Getting your Site Noticed

Introduction to Google sitemaps, link-building, Keyword optimisation and tracking

I have now covered the basics in getting a website off the ground - but this is only the surface, to master web-design can take years - you will understand this if you have looked in any great detail at the w3.org standards that I have linked to on the previous pages - html and css are big languages, and they are only the most basic web languages out there!

However if you are ready to move on from just designing websites, the next stage is getting your site noticed - and if you already have a website online, you may well find that no one is visiting it! Of course the purpose of your website does have a big impact on who you want to view it - you may want to keep it realativly private, but you may also want it to be seen by as many people as possible. If the later statement applys to you, then you need to learn about search engines and directories - if anyone outside of your circle of friends is going to find your website it will be through one of the major search engines - google, yahoo, msn, or one of the major directories such as dmoz.org.

Google

For the purposes of this article I am going to concerntrate on google and explain roughly how search engines work, and ultimately how anyone is likely to find your site.

Googles main job is indexing websites under loads of catagories and keywords so that when you type something into its search engine it can hopefully show you the website that most likely contains what you are looking for. How google does this is obviously shrouded with mystery, but I will explain the basics.

Google sends out crawlers - this is basically a piece of software that follows links over the entire internet and downloads every site it comes across - or at least takes not of all the relevant information on the site - you could try a simple version of this yourself by starting off on any website, and just keep following links from website to website - you will understand that you could keep doing this for days, weeks, or even years without running out of new websites.

Now google basically has a snapshot of the entire internet. With this information it then creates keywords for every page that it has indexed - google uses its own algorithm to accomplish this, but basically it will assign keywords to a page based on the content that it contains (ie how many times certain words appear etc), so the chances are if you write a really good article on sheep, google will assign "sheep" as a keyword for your article or page.

At the end of this process google will have millions of catagories (or keywords) each with probably thousands of pages in that category, the next step is for google to put these pages into some further order of relevance - several factors will determine this ordering process some of which will be:

How many times the keyword appears on the page
Where on the page the keyword appears
How long the site has been registered for
How the site has been coded (and thus how easy it is for google to read)
How popular your site is (how many people link to it)
The anchor text from inbound links (<a href="">this text</a>)

Important: When building links for your site make sure that the various descriptions you give for your site when submiting to directories etc are all unique - if Google finds duplicate descriptions it will penalise your site!

For a comprehensive list of factors that have been put into an order of importance by some of the top SEO professionals, read this article.

So when you type in the word "sheep" on google, after this process has been carried out in the background you should get a list of websites about sheep and in theory the best one should be at the top.

Before we start talking about SEO (search engine optimisation) from this information you will see that the best way to get listed on google is to have a site that has some really good information about a particular subject and a site that has been coded correctly - this will give you a very good starting point.

As well as this there are other things you can do to further promote your site in the eyes of google, the first and the easiest is to create and submit a sitemap - rather than waiting for google to eventually index your site, this is like telling google: my site exists, here is a list of all the pages on it, please have a look!

The best place to go to create your sitemap is xml-sitemaps.com - they provide a free online tool for creating sitemaps, simply enter your domain name and xml-sitemaps will crawl your site and create a list of all your pages - it will present it to you in several formats including xml (Google friendly), text and html (viewable in your browser).

After having created this sitemap, you need to upload it to the root of your website - normally in the same folder as your index.html file.

Lastly, you need to submit it to google - in order to do this you will need to get yourself a google webmaster account available here. From here you can goto the sitemaps section and upload your sitemap.

Dont forget about it though, everytime you add content to your site you should submit a new sitemap, so google always has the latest info on your site.

Content is King

The next thing you can do in your battle to get in the search engines is keep adding content to your site - this is very important, if you have something to offer, put it on your site, the more quality information on your site the better the chance of someone searching for it and reading it.

Link Building

Thirdly, get some other sites linking to your site. This one is a delicate subject, linking is a great thing, from your visitors point of view, it gives them a chance to see other cool sites related to your site. From your point of view, getting your site linked to by other sites means you might get some more visitors yourself. And from googles point of view, it shows them that other people are interested in your site.

Having said that you should be careful who you link to and where you except links from - more from an ethical point of view, there is no point in exchanging hundreds of links with rubbish sites just to trick google into thinking your site is popular - not only will this method go wrong in the end, it will be detrimental to any of your visitors who decide to look on your links page - they will see only a load of junk.

So when building links, be very picky and when you are deciding whether or not to exchange links with another website, use this question to make the decision:

Would this site be good to show to my visitors?

Monitoring your Position

To track the progress of your links and the progress of your listings in google you can use several methods - the easiest is to go onto google and type in these commands:

Site:www.yoursite.com - this will display all the pages that google has indexed in your site

Link:www.yoursite.com - this will show all the other sites that link to your site (and are indexed by google)

You can also check the page rank of your site (which among other things, is based on how many people link to your site. There is a tool here to do this:
www.prchecker.info

The next thing to do in your quest to get on the search engines is to actually monitor the results - there are several good tools that will enable to do this, the best one is:
www.selfseo.com

Be patient, it may take several weeks or even months before your start appearing in google.

Keyword Optimisation

If you start appearing in google but you either dont come in the top 10 results, or you are not appearing for your desired keywords, you can take steps to optimize your pages further - a lot of people will include this advice at the very start of their SEO guide. I am reluctant to do this because fundamentally speaking this shouldnt be the first thing you do - if you have information to put out there you should write it primarily in an easily readable format, and not get tyed down with optimising it for google, however if you get to a stage where you think google is maybe misinterpreting your information, you can optimise your text slightly to make for better listings.

The way to do this is to sit down and analise your potential visitors - if there is someone out there that is looking for the information on your site, what are they likely to be typing in? - for example on this site, I would imagine my potential visitor is typing in something like: how do I build a website - in other words the person that is typing that into Google, is a person that I want to visit my site! You can probably build a list of about 10 key phrases that you would like Google to have you listed for.

Check out the Competition

Once you have your ten key phrases, you need to scope out the competition for each phrase. The easiest way to do this is to type your key phrases, one at a time, into Google or another of the major search engines. Based on how many results appear, you can determine roughly how much competition their is for that particular phrase. For example, the phrase "how to build a website" holds 24,500,000 results on Google at the time of writing, this indicates a high level of competition, if your website is fairly new then this keyword will most probably be out of range. However, the phrase "building a website for beginners" holds only 634,000 results on Google. This is a more realistic Phrase to go for.

If you have a good website and are serious about SEO an invaluable tool for keyword targeting is Wordtracker. This online SEO tool holds data for millions of keywords and the statistics on how many times they are entered into the major search engines over a period of time. Wordtracker takes you through a process of refining keywords and then detailing how popular each keyword is likely to be. You can also use it to find niche key phrases that are not too high in competition. They provide a free keyword tool here that will give you an idea of what Wordtracker can do for you.

The Landing Page

Once you have refined your key phrases, you need to create landing pages - the best page on your site for each phrase (ie where would the visitor that is typing in a particular phrase be best placed when they arrive on your site?). Once you have your landing pages you should optimise them for the relevent key phrase.

Loosly speaking, the key phrase for the landing page needs to be in your title tags, your heading tags (primarily h1) and in the body of your page (in the paragraphs). So if they are not, then you may want to add them in. After you have optimised your page, re-submit your site to Google. Be patient, and keep checking your positions to see if you move up in the results.

Further to this you can also implement these keywords into the anchor text on your inbound links - speak to the sites that link to yours, and have them place the key phrases inside the <a href=""> </a> tag and around it - this is something else that google takes note of and this will also help you moved up the results.

Implementing all of these factors and constantly adding new and interesting content to your site should, over time, move you up the results.

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