HOEI

The following are tips I give to people who ask me how to get listed in search engine results. Most are pretty straight forward, but some can be a little intimidating. Don’t worry about those that are hard to grasp. Focus on what is easy and start asking questions to other bloggers and web masters concerning the harder ones.

Disclaimer: Most of these will only apply if you own your own domain name.

#1 Priority is to submit your URL to search engines:

If you do nothing else you need to register your domain with the big three search engines. This tells them you have a site that needs indexing by their crawlers (automatic web site content scanning/indexing tools).

It is believed by most seasoned webmasters that registering with the three big search engines (for free) will give you about a 95% coverage of all Internet searches since a large number of the smaller engines pull results from these three. You can verify this yourself by trying to register your url with some of the smaller search engines. The smaller search engines will often link you to one of these three pages to register your URL with them.

Google
Yahoo!
MSN Live Search

Learn from Google:

Note: Some of the Google resources require a Google account to view and use do if you are an anti-Google type then you are missing out on some very good information, tools, and most of all…traffic. The last time I checked, I was getting significant amount of my traffic here on HOEI from The Long Tail searches on Google.

Webmaster Tools – Starting spot for webmasters needing to learn about Google and general webmaster tools like the robots.txt files
Google Sitemaps – Sitemaps can be tricky to get formated correctly, but they are helpful in building credibility with Google.

As mentioned above, the sitemaps and robots.txt files lend to letting Google (sitemaps) and other search engines (robots.txt) know how often and/or if they need to scan each of your pages and folders based on how often you update them. Letting them know to not waste their time and resources indexing pages and folders that have not and will not be updated for a while makes them happy.

Suggestions for your site to get better search engine love: (in no particular order)

1. Interlink within your site where practical. (i.e., a blog post on this blog that mentions desktop friendly snack food might link to a post on Grill’n Time)
2. Make the title of each page match the content and URL of the page as much as possible. Wordpress and blogger can do this for you. Check out http://www.hoei.com/2007/05/website-to-blog/ as an example. You will notice the title of the blog post matches what is in the very top bar of the browser at the top of your screen and the URL contains the post title text.
3. Do a keyword density search on your pages to get a better idea of what keywords will work best in your keyword META tag.

GoogleRankings Ultimate SEO Tool (My favorite)
SEO Book Keyword Density Analyzer Tool
SEO Tools – Keyword Density

Review what Domaintools.com has to say about your site:

From the whois search results on Domaintools.com, you want to try and get your Title Relevancy, Description Relevancy, and SEO Score as close to 100% as possible. Add alt tags to any images that do not already have them. A header image alt tag is a great place to plant keywords that might not show very well in your page text, but you want the search engines to find you with these words. There is also a text browser example in the sidebar of the Domaintools results page that shows you what your site’s home page looks like to a search engine at first glance. You have probably heard some folks talk about the text near the top and left of the page being the most prominent to search engines. This text browser will give you a glimpse of why you hear these tips.

I saw an article in the NY Times this weekend that pointed out how some companies are paying ordinary people to have their cars wrapped up like a NASCAR. The article states that folks get as much as $800 per month and free gas to place ads on their cars.  In most cases you are encouraged to obey the law and maintain a certain social standard.  That means no cussing, fussing, smoking, and certainly no consumption of competitor’s products or alcoholic beverages.  It is a good thing the cussing and fussing rules are have not been strictly enforced as a prerequisite for decals on the cars of Tony Stewart, Kurt Busch, Kevin Harvick, Robby Gordon and a few other lively NASCAR stars or these guys would be sporting “Sponsor Wanted” on their cars.

That said, I have been pondering another idea and wondering if anyone has already tried this. How well does ad space on cars and road signs work for driving traffic to a blog and/or web site? No…Really? I know all the major marketing companies know the answers to my questions, but that data is hard to come by without forking over some fat loot. Has anyone tried it? If so, how did you advertise and how successful were you?

I have seen some pretty creative billboards recently that actually left me browsing the URL from the sign. I am sure there is some degree of success, but is it worth the investment?

The posting has been light in the past few weeks here at HOEI. I have a couple of pretty good excuses, but I now realize that I should have been a little better prepared for what I knew was coming. I felt a little guilty when I read Pro Blogger’s tips on what to do when you’re sick. I have not been sick, but the principles of Darren’s post still apply to my situation.

My wife gave birth to our third son on Friday evening. The newest addition to the Osborne Camp did create some excitement when he got moved into the Level II nursery about an hour after birth due to breathing problems. I posted the details on Caden’s Page in several posts beginning on August 10th, the day JJ was born.

On top of the preparations for my son’s arrival I have been working pretty aggressively behind the scenes on an awesome new group blog project for parents involved in or interested in the GFI (Growing Families International) ministry. The new blog is GrowingKids.org and it serves as the Internet home for the worldwide community of families brought together through the teaching ministry of Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo. Some of the titles from the Ezzo’s teaching ministry that you might recognize are Babywise, Childwise, Preparation for Parenting, and Growing Kids God’s Way.