Learn the basics of web design and found the most effective way to design your website. Good. Your website is designed and uploaded to your server. Excellent But nobody can find it? No problem. Here are few ways to enhance your site, to make it more search engine friendly. Then you can go about submitting your site to any and every search engine available. Of course, you can just wait for the search engine spiders to come to your site - they will eventually.
The main purpose of getting your site search engine friendly is to promote your site. This in turn will bring in visitors, and if you are selling some products or services, potential customers. These are some common SEO terms:
* Search Engines - Sites people use to find information or websites on the internet.
* SEO - Search Engine Optimization - what you do to your site, to make it more searchable by the engine spiders.
* Submission - The act of submitting/notifying your site to the search engines.
* Promotion - In one word - advertising to increase the traffic to your site, whether by site submission, advertisements etc.
* Traffic - Visitors, how many people visit your site, on a daily, monthly, yearly basis.
How to go about making your site search engine friendly? How to market your site to search engines? What should be your first step towards gaining that all important traffic to your site? Very valid questions, and the answers all lie in how you have designed your site. You may well ask - design my site? I have already done so, and it is beautiful. What do you want me to do with it now, after all this work?
To tell the truth, very little in the design part. The first and foremost step to take is to create meta tags for your site, and insert them into the html. If you need help, you can do this at my site's meta tags help page. The most important met tags are: title, keywords and description. There are others too, like robots, author, etc. but the first three are the ones used by search engines.
You put your meta tags in between the head section, a good place would be just below the title tag. Crafting a title and description of your site is very important. What is your site about? Find out some niche keywords and use them. Try to make your Title and Description tags, descriptive like a sentence, not just a list of keywords. Also, keep in mind the limit of characters or words in these tags. For keywords, use no more than 15-20 words. Title should be about 100 characters long, and Description should be between 150-200 characters long.
Remember to use the keywords in your site content also.
So all this is done, now what? How to submit to search engines? For this, let us first understand how the engines work. The term search engine actually refers to those search sites, which use a database of web pages, and run "spiders" to read your page, and extract information from it.
The other form of search engine, the directory or index, is also a database of web pages, but these do not run any spiders. All the information they have, is hand-submitted, not extracted from your webpage. These include Yahoo, open directory etc. It is important to submit your site to these directories, and not use auto-submission programs. Vast lists of search engines are listed here. But the important ones you need to submit to be described in this article. Two of the better known auto submitters are add me and submit express. Resist the temptation to submit your site again and again.
