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.