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You have the perfect idea for a website, you plan everything to perfection. Your ecommerce provider is setup, your website looks and functions excellent but you have one problem. There is no one knocking on your front door. More than a few people have faced this problem, but there is hope. By working to optimize your site for the search engines you can earn a stream of well targeted traffic, this will not happen overnight but if you are diligent it will happen. The more you know about optimizing your site the better you will rank in the search engines. There are some things to think about, like have you submitted your site to these searches engines, do you have any inbound links, are your SEO efforts completely ethical?

Are You In the Search Engines?

Your first efforts should be to make sure that you are indexed with the search engines. The 3 main search engines that you want to be focused on are Google, Yahoo and Bing, in this order as these are the most trafficked search portals.

If you want to check to see if your site is listed in these search engines simply go to the search engine and type in your domain name. If it doesn’t show up then your site isn’t indexed in their search directory. If this is the case you can submit your site for free, the main three search engines have provided pages where you can do this quickly and easily.

If your site has any inbound links then it will be automatically picked up and indexed when the web spiders index those inbound links. Web spiders “crawl” the Internet and update an engine’s internal database of links and sites.

Build Up the Links to Your Site from Other Sites

One way to build credit amongst the search engines is to have other websites linking to you. These links are seen as votes for your website, some search engines don’t look at Page Rank or links but the biggest search engine Google does so you may want to pay attention. The point is to have as many inbound links as possible, but it is actually more complicated than just links. These links range in authority from Page rank 0-10. You goal should ultimately be to have many inbound links as you can but from the highest page rank sites possible.

Next it is advisable to have links from sites that are in a similar market or sites that use similar keywords. Google likes to see that sites that are in the same “family’ as yours are sending you votes or links. Links from other types of sites don’t hurt, especially if they are high page ranking. Just keep in mind that it is optimal to have links from other sites of the same genre.

To find a list of sites that link to yours type this into Google search area: Link:yoursitename.com

If your site has many pages linking to it you may need to use a more advanced back link checking tool which you can find by doing an online search.

Keep Your SEO Campaign Ethical

In the drive to gain traffic to your website make sure not to participate in unethical practices. It can often have terrible consequences on your sites search ranking and possibly get you banned. Some people have tried to use sneaky tactics like a white background with white text. This white on white is use to hide keywords that will attract search engines. The problem is that search engines know how to detect this now, this tactic worked in 2004 but not today!

Do not create mirror site. Mirror sites are sites that look like your site but offer different content. One site is used to attract visitors through the search engines and then the other site is used to deliver a alternative message. This can get you banned quickly. Also you want to avoid suspicion by having a varying level of content, on indicator of false pages to a search engine spider is series of pages with nearly the same content.

Overall if you follow ethical rules while promoting your website and work to create content that offers something to the world you will receive more traffic and build your customers base. These tips are very important but there are even more things to watch out for, keep reading and searching for tips online.

Author

Phillip DeMassa is a staff writer for Core Web Solutions Web Design