Search Engine Submission - 5 Mistakes to Avoid

Do you make these mistakes when submitting to search engines?

Search engines are an effective way to bring targeted visitors to your website. With Forrester Research showing that almost 75% of visitors use search engines to locate new websites, search engines are a prime channel to attract potential customers.

However for your search engine submission to be effective it must be done right.

Here are the top 5 mistakes that we see companies making when they submit their website to search engines:

• Not checking that their site is search engine friendly before submitting.
• Not having effective links from other websites before submitting.
• Not having a system to monitor when search engines are updating their databases.
• Not testing the keywords, copy and headlines of the web pages prior to submitting the site.
• Not having a system to monitor and measure the effectiveness of their search engine listings and website.

Mistake #1 Not checking that their site is search engine friendly before submitting

There are several reasons why your website may not rank highly in search engines or even included in the search engines databases. Whilst a full discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this article, you should at least make sure that your pages all have:

• appropriate and descriptive titles,
• good copy that is written for people and not search engines,
• made sure that all of the pages in the site can be accessed by the search engine, e.g. don't use Flash or JavaScript as the only way to navigate between pages in the website

There are several tools that can assist you to assess your website against these criteria. These include: Xenu Link Checker (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) Price Free

Alternatively Panalysis can assess your website on your behalf and advise you accordingly. Please contact us to arrange this.

Mistake #2 Not having effective links from other websites before submitting

Search engines make significant use of links between websites to evaluate the quality of the content of the site. In Google this is known as the PageRank of the website. A crucial component of any search engine optimisation strategy is to obtain a wide range of links from strategically selected websites.

Obtaining links from other websites can be a time consuming process. It is recommended that you implement a system that involves these stages:

• Locating relevant websites and assessing their suitability to obtain links to your site
• Write to the owners of these sites with an offer to exchange links. It is wise to have already added the link to their website first and draw their attention to this.
• Follow up in 14 days if you have not heard back from the site owner, and
• Drop their site from your links page if you have not heard back in 30 days

Panalysis can assist you in locating appropriate sites in your industry and writing to them on your behalf. Please contact us for further details.

Mistake #3 Not having a system to monitor when search engines are updating their databases

If your site is larger than just a few pages, there is a good chance that your site will not have every page on it included in every search engine's database. Additionally you should identify how frequently your site is being updated in the search engine. If you have added new content to your website or have changed the existing content, it can take a month or so for this to be reflected in the database of the search engines. Once your site has a higher credibility in the search engines this will occur more frequently.

Panalysis strongly recommends the ClickTracks Optimizer software for its Robot Reports feature.

All major search engines now offer some form of paid placement advertising. This is a useful tool to testing which keywords and advertising copy works best to attract sales. The key advantage of using paid placement advertising is that a large number of tests can be conducted in a relatively short period of time to determine the best combination of keywords, offer, headlines, copy, etc that suit your site.

Only after you have identified which particular keywords are suitable for optimizing pages on your site should you then start to fine tune your web pages to rank highly against these keywords. You should also test headlines in your advertisements and these headlines be added to the titles of your web pages.

Panalysis specialises in testing advertisements, researching keywords and developing internet marketing plans. Please see our Internet Marketing Plan page or contact us for more information. Otherwise if you prefer to do it yourself, we recommend WordTracker to identify the most useful keywords.

Search engine marketing is a continuous process that involves far more than simply obtaining high ranking positions. You need to constantly monitor how many people visit your website from search engines, what keywords they are using, how many of them convert into a sale or sales lead, etc. The secret to success is test, test, test and test again.

Panalysis can either do this testing on your behalf and we encourage you to contact us to discuss your requirements. If you prefer to do this yourself we strongly recommend the following products:

• ClickTracks Optimizer or Professional products for this testing.
• Ranking Manager for monitoring the search engine rankings

If you want to discuss your own website and how to apply these principles, please contact us.

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