Introduction to getting free listings

Google is the most popular and widely used search engine. Once you get a top listing in Google you will see visitors to your site skyrocket. The question is, how do you get to the top of a search engine like this?

The most powerful way to get listed with this particular engine is to build links to your web site. Google is a ‘crawler’ search engine which follows links. So if you have good links pointing at your web site, the crawlers are more likely to find and include your pages.

Aside from just finding your site from links, Google does provide an "Add URL" page that lets you submit a URL directly to its crawler:

http://www.Google.com/addurl.html

There’s no guarantee that they will actually include a URL submitted to it this way, however. You may, if you wish, submit your home page to Google via their Add URL page. The only reason for submitting some of your inside pages, is in case there is a problem reaching them from your home page. This gives Google an alternate route into your site. From whatever page it visits, it will look for links to other pages that you have and perhaps include those. This is true for other crawlers, as well.

How do you make your website crawler "friendly"? Given below are some proven strategies that can get you a search engine listing quickly.

Researching Keywords - The First Step

 

Researching keyword to get free listings on a search engine such as Google is different to researching keywords for Google Adwords. With Google Adwords you are looking for as many keyword combinations as possible. You want to try as many targeted keyword phrases as you can to ensure that at least some of those phrases will only cost you 5 cents per click.

With free listings you want to find only a few keyword phrases … you want to find phrases that many people are searching for, but not so many people have web pages with that phrase in it. You want keyword phrases where there are lots of people searching, but little competition from other pages in Google. This is sometimes a little difficult to find because there are a lot of pages in the search engine, but you can find them. These are going to be phrases that are not so difficult to get top rankings for in the search engine, but have a lot of people searching for them, so they can potentially give you a nice stream of visitors to your site.

How to research keywords to a get a free listing on an engine like Google

To do this properly you should ideally have either the Wordtracker tool or the SiteBuildIt software. Both of these tools have an automated way of doing this which will make something that would normally take 10 or 20 hours to do, easily achievable in 1 or 2 hours or even less.

The research phase

The first phase is to research as many keyword possibilities as possible. This is similar to the first phase of researching keywords for Google Adwords. You want as many keyword ideas as possible. You can use all the ideas that you came up with for Google Adwords. The more ideas the better, and misspellings are really useful as well, especially if they are commonly used misspellings. Unfortunately you can’t research misspellings properly on the Overture search suggestion tool, so you will need Wordtracker orSiteBuildIt to research misspellings properly. So you keep doing this until you get a long list of eyword phrases.

The analysis phase

This is the part where it is much easier if you have the Wordtracker tool or the SiteBuildIt software. However it is possible to do it without either of these tools and here is how it is done.

What we are trying to do is to find keyword phrases that are searched for quite often in search engines, but where there are few pages in the search engine with that exact keyword phrase. So, you need to make a list of all the keyword phrases on an excel spreadsheet, and then next to each phase record firstly the number of searches in the past month, and secondly the number of times that it come up in the results when you search for that phrase.

To find the number of searches in the past month you are using either the overture search suggestion tool, or the Wordtracker tool. For example, to find the number of times that the phrase comes up in Google you simply type the phrase into Google and see how many results come up. You actually want to type the phrase in inverted commas, because this will give you the number of pages with the exact phrase on the page which is a better indication of your competition. You can then do a simple ratio by dividing the number of competing pages by the number of searches. Wordtracker has a more complicated formula for doing this which will give you an even better indication of how good the phrase is.

Here is a simple example:

 

Phrase	No of searches	No of competing	Ratio competing/searches
Digital camera	1344810	3360000	=2.49
Digital camera review	78928	83700	=1.06
Best digital camera	13935	109000	=7.82
Digital camera comparison	10935	8800	=0.80
Buy digital camera	4954	16300	=3.29

So to look at the last column for example, the no of searches for buy digital camera was 4954 according to the Overture search suggestion tool. You get this by typing in digital camera into the suggestion tool, and it will show you a list of phrases with digital camera in the phrase. As you look down the list you will see buy digital camera with 4954 searches (this number of searches changes each month, so it might be different if you look at it right now).

The second column is the number of competing pages which you get by typing "buy digital camera" into Google and it says that there are 16300 pages with that exact phrase in the page. The last column is simply the number of competing pages divided by the number of searches.

So what does this all mean? Basically you can see with this table a rough indication of how difficult it would be to get a top ten ranking in an engine like Google. You want to find phrases where the number of searches is high, but the no of competing pages is low. With the phrase "digital camera" there are 3.3 million competition web pages. This means it is going to be very difficult to get a top 10 listing in Google for this phrase. On the other hand, there are only 8800 competing web pages for the phrase "digital camera comparison", so it is much more achievable to get a top 10 listing in Google. The ratio gives you a rough indication of how good the phrase is. The lower the better.

Deciding on the best keywords to focus on

So you can use this process to decided on what keywords to focus on for your site. Each page should have a keyword phrase that you are trying to get the top of the search engine for. Select 10-30 phrases for the site, depending upon how large you want the site to be. The home page keyword should be the most important keyword phrase, the phrase with a large number of searches on the search engine.

Select phrases (at least two words), rather than single words, as there is usually too much competition for single word searches. Single words lead to lower success. You are much better off narrowing down your search keywords and using longer phrases.

What are the important factors for getting free listings?

Keyword density

This is a fairly important factor for getting your website into the top 10 on Google for a particular search phrase. Each page on your site should have a different keyword phrase that you are trying to optimize for, the phrase that you are trying to get to the top of the search engine for.

The location of keywords on your website is vital. You may have placed keywords at only a few locations but if they are inserted at prominent positions, your Google ranking may be boosted. The most prominent position is the Title of the page. Ensure that your keyword is placed in the Title.

Another proven strategy is to place keywords towards the beginning of the web page. For instance, inserting keywords in page headlines, other sub-titles, and introductory paragraphs would certainly help rankings.

Meta tags - why you don’t need to worry about these

What are Meta tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag, information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, Meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. The most important Meta tags are Title, Keyword, and Description.

Meta tags may help you with some search engines. On the other hand, you can find many highly ranked web pages without Meta tags. This is especially true for Google. The Google ranking algorithm does not pay much attention to Meta tags. Thus, it is recommended that you do not pay much attention to working out most Meta tags for your website. However, the Title tag is an important one for search engines like Google, as that is often the first one indexed and it is given higher weighting in the relevance rankings. Let us discuss this tag in more detail.

Title tags

The Title tag should be kept short (lower than 40 characters). Moreover it should have material relevant to the keywords used during search. As an example, if you had stuffed your Company Name as the TITLE tag, it is not going to help with your search rankings. The visitor that you want to attract is unlikely to be looking for your Company name in the search string of Google. Think creatively as to what keywords people would use if they were looking for goods or services that your site offers.

H1 tags

Apart from the Title Tag, there is also the heading tag (H1) that may be useful. Google indexes heading tags in a similar way to the Title tag. However, the heading tags that are towards the beginning of the web page may be given more importance as compared to those at the end of the page.

Other important factors to consider for good search engine rankings

Have relevant content

Positioning keywords into web pages for better ranking should not be confused with spamming. Whatever you do, avoid spamming and keyword stuffing. Search Engines like Google have mechanisms that can spot spamming and as a result ignore such web pages. The key is to insert just "enough" keywords into the web page so as to make the content relevant. Moreover, keywords have to be consistent with the entire content of the web page. In other words, do not insert non-relevant keywords just for the sake of improving page rankings.

A pretty page or a page that makes you money

Many webmasters believe that adding more graphics to a web page will make it more attractive. However there is a major problem in that Search Engines cannot read images. A web page should be rich with HTML text rather than graphics. This makes the site more relevant as Google can easily scan text.

Write a persuasive home page

Writing a strong homepage that will rank high in a search engine and will read well with your site visitors can sometimes present a challenge, even to some seasoned SEO professionals. Once you have clearly identified your exact keywords and key phrases, the exact location on your homepage where you will place those carefully researched keywords will have a drastic impact in the end results of your homepage optimization.

If you need powerful rankings in a search engine and at the same time you want to successfully convert your visitors and prospects into real buyers, it’s important to write your homepage in a way that achieves both of these aims. You should always remember that a powerfully optimized homepage pleases both the search engine and your prospects. In randomly inserting keywords and key phrases into your homepage, you might get higher rankings buy you will definitely put off your visitors. Your page needs to persuade the human visitors as well as "persuading" the search engine to rank you near the top.

ALT Text

Search Engines like Google are unable to view graphics or distinguish text that might be contained within them. For this reason it reads the content of the image ALT tags to determine the purpose of a graphic. By taking the time to craft relevant and keyword rich ALT tags for the images on your web site, you increase the keyword density of your site.

Although search engines read and index the text contained within ALT tags, it’s important NOT to go overboard in using these tags as part of your campaign. Search engines do not give immense importance to such text and unnecessary use may be viewed as spam.

The most important factor - Links with the correct keyword text in the incoming link

We discussed some of the strategies to make a crawler friendly website and in turn improve free listing ranking in search engines. The most important factor, however, is having links from other websites point to your website. The number and quality of links coming into your site is sometimes referred to as your "link popularity".

Your "link popularity" is simply a count of the number and the quality of web pages that are linked to you. Improving your website’s link popularity is absolutely vital for improving the visibility of your website with regard to Search Engines. For example, Google is a crawler-based search engine that has a component called the spider, which crawls from one webpage to another through links.

Google gives sites with good inbound and outbound links a higher ranking. The logic goes that if you provide outbound links to other material you are providing a valuable service: and, if other sites link to you then you must have content of value.

Link popularity can be improved by providing something known as reciprocal linking. This implies that you contact other similar websites and have their link placed on your website in exchange for your website link being placed on theirs. This is a win-win situation for both the websites.

Google PageRank (or PR) - what is it?

Google web search technology involves the use of its ingeniously designed PageRank Technology. Essentially what this is a calculation of the popularity of a web page, which depends upon how many links are coming into that page. Google counts each link as a ‘vote’, and calculates the importance of a page by the number of such ‘votes’ it receives. Not only that, Google also assesses the importance of the pages that are involved in the voting process. So, PageRank does not depend on just how many links are coming into your site. If this were the case it would be easy for you to create 1000’s of automated pages, submit them to Google and have them all link to your site, thus increasing your PageRank. This does not work. You need to have high quality sites linking to your site … the PageRank of the site linking to your site must be high in order for it ‘pass on’ PageRank to your site. The bottom line for you is this means that you must get links from sites that have a high PageRank, for you to get a high listing in Google.

How to see your Google PageRank

The way to see your Google PageRank is by downloading the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.Google.com). The Google Toolbar displays a green bar that gives you a rough indication of the PageRank of any page. The PageRank on the toolbar varies from 0 to 10. The higher your PageRank, the more likely your page is to rank on Google.

Where and how to seek reciprocal linking

Once you have found the candidate sites that have high link popularity and link quality, the next step is to choose those that you believe may agree to reciprocal linking. Your competitors are unlikely to link to you, but you can try sites which are not directly competitive but in a similar area to you. Several sites have a page where they list useful links or relevant links, as a service to their site visitors. You can locate the email of the company or of the person who handles link requests for such list pages.

 

• When you make a request for reciprocal linking, approach the target site owner or webmaster by providing your URL and a short description and explain how providing this link would be a valuable and useful addition for the benefit of their audience. The description is important as often that would be what appears in their links page. Offer them reciprocal linking from your site’s links and resources page. Better still tell them that you have already provided a reciprocal link to their site.

 

• Build a good links and resources page on your website. Present the links in an organized manner so that this is useful to your site visitors too. Of course, you do not want this links page to be amongst the first pages accessed by your visitor, as this may induce the person to leave your site. Some webmasters try to build a standalone links page that is totally isolated from all other pages on their site. This would perhaps provide an URL to the reciprocal link provider, but in reality it is not a genuine link page at all. Avoid these tactics; they will not work in the long run.

 

• Finally, not all sites are equal and therefore not all links are equal. A link from a high traffic industry portal is worth infinitely more that a link from a low-traffic free-for-all site. Concentrate of giving the search engines what they really want - great content, well-organized, well-published and linked to other relevant material. Concentrate on that and you will be rewarded.

Submitting to directories

One of the best ways to get quality links to your site is to submit your site to directories. What are directories? Basically they are sites that are organized by humans, with a list of various sites in different categories. The biggest directory is called the Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org) which is edited by tens of thousands of volunteer editors. If you can get into dmoz this will be a big bonus for your site as it will often give your site significant PageRank. It is sometimes quite hard to get listed in dmoz as there is a backlist of sites that the editors are waiting to review.

Should you even bother to submit to search engines like Google?

If you have a brand new web site, it will probably take about a month before search engines list your web pages. As stated earlier, search engines like Google does not provide any guarantee that your site would be listed if submitted through the Add URL page. Besides, if you make your website crawler "friendly" it is very likely that your site would get listed through links even before it is listed through the Add URL facility. Thus, submitting your site is almost a waste of time.

How to make sure you don’t get banned from Search Engines

Over the years, Search Engines have been constantly improving their ranking mechanisms. A couple of years ago, webmasters would resort to creating fake links and other illegitimate activities to improve their website ranking, and it worked too. However, such activities can only have a negative impact now. If an engine comes across foul strategies, it may not only ignore your website but also ban it.

Here are some tactics to avoid in order to ensure that your site doesn’t get banned from Search Engines.

Link spamming

Realizing the importance of links popularity and link analysis in search results, several link farms and Free for All sites have appeared that offer to provide links to your site. This is also referred to as link spamming. Search Engines like Google are smart (they have 50 PHD’s working full time to improve their search technology) and know how to spot this and ban sites employing them. Such FFA sites, as they are known, do not provide link quality or link context, two factors that are important in link analysis. Thus the correct strategy is to avoid link spamming and not get carried away by what seems to be too simple a solution.

Invisible or Hidden Text

Invisible text is content on a web site that is coded in a manner that makes it invisible to human visitors, but readable by search engine spiders. This is done in order to artificially inflate the keyword density of a web site without affecting the visual appearance of it. Hidden text is a recognized spam tactic and engines such as Google recognize and penalize sites that use this tactic.

Tiny Text

This is the technique of placing text on a page in a small font size. Pages that are predominantly heavy in tiny text may be dismissed as spam. Or, the tiny text may not be indexed. As a general guideline, try to avoid pages where the font size is predominantly smaller than normal. Make sure that you’re not spamming the engine by using keyword after keyword in a very small font size. Your tiny text may be a copyright notice at the very bottom of the page, or even your contact information. If so, that’s fine

Doorway or Gateway pages

Doorway pages are pages that have been designed for one purpose only, to rank high in the search engines like Google for a particular keyword and then direct the arriving visitors further into the site. Usually their design is relatively simplistic and includes a lot of text, but contains very little graphics or other fancy effects.

Doorway pages focus on particular keywords and phrases targeted for search engines and serve as an entry page to visitors. These used to be a popular means to achieve high rankings with Search Engines, but recently, Google has started completely ignoring websites with doorway pages.

Because creating doorway pages used to be so easy, especially when using programs that can automatically generate hundreds or thousands of pages in a heartbeat by using a simple template and merely placing the keywords in the right places, many sites lost control and created enormous amounts of them.

Search Engines initially tolerated this behavior, but as its database started being filled with doorway pages it soon realized that these pages would quickly conquer the top ranking spots from normal content-rich pages. This would reduce the quality of its indices and lower the value of the search results, resulting in users abandoning the search engine.

Consequently, they started removing doorway pages from its index and in some cases even banning the sites that were using them. Other engines also followed suit and so it is safe to say that the age of doorway pages, at least in the form we used to know them, has passed.

Instead of focusing on doorway pages, you should focus on optimizing your actual content pages.

Beginners guide to getting started on Search Engines

Registering your domain name

Domain name registration is one of the most important things to consider when you are designing a site for high search engine placement. Some Webmasters use shared domains or sub-domains available for free from popular Web hosting services, or some kind of free domain name redirect service. This might be cheap, but if you want a good search engine placement, it’s probably not the best option. To register the domain we would recommend http://www.godaddy.com which is one of the largest and most reliable domain name registries and is also very cheap.

 

• Some search engines do ban free Web hosts because search engine spammers frequently use them for hosting duplicate sites (mirrors) and doorway pages.
• Sharing domains or IP addresses with spammers can get your search engine position penalized or your entire site banned.
• Without your own domain, you will be forced to start working from scratch again if the host goes out of business or if he decides to change your URL. Many Webmasters have lost their search engine positions, link popularity and Web traffic because of this.

Should you put keywords in the Domain?

Hosting

Choosing a Web host provider for your site is no small decision. When you make a choice of a Web page host, you are actually placing your business in the hands of your Web host provider. Choosing the wrong Web page hosting plan can cause permanent damage to your search engine placement.

Selecting a Web page host is like renting an office. You want to get it right the first time. It is always possible to move somewhere else, but it’s no easy task to move your entire business - not to mention the damage that already could be caused by then. For hosting you can get some good hosting without paying too much money. Here are a few options:

BlueHost.com - very good value at $6.95 per month and 300 GB Space, 3000 GB of traffic per month allowed with a domain name included in the package.

Building your website

Then it comes to actually building the site. For building the site you can use simple software like Dreamweaver, or you can get someone to build it for you, but this could end up costing a lot of money, and is probably not the best long-term option.

Probably the easiest option if you are a newbie is to look at the Site Build It software. Site Build It is a software technology which is fantastic for newbies to build an effective website that can attract thousands of targeted visitors. Site Build It! (SBI) has plenty of resources available for its users which can help them to effectively create a great website.

Using the SBI manager, you can research the entire Internet for suitable keywords and key-phrases for the topic you have in mind for your website (this research tool is equivalent to the tools that you get with Wordtracker, so you can save some money by just getting the Site Build It software. You can use this tool to discover which keywords are the most profitable and pull the maximum traffic.

SBI also provides web hosting facility and easy to use templates which you can use to create your own customized site. It has plenty of tools for helping you design logos and buttons to make your site attractive and easy to navigate. You can build your website step by step using the form available on SBI. All you have to do is just put in the information and SBI will create a website based on suitable pre-designed formats. You can analyze your creation to see how it will rank on different search engines and then preview it to see how it will look when it is finally done.

After SBI builds your site, it is continuously making efforts to see that almost all the search engines index your site. In case, a spider or crawler does not visit your site, SBI submits and resubmits your website to make sure that eventually they do visit. It also keeps a detailed log of all the activities on your site.

SBI provides detailed information about the ranking of each keyword on different search engines and what you can do to increase the ranking of your keyword or diversify your keywords. It also gives you various tips and tricks of the trade to increase traffic on your website. SBI manager researches the top 20 bids for all your keywords in all the major pay-per-click search engines and hence helps to bring you cost-effective traffic.