Getting your site noticed at low cost

A simple guide to search engine optimisation (also known as getting up the ranking in search engines).

There are lots and lots of books, articles, blog entries, scientific studies, PhD theses and commission papers all written about this subject which is currently becoming quite a science. At this date, nobody knows what the Google ranking method is, but there are clearly lots of indicators as to what improvements can be made to a website in order to affect the ranking of the website.

This article looks at simple and cheap ways of ensuring that your website receives a reasonably good ranking from the Google search engine.

1. Update your website frequently. Even if this is just to save the pages on a different day and publish them, it may have an effect on your ranking as it will indicate to Google that your site is being regularly updated.

2. Write new entries for your website as often as you can. Again, even if this is just to add a comment to a page or to alter a couple of words which is worth doing because it will again show Google that your site is being regularly maintained and updated.

3. Write articles and get them published on the internet. Websites such as articledashboard.com will take your article and it will get published and noticed across the internet. The article can be on anything you like, but the main thing is to ensure that you include details of your website as a link to the page.

4. Check your meta tags. Although these no longer have the relevance they once did, a lot of search engines apparently still use them to read the content of your page. In fact, David Viney in his well known guide gives a specific example where meta tags have actually been used by Google and other search engines for ranking purposes. It is very important to have these on every page of your website, and thoroughly recommended that you go through and pack them in if they are not already there. If you do not know what a meta tag looks like, you can do a search on Google and get a guide to them.

5. Contact lots of other websites of a similar sort or of a directory nature linked to your industry, make sure you get a link from them to your website. This can be quite time consuming, and you may rarely see a result or reward for it, but when you look back at your website in a few months or few years and see the links that you have created, the result will be worthwhile. Furthermore, there is a lot of evidence that Google place heavy weighting on links from well ranked websites.

6. Try to avoid anything that involves spending a lot of money, as most search engine optimisation techniques can be done via an SEO and web marketing consultant with quite interesting results. Whilst there are lots of companies out there spending thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds to get onto the first page of Google for certain topics, there is nothing to stop a small company or individual having a go as well, which is partly why the internet is such a wonderful place.

If you want to read more on the subject, do a search on Google for search engine optimisation techniques or similar, and you will find there is lots of information on the subject, including extensive research papers carried out to see what are the best techniques to use.

If you would like a free website MOT and marketing report, please visit www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk