your targets carefully, make personal contact and don’t automate the process. Make sure the sites linking to you have a decent page rank or it’s not worth it. You may increase your inbound traffic a hundredfold, but  discover you’re still not getting results. A million “junk hits” aren’t worth a single “quality hit” from someone who really wants to find your service. It might take some time to research the places that would work best for you, so I’ll use one of our clients, a local theatre company, as an example. The theatre’s website can be submitted to Playbill.com (a theatre website) and will be listed along with other theater companies throughout the United States. Once a site is added, it ends up on this list.  The more quality exposure the better, I say.
4. Link exchanges. Yes, this can be somewhat tedious and time consuming, but it does increase your website’s ranking in search engines if you have quality links on your website.  Basically, the web crawlers from Google, Yahoo and other search engines crawl your site for information and this includes any links on your website.  If you have a link to a quality website (one that is high in the search rankings) and this website in turn links to your website, this will increase your website’s search ranking.  This is also called reciprocal linking.  So, for instance, if you own a running store and linked to to Nike’s website, and Nike in turn linked back to your site, then your search engine results would be higher.  Most of the time, these link exchanges are done via e-mail. The best way to go about this is to identify sites that would be good matches, then ask the website managers to link with your site.Here is an example of a link exchange request that a client of ours received recently:

Dear Webmaster,

As a part of an ongoing campaign to increase the link popularity of our website, we are looking for good potential sites like your site ___________, which has a theme relevant to ours. We are interested in swapping links with you.

Please consider listing us here: ______________. Our text link info is:

Title: Fresh Roasted Coffee Beans
Description: Receive fresh roasted coffee beans. We will roast your blend within days of shipping it to you. Receive it while its perfect for drinking.
URL: _____________
Once you place our link on your website, your link will be added in the best category here: _____________

Thank you very much for your time and I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Best Regards,
Webmaster
URL
Address
City, ST 12345

This particular site wasn’t a great match for our client, so we had to decline, but had it been a similar organization in a different community, that would have matched the mission of our client and been a good opportunity. In fact, because the missions of the two were so different, many search engines would have frowned on the exchange and, possibly, penalized the two in the rankings.

One thing to remember is that Search Engine Optimization takes time and you probably won’t see any major results for a good six months or more. However, using these tips, your website should start slowly creeping up the search engine result rankings, so don’t be discouraged.

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