Post 8 on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.
You’re new website is live, you’re on-page SEO has been worked to perfection and now you want the world to sit up and acknowledge the fine work you have done so far. Like a talented and aspiring rock band, you now need to get noticed in all of the right places!
If you have any previous experience of internet marketing, you’ll know that one way to tell the search engines about your new website is to simply find their submission page and enter your URL into their database of sites to crawl. In a few weeks, all of Google, Yahoo, Bing and any others you submitted to will send their spiders to crawl your website. Sounds fair enough? However, what if there was a way to make the search engines come to you? Here’s how to make that very thing happen and get your new website indexed by this time next week.
- DON’T submit your url to any of the major search engine ‘add website’ pages.
- Write an article of around 450 – 500 words in length. Keep the content informative and educational about your topic area. Avoid any mention of your website or company name within the article body, equally avoid any reference to items or services you offer for sale. Think of the article as a ‘useful resource’ for anyone interested in your product area. Try to place your main keyword target within the article title if possible grammatically, if not don’t worry, the main purpose of this article is to get you indexed.
- You now need to create accounts at a minimum of five top article directories. Here’s my current fav five:
- EzineArticles
- Go Articles
- ArticleBase
- The Free Library
- Article Monkeys - Every one of these article directories will offer you a ‘resource box’ to tell readers of your article a little bit about you. It’s here that you can place a link back to your new website. Instead of just typing your URL in here, embed it around your main target keyword. Resource boxes accept simple HTML, to embed your URL within your keywords the HTML looks like this
<a href=”YOURWEBSITE.co.uk”>YOURKEYWORDS</a>
Using our earlier example of www.buycheapshoes.org.uk, a good resource box might read something like this:
“For all the latest online shoe deals, visit our new website <a href=”www.buycheapshoes.org.uk”>Buy Cheap Shoes</a> to browse over 200 shoe ranges at great prices.” - A couple of days after you have submitted your article, you should start to receive notifications of acceptance by the directories you submitted to. If you use Delicious, JumpTags or any other bookmarking service, you should bookmark your article URL’s as they go live. If you don’t ‘bookmark’ yet, don’t worry – they’ll be more on that later.
Google, Bing, Yahoo and many others crawl major article directories several times a day. Hence, once your articles go live, they’ll soon be indexing your articles and following your resource box links back to your new website. If you have your sitemaps setup properly, they’ll easily and quickly find their way around your new site and pretty soon you’ll be indexed.
How To Check If Your Website Is Indexed
Go to Google, Yahoo or Bing and type into their search box your website url within speech marks, ie “www.buycheapshoes.org.uk”. If your indexed, your website will appear first, or very near to first, within the search engine’s results.
If after 7 – 10 days, your website is still not showing up, search out the best and most relevant blogs you can find for your topic area. Find a handful of posts (one for each blog) you like and place a polite and relevant comment on each of them. Include your new website URL on your reply form.
So, Why Does This Method Work Faster Than Submitting Direct?
If our aspiring rock band were to send their latest demo CD to their favourite music labels, their CD would sit in a huge pile of similar CD’s from similarly ambitious bands. If however, a trusted music industry colleague were to tip off our band to the music labels, they would no doubt be listened to far quicker than otherwise. It’s the same with new websites. There are literally hundreds of thousands of websites submitted to the top three search engines on a daily basis. Top Article Directories are trusted websites with high PageRank values, if they approve your articles they are also giving you a vote of confidence. Just like the music labels, the search engines will follow this tip and crawl you far faster than they would have done otherwise. Try it and see for yourself.
Next time, we’ll look at some first steps aimed at moving your new website higher up the rankings once you’ve been indexed successfully.
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2 users responded in this post
With regard to the bookmarking the article url, is that just for your own benefit to keep track of the articles or is it to help boost that page for the search engines?
Hi Will. Bookmarking your article means that Google and other search engines will index it quickly – which in turn means that the link from your article to your website will be indexed quickly also.
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