Get your website found

GET YOUR WEBSITE FOUND
Working on your website to ensure
it’s found by the search engines – for
the right terms!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Introduction 1
1. Some experts claim to understand completely how search engines such as Google work. We
believe that only the authors and programmers actually working on the search engine systems
today have this knowledge.
2. Search engine systems which provide search engine listings such as Google and Yahoo are hot
property and the authors and programmers are not going to reveal all their trade secrets.
3. Sometimes the programs used by the search engines are ‘tweaked’. We have seen this happen
several times over the past few years. The effect is that sites can move around a little in the
listings. Bear this in mind as you work on your sites SEO. If one day your site vanishes off the
coveted page 1 position it doesn’t mean your site has become broken.
4. Our observations are practical, based over time and over a moderately large client base. We host
around 400 companies.
5. We regularly hold ‘jamming sessions’ in house each week where we look at each genre of site in
our portfolio from the point of SEO.

Google
1. In the UK prime consideration is given in most companies SEO targets to a websites positioning
in Google. Other search engines are often neglected.
2. Google is very important, but we believe that your ignore other search engines at your peril.
3. Huge amounts of data relating to search engine usage are collected by Comscore in the U.S.A.
http://www.comscore.com/ This data is used by many of the world's leading corporations to better
understand, leverage and profit from the internet. We are investigating sources which can provide
this information for the UK and Europe which we can trust right now.
4. We believe Google is more popular in the UK, taking share from Microsoft, Ask and Time Warner
bringing Google’s share to somewhere between 62% and 70%.
Comscore results for the U.S.A for January and
February 2007 (around 7 billion searches)
Web surfers used Google for 3.3 billion search
queries. Yahoo served 2 billion, MSN served 730
million, Ask.com served 348 million, and Time
Warner sites, including AOL, served 338 million
searches in February.

How do you get your website into the search engine listings ?
1. If you have a solution with us you don’t have to do anything since we portfolio your site when it is
live on one of our websites. When the search engines ‘crawl’ our site using their ‘spiders’ your site
will be found and indexed.
2. BUT … This can take time.
3. You should submit your sites manually to Google and Yahoo. We know this accelerates the
process of being indexed (and re-indexed).
4. To submit to Google visit http://www.google.co.uk and then follow the link ‘About Google’, then
follow the link ‘Submitting your site’. Follow the instructions and enter your website address. Read
the insructions carefully.
5. Don’t submit any site to Google more once in any 24 hour period. We have observed that Google
doesn’t like this and concensus in the industry is that all submissions which are classed as
multiple are at risk of being discarded.
6. To submit to Yahoo visit http://www.yahoo.co.uk and follow the link ‘How to suggest a site’ at the
bottom of the page, then follow the link ‘Submit your site for free’. You will be required to register
to complete the submission.

What about free search engine listings ?
1. Our experience is that these do not appear to provide a great deal of value to our clients websites.
2. We have made a point of choosing one or two websites and spending several days submitting
these sites to the free listings and observing the results.
3. The return on investment in terms of quality traffic balanced against the time you have to spend
and the spam that is received tends to be very poor.
4. Most of these free sites try very hard to encourage you to provide marketing information such as
names, addresses, telephone and email details.
5. You will find that on many of these sites the terms and conditions allow them to pass marketing
information on. This is valuable sales property for them. If you do submit to free listings be
cautious. Don’t give too much private information away.
6. We believe that submitting your site to fee listings actually benefits the free listing providers far
more than you.
7. You are generating quality human input content for them which when aggregated makes them in
turn attractive to search engines.
8. They tend to make most of their money from advertising and you tend to be buried in a section
alongside other similarly grouped organisations and are often very hard to find.

Linking
1. Relevant inbound links to your site will generate traffic and will been seen by the search engines
as a boost to your sites value.
2. Reciprocal links on the other hand need to be made more cautiously. Make sure that the links are
really relevant.
3. On the previous site page we talked about free listings. An extension to the creation of free
listings sites are automated mailings which are sent to you from these sites which look like they
are addressed to you personally. They claim that they can help you generate relevant links.
4. This is true, sort of, except again you will provide a prominent key link on your site. Your link from
them will simply be buried in a mass of similar links. The value is not in your favour. Steer clear of
these since they will take up precious link space on your site which has low value.
5. Contact your suppliers and people who you sell products for. Don’t be afraid to ask for a link from
their site to yours. Most of the time they will agree.
[Footnote: Make sure every single piece of collateral you have carries your web address]

DMOZ – A trade secret
1. DMOZ. This can be found at http://www.dmoz.org.
2. It is the Open Directory Project, and is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory
of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors .
3. Some automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search
queries. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can't keep up with
submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered.
4. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular
search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot,
DirectHit, and hundreds of others.
5. These engines buy and regularly refresh their listings from DMOZ. Acceptance by DMOZ
basically guarantees that you will be comprehensively indexed worldwide.
6. To submit to DMOZ follow the link called ‘Suggest URL’ located in the upper right hand corner of
the main page and very carefully follow the rules.
7. You can submit your site only once so it is vital you get this right first time.
8. After you have submitted to DMOZ you just have to wait …

Pages hidden off the main menu (landing pages) have a dual purpose !
The simplest reason for using a page hidden off the main menu is when you want people to access
extra information about a subject but do not feel this information should be taking up valuable real
estate on your menu bar. A classic example is on a contact page you may want a large map or
instructions on how to get to your office. Simply uncheck the page from the menu and create an
internal link to the page from the relevant section on your website.
1. Go to Website Pages and
choose the page you wish
to hide from the menu. In
this case it is Custom Page
1. (This is restricted to any
of the 15 Custom Pages
only.)
2. Check the relevant Hidden
on Menu box (shown
circled in green), then click
update
3. Create an internal link to this page from the dropdown menu in the links tool as described in
the

Landing pages – Also sometimes known as VAC’s (Value Added Content pages)
The less simple and more powerful reason for using a page hidden off the main menu is to assist search
engine optimisation.
1. VAC’s are a very easy way to significantly increase your footprint on the web. To increase the
number of search keys your site generates and to provide a draw to visitors.
2. For example, suppose your site is a florist site and you have eCommerce. You could add a page
called Flower Preparation another called Flower Care and so on.
3. It is especially useful if you can provide VAC’s which are not completely ‘core’ to the purpose of your
site, but which extend your core offering slightly while still keeping on topic.
4. This extends the footprint of your presence on the net since you cover wider topic areas and
introduce new keywords on those pages.
5. When you are constructing your VAC’s imagine you are building a funnel spider-web to draw those
visitors in.

Variable content
1. Sites which are ‘refreshed’ from time to time, which have variable content, work better than sites
which are built and then left alone.
2. People like to see fresh content, and if they know a site is updated regularly will tend to return
more often.
3. Our observation, based over a long period of time is that Google does seem to re-visit sites where
the content is changed much more often than sites where the content does not change.

Variable content – News Articles
1. The News Articles facility which is provided in Webboutiques is a very powerful way of providing
easy variable content.
2. News article summary descriptions should be kept terse and to the point. They form nuggets of
valuable content.
3. News articles have a finite life span, but they don’t leave the system until you actually delete
them. This is by design. A future upgrade which is coming soon will optionally reveal this valuable
archive which can be fully indexed.
4. You can program news articles in advance. They won’t appear on your site until they are due. You
can use this powerful facilty to set up the month ahead in advance.
5. Some websites are using the News Article facility very imaginatively. For example, one site (an art
gallery), has renamed this Exhibitions and are using this heavily with up to six months worth of
pre-set events.

Variable content – The Gallery
1. Visitors are often attracted to your sites imagery.
2. Google has a special images search facility. Visit http://www.google.co.uk and follow the images
link (this is probably the most comprehensive image search facility on the web).
3. Type in the word radio into the search box and then click the Google Search button.
Note that the descriptions accompanying these images are meaningful and informative, rather
than say picture 1, picture 2 and so on. Good descriptions help these images to be found.

A note about Word
1. Webboutiques is designed to be compatible with Word.
2. But sometimes Word can generate strange artifacts on your web pages. Word documents contain
huge amounts of formatting which can sometime interfere with a web pages look and
performance.
3. You can clean a word document by clicking the paste from Word button in the toolbar (instead of
pasting directly into the page). This brings up a pop-up box for you to paste the copy into. It
automatically takes the formatting out and turns it into clean html.
4. Once the cleaned content is in the Webboutiques editing panel it is a simple and surprisingly
quick process to reposition the text sections..
5. A word of caution about Word page sizes. We have sometimes seen pages which have been
pasted from Word compared to pages which have been created directly in Webboutiques or have
been cleaned, vary considerably in size..
6. Later on when we talk about page analysis tools we will show you how to determine what your
page size is and what is acceptable.

Webboutiques – SEO support – Basic indexing 1
1. Webboutiques has been designed from the ground upwards to provide SEO support.
2. Every page, product entry, catalogue entry, gallery entry, news item is individually indexed.
3. Accompanying the indexing of the site is an automatically generated site map. This produces a
highly focused one stop page for the search engines to index your site.
4. We have found that most sites who use the Webboutiques system receive two index entries for
each item in the product catalogue.
5. The site map is very powerful and while you can switch it off we strongly recommend that you do
not do so.
6. Even if you do not have eCommerce or are not using the catalogue consider other ways that it
can be used. It can help significantly to increase your internet footprint. It is very versatile.
7. For example, one site which is being built has called the catalogue ‘Accomodation’ and is using
this as a mini-property site. The catalogue allows the upload of accompanying files to be made
and this is being used in this case for floor-plans
8. Another site (a band), is using the catalogue specfically to provide ring-tones of their own music.
This is a terrific draw.

1. There are four key parts to any web page which the search engines expect to see. These need to
be carefully crafted with respect to each other to work to their best.
2. Humans can see two of these parts. The other two are not visible to humans unless you look at
the machine readable page source. All four should be present.
3. The page title at the top of each browser window and the page content are the two human
readable components.
4. The other two, referred to as the page META Description tag and META keywords tags are
embedded in the machine readable source.
5. Four key parts to every page ... Title, Content, META Description and META keywords.
6. The Content you set throught any Webboutiques solution simply by editing the web pages through
the Webboutiques editing panels.

1. Some sections of Webboutiques are prepared for SEO automatically. These are News Articles.
The product Catalalogue. The Contact Us page. The Subscribe and Unsubscribe pages and the
Gallery. Key information is extracted from the fields you supply.
2. Some sections benefit from being prepared by hand.
3. That part of the Webboutiques solution which is concerned with hand prepared SEO is found by
following the link Web Site Pages and then using the far right-most column Search Engine
Preparation

1. The page title, META Description and META keywords you set by filling in the following fields.
2. The system will fill these with default values which satisfy basic search engine criteria.
3. But what to actually put in these fields ?

Webboutiques – Title, META Description and META keywords
1. To build these, first populate your site with content.
2. Keep the content throughout the site as succinct as reasonably possible while at the same time
maintaining readability.
3. It’s a fine balance between making pages index well through the search engines by keeping down
unwanted words and making the text enjoyable and informative to read. If it doesn’t come
naturally to you and you are really struggling use a copywriter to help you.
4. Then you have three basic choices to develop the Title, META Description and META keywords.
5. Use a keyword analyst. They will tell you what to put into the your site pages.
6. Put in the title, META Description and META keywords as you believe they should be and then
submit your site to the search engines and wait and see.
7. BUT ...
8. You can use tools to massively improve your chances of getting this right and to refine your page
search engine components as time goes by.

Some very important points to bear in mind
1. It is really important to have the correct level of expectation for how long it will take to generate
traffic when you set up a website.
2. Depending on the nature of your site it can take up to six months to achieve good traffic results.
3. Niche sites will index highly quicker than sites which have a lot of competition. Think about an
angle which is relevant to your site but which distinguishes you from the competition. Work this
into Value Added Content pages.
4. It takes hard work and/or money and time to make the site SEO work well.
5. The most important message is that you get out of your site what you put into it.
6. Study your competition. We will have mentioned this many times during this training day. Keep
studying the competition and keep an eye on them even when you have your ranking search
engines positions.
7. Always remember the internet is a level playing field.

Get your website found

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