Using Search Engines To Market Your Webeden.co.uk Website - Part 2

By Author: Ken Builder
Total Articles: 1
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Introduction

In the first part of this article we looked at ways that you can use the sponsored listings on search engines to drive visitors to your website. This time around we're going to be looking at boosting your website in the organic listings on search engines, a process known as Search Engine Optimisation. If you're a website builder, then you're going to want to get this right from the start.

Search Engine Optimisation

This is the process by which your website appears on the left hand side of the search engine results page. Also referred to as the ‘organic' results, Google decides what to put on the results page by sending out ‘spiders' that search the web, reading every page and categorising them into a huge directory. The spiders decide what your website is all about, and then decide how important your website is. There are two things you need to do in order to appear high up in the results. First, make it very clear to the spiders what your website is about. Second, make your page appear very important. This is a whole art in itself, but here are the basic areas you need to look at

Changes ...
... you can make to your website - ‘on page optimisation'

There are two separate ways to optimise your website so you can tell the search engine spiders what each page is about. The first is to modify the non-visible elements, such as the page title, meta keywords and meta descriptions. Within Webeden.co.uk this is very easy to do in the control panel - in fact its an important reason to build a website using the Sitemaker platform. Just go to ‘Admin' and then from drop down menu choose ‘site keywords' and ‘site description'. Enter the keywords and information that you want to appear for. If your site has many different pages then choose different keywords for each page. Its important that these keywords reflect the actual visible content of the website, and aren't about a completely different subject

The second way is to tell the search engines what each page is about, is to actually include visible text on your page, and to include your important keywords within the text. You need to make your keywords make up approximately 5% of the total content. Any headlines on the page should include the keywords too. Once again, you need to choose different keywords for each page of your site.

Off-page optimisation

The second and perhaps most important way you can boost your position in the organic SERPs, to reap the benefits when you make your own website, is by generating inbound links to your website from other websites. You also need to make sure those inbound links are using anchor text - that's the actual words on the webpage that link to your site - are keywords that you want to appear high up for. So using the pens website example from above, you need to get inbound links to your website using the anchor text ‘buy pens'. Google places about 60% of the value of your website according to these inbound links, by looking at the ‘value' of the websites linking to you, and the text they use to link to your site.

There's lots of ways to generate inbound links to your website. A few are:

- Make posts in forums that include links to your website

- Make comments on blogs, especially build your own website related ones, and contribute to debates, always including a link back to your site

- Buy links using a service like text-link-ads.com

- Send out press releases that contain links to your site

- Write articles (like this one) and post them in article directories, and Google Knol

- Ask your customers and visitors to link to your site

- Contact the owners of websites that you think would benefit from knowing about your website, and ask them to link to you

- Submit your website to as many as possible website directories, including dmoz.org and Yahoo!

Summary

Search engines are the single biggest source of traffic for websites, and something you need to think about when you build a website. You need to market using search engines in order drive high levels of traffic to your site. This doesn't have to be expensive - in fact it will probably be the most effective source of traffic. Get it right and your website will be a guaranteed success.

About the Author:
Ken Builder is the Webmaster at http://www.webeden.co.uk and wants everyone to build a website for free. Try the website builder now.