Your new business or personal/community web site is finally up and running. But how do you attract visitors now to your website? The first step towards announcing your website to the World Wide Web is to get listed in Search Engines. Majority of the traffic to a website is through Search Engines. Google is one of the most popular Search Engines and we will give you a few tips on how to get listed in Google and increase the traffic to your website.
1) Add your URL to Google:
The first step to get listed for any website is by manually submitting your URL with Google. Visit: http://www.google.com/addurl/ and submit your website details. Google does not guarentee that your website will be listed, but you can improve your chances of getting listed by following the protocols outlined by Google. You can follow these protocols when designing your website to increase search engine friendliness.
You can also try submitting your URL at DMOZ The Open Directory which Google uses for classifying websites. This is a directory that is managed by volunteers that act as “category editors.” To list your site, simply go to the most appropriate category for your web site, then drill down to the relevant subcategory and select the “Add URL” link at the top of that category’s page.
The time required for the Google bot to start crawling your website will vary though you can expect it to start within a week or two.
2) Increase PageRank
Google uses PageRank algorithm for ranking websites. This is Google’s description of PageRank:
“ PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.
Hence it is important that your website should have links from and to other websites. The more number of links, the better PageRank for your website which means more traffic to your website! You can start writing articles and submit them to the article submission sites. All of the article sites (the good ones at least) allow you to include a section called “About the Author” or “Author Resource”. It’s here that you can include a link back to your site.
3) Sitemaps
Sitemaps help visitors to navigate between pages and also helps search engine bot to index very easily. Generate a sitemap and keep it updated so that Search Engines will be able to index your website efficiently. There are many Sitemap generators available. You can find a good list of Sitemap generators here.
4) Search Engine Friendly design
When designing your website, make sure that it is search engine friendlt. Meta description is an important component for on-page SEO. Google only consider 155 characters from Meta description. So it’s important to write a unique Meta description within 155 characters using keywords. Images make articles and pages attractive to visitors. More over images are also indexed different search engines. Using relevant keywords in the image ALT tags help Search Engines to recognize images and index them according to the ALT tags. Title tag is very important. Title should not be too long. For Google, 70 characters are enough. Descriptive titles have maximum clickthoughs.
5) Content is King
The most important factor for driving more visitors to your website and maintaining them is to keep your content updated regularly. This would naturally keep Google Bots busy as well as they will index more pages from your website. The more you update the content within your site, the more value it earns. it It takes more than simply having content on your site to bring visitors back to your site time after time. It takes quality content that is updated regularly.
Google and other search engines have a very simple goal with their search results: to provide the most relevant results to those who perform a search. It is important that your web pages are optimized for search engines if you want to get high search engine rankings. A combination of optimized web pages and high link popularity leads to high rankings on search engines like Google.