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Monday, November 24, 2008

5 Steps to Get Your Website Indexed by Google

How does Google find your site and list it? Purely registering your domain on the Internet isn't enough.

Before it can include a site in its index, a search engine has to know that the site exists. One of the first steps in picking up traffic to your website is to get it indexed by major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. However, it does not denote that your link will appear on the first page of search results. Although by submitting your site will get it listed in some search engines, it will not necessary get it into Google. As Google is the most popular Internet search engine with the largest index, if there are no links from other pages that point to your site, the site will not be indexed. Therefore, before submitting your site to Google, you need to get linked from other sites that are already in Google's index.

1. Make sure that your website is ready (i.e. no broken links, has enough unique contents, etc). Optimize your website for keywords that are highly related with your website content.

2. Create a sitemap file for your website. It contains the URLs for all of your pages in your website. Sitemaps are rarely clicked by most visitors, but they are vital as it helps search engine robots find all the pages on your website. You can use free online or offline tools available to generate your sitemap file. 3. As soon as your site is available on the Internet, you can submit your site to web directories such as webguide.sg and business.com.

4. Create an article that is relevant to your site and submit it to pertinent article directories such as Amazines.com. Be sure to include a link to your site in the article. The 'spiders' will crawl these sites at least once every week. It will find your links and eventually lead them to your website. If other people find your article relevant and use in their own website, you may also get new links and visitors from other sites, which will eventually boost your website ranking.

5. Join a popular, highly ranked forum site and create a profile with your site URL along with a short description in the signature. Each post will count as a link to the search engines! You can use any of the above techniques to get indexed by Google and other major search engines. However, do keep in mind it will take a few weeks for your site to appear in the search engines.

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Article by Shiyi Lau eDLink Marketing Website: http://www.edlinkmarketing.com

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Got Traffic?

Here's what your website must have to get lots of traffic - links pointing to your site. The more you have, the more traffic you get.

But how do you get links pointing to your site? Well you could email webmasters and ask them to put a link on their site (reciprocal links). But that's rather slow. You need something that will get other people link to your site.

How do you get other people linking to your site? Here are some ideas:

Content
People want content. If your site has lots of good fresh content try providing free content feeds. You get links back to your site, and they get free updated content from your site.

Articles
Write good quality and useful articles and put a link to your site at the bottom. Allow people to freely publish them. The better and more useful the article the more people will publish it and the more links back to your site you will have.

Services
For example on my website Crossword Heaven (http://www.crosswordheaven.com) I have a service where webmasters can add a crossword to their site. On my site PerkyPup.com (http://www.perkypup.com) I provide quotes that other webmasters can link to by means of a dynamic image.

Another example is a "recommend this site" service. That is you have a page on your site that people can use to recommend a website. People get to the page through a link on the website that they want to recommend.
Another example is a "recommend this site" service. That is you have a page on your site that people can use to recommend a website. People get to the page through a link on the website that they want to recommend.

Affiliate links
I like to think of affiliate links as "paid for" links. Basically you're paying someone to link to your site. Do they work? Yes! You win because you only pay the affiliate when a sale is made (ok, there are exceptions) and the affiliate wins because they get paid.

eBooks
People love eBooks. Create an eBook with links to your site in it. The more popular the eBook is the more links back to your site you will get. Plus eBooks go hand in hand with affiliate programs.

Of course there are many more ideas than these. The thing is to think about ways of getting people linking to your site. It doesn't matter how crazy the idea sounds. In fact sometimes crazy is good. Remember all those times someone sent you a link to a wacky web site? Just think about how much traffic that website must get!

by
Kevin Davies is the webmaster of Crossword Heaven http://www.crosswordheaven.com