10 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines: Part 3

After you have taken care of the on page techniques mentioned earlier, you now need to do some off-page promotion of your site so that people take note of and visit it. Here are few things you can do:

6. Site Maps
Sitemaps are an easy way to inform search engines about your website & the pages on it that are available for crawling. A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site, along with additional information about each URL (like when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site). Sitemaps give out all this information to the search engines important so that they can crawl the site more intelligently.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

  • Your site is updated frequently.
  • Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
  • Your site is new and has few links to it.
  • Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
You can generate sitemaps of your site by use this generator.

7. Press Release
Writing a good Press Release and submitting the same to various syndicates can bring in a lot of traffic to your site by creating a positive impression about your services, apart from the much need inbound links. Few things you should keep in mind when writing them:
  • Press releases are written in block style, so no paragraph indentation is necessary.
  • Have a friend read your press release and tell you whether he or she would be interested enough to read a newspaper story about it. If not, consider a rewrite.
  • Send your press release to as many free distribution site as possible. Often, this will turn into a story much faster.
  • Keep the tone of your release all business. Don't go into too much personal or non-business related detail or your press release will likely end up in the editor's circular file.
The distribution source of the release is also an important consideration. For reference, here is a list of wire services for distributing press releases: Remember, the objective of the press release should not be poetic and dont try to outsmart the reader!

8. Directory Submission
Directories are kind of online yellow pages with categorized data. Once they include your site in their database, these directories provide you with quality back links, which is precisely what we are looking for. But they follow stringent rules and guidelines to approve listing requests, to ensure good experience for their users. However, they all list their guidelines and if you follow them properly, then you can be rest assured that your site will be accepted in their!

Here are some sites where you can find a good list of various directories to which you can submit your site to:
  • info.vilesilencer.com
  • www.directorycritic.com
  • webdirectorylist.smashingdir.com
However, if you can also go for certain directory submission services, as they help to save a lot of your productive time, which you can utilize in creating more value for your business. Certain highly recommended services are:
  • Submit2Please.com
  • SubmitEdge.com
  • www.inetzeal.com

9. Article Writing and Submission
Writing an article about the various phenomenons of the industry to which you belong to and submitting the same to various article syndicates and directories has got its own advantages:
  1. It helps you to create a goodwill for you as you are sharing your knowledge with your readers and helping them to go about their business in a better way
  2. It is Viral in nature
  3. It helps you to generate quality links
  4. It helps you to pre-sell your product or service to the reader
However, the key for your article submission campaign to be successful is not just creating quality, informative and creative articles, but you must also submit them to the right places in the right manner so that your desired audiences can find them. You can find a good list of article directories at www.directorycritic.com/article-directory-list.html

10. Social Bookmarking
By getting your site bookmarked on various popular social bookmarking sites, you can gain instant access to a large number of audiences around the world. You thus get a big boost in the traffic to your site and improve your sales manyfold!

Social bookmarking service has proved to be a very effective SEO tool. Search engines use the data on these sites by counting the bookmarks as votes & using tags to index & categorize data. Social Bookmarking brings you the following advantages from SEO’s point of view:

  • Faster indexing
  • Deep one way links from sites with high page rank
  • Anchor Text Links
  • Can have a viral effect if the site has got interesting content.
Thus, it helps to increase your website’s value in the eyes of the search engines, who in turn, give your website more importance, leading to better rankings. The best way to get people start bookmarking your site is to request your friends, other bloggers and eminent experts to visit your site and bookmark it if they like it. Few of the more famous bookmarking tools are:
  • BookmarkSync
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Diigo
  • Furl
  • Fark
  • Faves
  • GiveALink.org
  • Ma.gnolia
  • My Web
  • Netvouz
  • Newsvine
  • Reddit
  • Simpy
  • SiteBar
  • StumbleUpon
  • Thoof

Posted by Rahul Rungta Monday, November 12, 2007 at 9:38 PM Labels:

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)