Marketing Your Website for Search Engines

Establishing your Target Market

The first step in starting any project is developing a plan and choosing the market of people that your website will attract. Why will they come to your site? What makes your site better than other similar sites. This will help you choose your keywords.

Choosing Keywords

One of the main factors search engines use when determining the relevance of an individual web page are the "keywords" and "keyword phrases" that appear within the content of the page. Although each search engine uses different algorithmic parameters for determining the importance of a page, in general points are awarded or subtracted based on the following factors:

1. The number of times the keyword phrase is repeated
2. The position/location on the page where the keyword phrase appear
3. The HTML "tag" the between which the keyword phrases is placed

Writing Good Content

Since search engines such as Google systematically look at websites based on their content, it is good writing practice to distribute the keywords throughout the text. However, it is also important to keep in mind that customers will be reading this document so it must be worded well. The order of words is also important so creating keyword phrases has some importance. Choose the order of words - as a customer would search for it. (ie. Hosting web is not as good as web hosting)

The first page is especially important. There needs to be enough content to make it search engine friendly, but at the same time, it needs to captivate the readers attention using images. In general, sites with a significant amount of websites are deemed more useful to viewers therefore having more content is better. Larger multiple page sites are generally given better search rankings.

Submitting to Search Engines & Directories

You should submit your website to all the major directories including Yahoo, Google, MSN and AskJeeves. Doing this however, is not as easy as using the submit tools. I recommend building links from sites that are already listed in order to accomplish this. You can also use the paid submission tools to get listed fast, and as an added bonus they will continue to update your pages on a regular basis.