The Costco Connection (February 2011) recently featured an article titled "Nine Steps to Getting Your Website Noticed" by Andy Tilbrook. The original article is available at http://www.costcoconnection.com/connection/201102?pg=28#pg28.
Here are highlights of the tips:
- Be sure to submit your website to the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing). Links are:
- Submit your site to dmoz, a human-reviewed non-profit Web-monitoring project that links to Google's directory. Link is: www.dmoz.org/help/submit.html
- Include a sitemap, which provides a list of your web site's pages for the major search engines. You can generate a sitemap automatically at www.xml-sitemaps.com. After generating the map, you will need to upload it to your website and submit it to the search engines.
- Be sure the content of your site includes the key words and phrases that people would enter into search engines when they are looking for the type of product or service that you offer.
- Try using Google's keyword tool to get ideas for keywords to include in your site. Link is: www.google.com/sktool/
- Be sure the filenames of your photos include descriptive keywords, such as avoid_gum_surgery.jpg. (And don't forget to include the "Alt" tags.)
- Encourage links from other (related) websites to yours. For example, when commenting on blog articles that are related to your business, be sure to include a link back to a relevant page on your website. Also, ask for other sites to link to yours. For example, if you sell volleyball uniforms, ask the webmaster for your local volleyball club to link from the volleyball club's site to your site.
- Use informative description and title meta tags on each page of your site. These tags are not visible to website users, but most search engines employ them when creating a listing for your website's pages in their indexes.
- Use relevant, visible headings that employ your search engine keywords throughout your site.
If you would like us to help improve your site's search rankings using the tips below, please contact us.
