5 Helpful Tips For A More Effective Search Engine Submission

In the course of helping our valued clients, Panalysis gets to see some good search engine rankings and some not-so-good. We’d like to share our heads-up on avoidable mistakes when your turn comes!

Search engines are a cost effective vehicle to drive targeted visitors to your website. Forrester Research shows that almost 75% of visitors used a search engine to locate new websites, making them a potentially rich source of new customers.

Following some fundamental rules will help you get your search engine submission right the first time.

Here’s a 5-point checklist to ask yourself before you hit the [submit] button!

1. Is my site search engine friendly?
2. Have I built effective links from other relevant websites?
3. Can I monitor when search engines might re-index my site?
4. Did I road test my keywords, copy and headlines with Adwords & Yahoo! (PPC)?
5. How will I measure the effectiveness of my listings and website in the long term?

#1        Is my site search engine friendly?

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 on the website

There are several tools – such as the Freeware Xenu Link Checker - which might help assessing your website against these criteria.

Panalysis has tailored solutions to assess your website and provide advice which is current. Please contact us to arrange this.

#2     Have I built effective links from other relevant websites?

Search engines make significant use of links between websites to evaluate the quality of the content of the site. Google calls this the website’s PageRank. 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 tedious, time consuming process. It is recommended that you implement a system that involves these stages:

• Locate relevant websites and assess 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 then 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 has insight to help identify appropriate sites in your industry vertical and will even approach the publishers on your behalf. Please contact us for further details.

#3.       Can I monitor when search engines might re-index my site?

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 indexed by 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.

#4.       Did I road test my keywords, copy and headlines with PPC?

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

Armed with your proven key words, you can start optimising the pages on your site with a view to ranking higher against these keywords.  The headlines which were tested in your paid advertising can also make for relevant Meta Title Tags for your pages.

There’s a Free Trial available in keyword tools such as WordTracker

Panalysis has more than a decade’s experience in keyword research, Ad testing and best-practice PPC campaign management. Please see our Internet Marketing Plan page or contact us for further information.

#5.       How will I measure the effectiveness of my listings and website in the long term?

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 a market leader in website analysis can execute this testing on your behalf.

To discuss how these suggestions might relate to your own website, please contact us.