Providing Fresh Content For Search Engines

Apparently I don’t read my own post or something, as you know my page rank just went in the toilet. I have no idea why unless they seriously want me to post like everyday to keep my ranking up there. (when I say they I mean those mean google people!) So, if you want to keep your page ranking, I suggesting doing as I say and not as I do…. and on with the post.

Providing Fresh Content for Search Engines

Will adding a little fresh content and updating my home page regularly be a good thing?

I thought this might help some of you that are interested in attaining more traffic from the Search Engines. It’s a great way to get free traffic. It does take time to optimize your site to make the Search Engines happy, but it’s time well spent.

Search Engines love fresh content. It’s a well known fact that if you provide fresh content to any page the bots will visit more often to pick it up. And if you have more key words to your sales page, it’ll probably be even more beneficial…

I personally try to update my home page several times per week. I have a “What’s New!” that highlights any new articles, eBooks, or whatever. Which works great! It helps the Spider Bots find that content. If you write a new article, provide a link (with good keyword targeted anchor text of course) from your front page and the next time the bots come by, they’ll pick that article up and index it…

I also have just started a “Some New Thoughts” area on my front page to update a few times a week with fresh content. A good thing for SEs, but also remember… fresh content is also good for your visitors. Giving people a reason to come back is a good thing and making it easier for your visitors to find fresh content is another good thing. Then they can bookmark that home page, come back and in an instant find What’s New!

 

A Brief History Of Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages attractive to internet search engines. Some internet businesses consider search engine optimization to be the subset of search engine marketing.

In the middle of the 1990s webmasters and search engine content providers started optimizing websites. At the time all the webmasters had to do was provide a URL to a search engine and a web crawler would be sent from the search engine. The web crawler would extract link from the webpage and use the information to index the page by down loading the page and then storing it on the search engines server. Once the page was stored on the search engines server a second program, called an indexer, extracted additional information from the webpage, and determines the weight of specific words. When this was complete the page was ranked.

It didn’t take very long for people to understand the importance of being highly ranked.

In the beginning search engines used search algorithms that webmasters provided about the web pages. It didn’t take webmasters very long to start abusing the system requiring search engines to develop a more sophisticated form of search engine optimization. The search engines developed a system that considered several factors; domain name, text within the title, URL directories, term frequency, HTML tags, on page key word proximity, Alt attributes for images, on page keyword adjacency, text within NO FRAMES tags, web content development, sitemaps, and on page keyword sequence. (Phew… that’s a lot of things to know.)

Google developed a new concept of evaluating internet web pages called PageRank. PageRank weighs a web page’s quantity and quality based on the pages incoming links. This method of search engine optimization was so successful that Google quickly began to enjoy consistent praise.

To help discourage abuse by webmasters, several internet search engines, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com, will not disclose the algorithms they use now,when ranking web pages. The signals used today in search engine optimization typically are; keywords in the title, link popularity, keywords in links pointing to the page, PageRank (Google), Keywords that appear in the visible text, links from on page to the inner pages, and placing punch line at the top of the page.

For the most part registering a webpage/website on a search engine is a simple task. All Google requires is a link from a site already indexed and the web crawlers will visit the site and begin to spider its contents. Normally a few days after registering on the search engine the main search engine spiders will begin to index the website.

Some search engines will guarantee spidering and indexing for a small fee. These search engines do not guarantee specific ranking. Webmaster’s who don’t want web crawlers to index certain files and directories use a standard robots.txt file. This file is located in the root directory. Occasionally a web crawler will still crawl a page even if the webmaster has indicated he does not wish the page indexed.

There you go, the history of Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  This is one area each of us who has a webpage needs to learn and understand so that we can continually optimize our webpage to pull in those higher rankings, which inturn pulls in more visitors, which brings in more sales and prospects.

More to come on just how to use Search Engine Optimization to our advantage.

 

 

Must Have Features When You Design Your Website.

Don’t just focus on the home page, keywords and titles.

 

The first step to sales when customers visit your site is to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer has visited your site, now, ensure that they get interested in your products or services and stay around.

 

Motivate them to buy the product by providing clear information.  If you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about each product, maybe by keeping the information on different pages. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details they need.

 

Understand Your Target Customers

 

If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you won’t make much money.

 

Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send emails to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website ask them to complete your survey.

 

Ask them about choices they want to see. Why do they like your products?  Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

 

Does your website give enough contact information?

 

When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. Your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you.

 

People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When offering customers the option to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment services, don’t give them any reason to leave a sale behind.