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5 Best Ways To Make Your Website Visible To Search Engines

Written by: Frank

Article Overview: Every website owner needs to make sure their website is visible to search engines but it's a task that is easier said than done. Here are 5 of the best ways to make sure your site is visible to the major search engines.

5 Best Ways To Make Your Website Visible To Search Engines

Every website owner needs to make sure their website is visible to search engines but it's a task that is easier said than done. Here are 5 of the best ways to make sure your site is visible to the major search engines.

1. Accessibility

Accessibility means that your site is available to the visitor and to search engine spiders. First, make sure you have reliable hosting. If your site is down or very slow when and a search engine spider visits it, your chances of being indexed thoroughly lessen. Also, in terms of accessibility, make sure you have a robots.txt file available to search engines and that it allows the search engines to crawl around the pages of your site you want them to index. If your robots.txt file says "disallow" for a certain file or directory, then the search engine spider will ignore that page. In addition, you'll want to make sure that any pages with Flash, frames, are mostly graphics or that include fancy navigation schemes allow the spiders to enter properly and find other links to your website.

2. Friendliness

Friendliness just means that your site is friendly to search engine spiders and provides them with enough information for them to properly index and rank your website for your desired keyword phrases. This includes integration of proper meta-tags, like the meta description tag, meta keywords tag and meta copyright tag, as well as integration of your keywords in the page title, file name and image ALT tags in the HTML code. It is also very important to include your keyword phrases with enough frequency and density in the text content of your web pages.

3. Navigation

Having proper navigation on your website is crucial for both your visitors and the search engine spiders. Navigation is basically the linking structure of your website. Most sites should have one set of plain text links as navigation, usually at the bottom of every page. Include links to every page of your site or at least every key page of your site, regardless whether you use a javascript, DHTML, image map or other linking structure in your pages.

4. Sitemaps

Include a sitemap in your website to help the search engine spiders crawl all the pages of your website without having to travel to them link via embedded links on the page. A proper sitemap will include links to ALL the pages of your website, clearly marked with what the page is about. Some people even include a description of each page as well. Sitemaps are so important to Google, that they recently introduced a free service where you can create and submit your sitemap directly to Google to facilitate the indexing and crawling of your pages. You can find out more about this free Google service at: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

5. Linking

Once your website is ready, friendly and accessible to search engines, you need to let the search engines know about it. One of the best ways to let the search engines know that your site is ready for visitors is to begin building your links. You can do this by submitting to large and important directories like Yahoo Directory or DMOZ, by exchanging links with other webmasters of authority and closely related sites, by submitting to general directories and by generating your own content and distributing it whether through RSS or by writing articles. No one bothers to submit to Google, Yahoo or MSN these days, it's all about letting them find your link on another website. These methods of linking are an important start to getting search engine spiders and visitors alike to notice and visit your website.

About The Author

Frank Stoczko writes for goSEOpro (www.goSEOpro.com),an Internet Marketing and Website Promotion company offering Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign management solutions designed especially for professionals and small business owners who require high impact, quick results and value-based pricing.

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Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
Re: SES Toronto Next Week - In that case, how about the following? Track: Get Me Up to Speed * State of Search Marketing in Canada Track: Practical & Actionable * Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions Track: Advanced * User Search Behavior * Social Media Success * Web 2.0 & Search Engines * Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Which Campaign Sold What?
Re: SEO Recommendation Needed - One who gives guarantee of top position in Search Engines surely does not know much about SEO
Re: Blogging for Entrepreneurs - Hi, Plus Search Engines LOVE blogs. If you can update your blog a few times a week that will go along way. Plus you like David said linking to internal pages (use good anchor text) can help other pages of your website be indexed faster & higher in the search engines. Jeff
Re: How To Pick Keywords To Rank For - For anyone that wants to learn SEO, Stomper Net is the true expert. I just found out over in the CYN forums that they are giving away their Stomping the Search Engines courses for just $1. I own a copy of these courses, and I can tell you they are rock-solid. I highly recommend them. This is way cheaper than paying a firm or "guru" to do it for you, and I'm a strong believer in learning stuff for yourself.


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