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CodingElite.com | Articles Links & Traffic | Article #28: SEARCH ENGINES
People have been trying to win the search engine wars since the beginning of time. To that, I have just one thing to say. GOOD LUCK! Sadly, if you can make it up to the top of the search engines with YOUR business, then you pretty much have it made. The problem is actually getting there. One thing before we continue on this so that you’re not wasting your time with this section. Search engine advertising, or getting yourself on them, only works if you have YOUR OWN WEBSITE. If you are an affiliate marketer who is promoting somebody else’s product, then don’t even bother reading this section until you’re actually ready to create your OWN website. The reason should be obvious, but I’ll explain with an example. Let’s say you’re promoting the ebook, Google Cash. The main sales page for the book itself is already probably at the top of the search engines for keyword searches relating to that topic. But search engines don’t list affiliate links, which is essentially what you’re using to promote the book. So even submitting your link to the search engines is a waste of time because they are just going to ignore it. So unless you have your own website that promotes that product, or some other affiliate product or better yet, your own product, search engine advertising isn’t going to do a thing for you. Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let’s just get down to the nitty-gritty of HOW to get to the top of the search engines. Ironically, if you have your own site, a lot of what we already talked about will help in getting your site up the search engine rankings. It ultimately comes down to 2 things. How many links you have from OTHER pages to your site. How much traffic you’re currently getting from your current promotional activities. Number 1 is the key. That’s where we get to things like link exchanges, forum and message board posts, blogs, and any other place on the Internet where you can get a link to your site placed. Obviously, nobody is going to place your link for you out of the kindness of their heart. We already went over link exchanges and you know how hard that is. If you skipped that section, read it now. So for the most part, you are on your own as far as getting your link around the web. And unfortunately, this is a very time consuming process. No, don’t even bother with these blasters that post your link to these FFA pages. They’re ignored by the search engines and will actually hurt your search engine ranking. Many a site has self destructed from this procedure. Don’t do it! Because the search engine wars are so hard to win, we’re not going to go into a complete tutorial on how to go about waging those wars. But I am going to give you some basic tips to get you started in the right direction. There are plenty of tutorials and articles on the Internet to fill in all the blanks. What follows is pretty much just an outline.The first thing you have to do is get your site search engine ready. This means optimizing it as much as possible. This is NOT open for discussion or debate. Without an optimized web site you have NO chance to even get into the game. This means making sure the HTML of your website contains the proper keywords and description for the product or service that you’re promoting.
You don’t necessarily have to get all the content on your website at this point. Actually, you’ll be adding content to your website on a continual basis. But you do have to make sure that you have enough content on your website so the search engine spiders will be sufficiently “impressed” by what’s on your site. Maybe I should take a moment to just go over what a search engine spider is. A search engine spider is a piece of complicated software that goes all over the Internet checking websites and links. When they find your site, the more content they find and the more links they find pointing to your site, the higher up in the rankings you get. This is of course a simplified explanation, but it will suffice for our purposes. After you have your site optimized for the search engines, the next thing you want to do is submit the link to your site to each of the major search engines. Again, don’t use a blaster to do this. Do each submission manually. It will bring you better results, though by no means will this step guarantee you’ll hit the top of the engines or even get listed for that matter. If you want to “almost” guarantee a listing, you have to pay the search engines, and this service is not cheap. And even with this service, there are no guarantees. I told you it was a war out there.
So the next thing you’re going to need is a list of the major search engines. This list, believe it or not, is compiled from a survey of users. If you’ve been listening to all the hype, you may be surprised at the order in which these sites fall or even at some of the sites themselves. Ask There you have it. The top 10. Probably not at all what you expected. I know there were a couple of these that I never even heard of until I did the research on them. I’m not going to try to include instructions for submitting to each of these search engines because they all have different procedures. The only thing I will say is DON’T submit your link to them more than once a month. Submitting it more will be taken as spamming and you’ll only end up getting your site banned. After you have submitted your site to all the search engines the first time, the next thing to do is work on getting those inbound links. The best way to do this is with link exchanges, article writing and posting to forums and message boards. Do these things as much as you can. Yes, it’s time consuming, but it’s what it is. There is no shortcut to doing this, regardless of what all those “gurus” try to tell you and then ultimately sell you with their “guaranteed search engine placement” software. Trust me. It’s just money thrown away.
I guess what I am trying to get across in this section, as much as nobody wants to hear it, is there is no magical way to get to the top of the search engines. It’s hard work and it’s time consuming work. And if that isn’t enough, it takes forever, if at all. Now, here are some tips to help speed up the process a little bit more. If you haven’t already decided on the kind of site you want, write down your hobbies and interests. Take each one of them and do a lookup using the Wordtracker search tool. Here is the URL: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ Normally, I tell people that you want a search result of at least 100,000 searches for that topic for a month. That means there is considerable interest in the topic. I’m now going to lower that requirement to 50,000. Here’s why. 50,000 searches is still a decent amount for a topic in a month, while at the same time it means that there isn’t a lot of demand. That will probably also mean that there aren’t as many sites in that area. With fewer sites to compete against, you have a better chance of getting to the top of the search engines. So if you have a hobby or interest that falls in this range, you may want to seriously think about building your website around that interest. Think of ways to make it profitable, either by creating your own product or selling affiliate products that relate to that interest. You’ll find that you’ll have a much easier time of it as opposed to deciding that you want to get into “Internet Marketing Schemes” and the like. There is so much competition in this area that the chances of your site even being seen are slim to none at best. In conclusion, winning the search engine wars is pretty much the top prize. Getting there, well, that’s a whole different story.
Sincerely,
Steven Wagenheim
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