Getting Hits
Your web business is dependant of customers, and mostly with their ability to find your web site. You can spend a big buck to advertising in traditional and online media, or rely on grassroot techniques, such as being listed in search engines and word of mouth.
Search Engines
If you want to have your business flourish through search engines; you need to achieve only one thing. Your website should be the number one in Google when people are searching with terms relevant to your shop. This is hard and you may not ever reach the goal. Fortunately it is almost as good to be on the first page of Google search results, but unfortunately this as almost as hard.
There are several web sites and books devoted to the fine art of optimising your site position in Google. While they have some nice ideas, usually you do not get anywhere following their advices or Google even bans your site as you are breaking the rules of the game.
To prosper in Google, you need to do three basic things:
- Create a site with good content that is updated regularly.
- Have it listed in Google, by submitting the URL with a form found in Google pages.
- Have good sites to link to your site.
The first bullet is the most essential and usually neglected in Google optimisation tricks, as good content is hard to produce and update. But it is the key for the third bullet — to have somebody link to your site — that is the real key for improving your rank in Google.
Google uses several techniques to calculate a ranking number for a page. The page content and metadata counts, as well as emphasises inside text, such as headings and bolded text, but Google takes other pages refering to the page into account, too. If a page that has high ranking points to your page, your page will get some share of the ranking points as well.
High ranking pages are, of course, pages that have good content and refering pages with high ranking. And these are the pages that you should be most interested in. The philosophy in Google is that good pages tend to refer to other good pages.
Unfortunately there is no short way to success having somebody to link to your site. You have to get your pages to be thought as an established site that offers some additional value for the visitors of another sites. When you think that you have something to offer for some site, ask that if they could link to you. Make sure that you have already linked to them.
You can list your sites to link lists such as Yahoo! and dmoz.org to gain more publicity and some incoming links. If there is an established webring or Yahoo! groups available for the topic of your site, try to get yourself listed into those, too.
A word of warning: Do not ask linking before you have a ready site. It also helps if your site has pleasing layout and clean navigation. Do not beg linking and if someone refuses, do not bombard him or her with e-mails.
If you do not see any improvement on your ranking, consider buying advertisements from Google. This approach is preferable to trying to cheat your ranking up.
You know that your site is gaining respect when people start to ask you to link to them. Make a policy and do not link with everybody, but always think your audience and ponder if they would benefit from the link. In this way your site does not degenerate to a mere link collection.
Other Search Engines
If you have successfully improved your Google ranking, your site will have top rankings in other search engines, too. This is due to the fact that all search engines use similar algorithms to rank the pages. There are variations, of course, as some search engines give better rankings for sites that advertise with them.
Keeping the Ranking
Once you have secured a good ranking in search engines, and your site is also listed at the most relevant directories or link lists in your domain, the hardest part of the work begins. You have to keep that position.
Again, there is no simple way of staying at the top; you just have to be one step ahead of your competitors. Stay tuned with the current trends, or better yet, create them. Write more compelling content, keep your site constantly up to date, and create a community of people helping you in the mission.
It is a lot easier to gain bad reputation than to get your site established well. Try to understand your visitors and learn from them. Study your log files to understand where people are coming from, and target your efforts to the missing locations or forge stronger ties with the current ones. Simultaneously, keep the site rolling and develop new features.
Sounds hard? Yes, but if you do not work hard, you cannot play hard.