6 Ways To Attract Search Engines To Your Website More Often by Priya Shah

6 Ways To Attract Search Engines To Your Website More Often by Priya Shah

Copyright 2004 Priya Shah
http://www.PriyaShah.com

Adding fresh, updated content to your website is the surest way to get search engines engines to spider your site more often. Search engines are known to index sites updated on a regular basis more frequently.

Updating and adding to the content on your website frequently will give you an advantage in the search results and also help you expand the number of search terms or key phrases you can get found for.

There are many tools and resources you can use to automate the process of adding fresh, updated content and creating more spider-food on your website.

Here are six ways to add fresh content to your site:

- Weblogs or Blogs

A blog is an online diary or journal. Setting up a blog is easy and the many free blogging services make it possible for just about anyone to get started.

Several blog programs allow your users to create an account and post their comments to your blog, thereby adding more fresh content for you.

I use Blogger.com to create my own blogs like the Number One In Your Niche Blog.
http://www.numberoneinyourniche.com/blog/

- Newsletters or Ezines

Publishing a regular newsletter or ezine is an excellent way to add content at regular intervals and get repeat traffic to your site. Archiving your newsletters online is one way of automatically updating your pages and adding new content.

As an example see the archives of my newsletter online
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/archives/

- Content Management Systems

Content Management Systems (CMS) allow you or your website visitors to add, edit or delete content to your website without having to create and format the pages manually.

Article exchange scripts are a type of content management system. There are many zero-cost or open-source content management systems like PHP-Nuke or Post-Nuke, that are often included with hosting packages and require no set up.

Xongoo! CMS is a search engine friendly and zero-cost content management system
http://www.xongoo.com/contentmanagementsystem.php

Other open-source CMS include PHP-Nuke and Drupal
http://www.phpnuke.org
http://www.drupal.org

- Forums/Bulletin Boards

A forum or bulletin board is an excellent tool for building content and creating an online community that will bring repeat traffic. Many web hosts now provide packages that include bulletin board scripts on your server.

The best part about a forum is that it allows your visitors to build your content for you. However, it does require time and energy, and some technical knowledge to moderate and maintain forums.

phpBB is a popular open-source bulletin system
http://www.phpbb.com

- Reviews/Interviews

Reviewing and publishing a write-up on new products or resources in your field is becoming a favourite technique with affiliate marketers looking to boost their commissions.

It is also an excellent way to get found for the keywords related to the product you review. You can also do regular interviews of experts in your industry and put up the transcript on your site.

My product reviews have allowed me to get high rankings for specific keywords of my choice
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/reviews.htm

- RSS or Newsfeeds

RSS is the latest craze in online publishing because it allows syndication of *expert* news and content that is regularly updated at the source.

Using RSS feeds you can enhance your site content without the need to write a single line on your own. Search engines love RSS feeds and are known to spider pages with such feeds more often.

Express RSS is a tool that allows you to add RSS feeds to your site in under a minute
http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/expressrss.htm

About the Author
Priya Shah is the author of the search engine optimization guide, Number One In Your Niche http://www.NumberOneInYourNiche.com and edits the newsletters Be a Whiz at eBiz http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com and The Glutathione Report http://www.glutathione-report.com

Search Engine Tips & Techniques by Terri Seymour

Search Engine Tips & Techniques by Terri Seymour

Search Engine Tips & Techniques
Terri Seymour www.seymourproducts.com

As you are building your site or getting your site
built, you need to do as much as you can to ensure
higher rankings in the search engines. There are a
variety of little tips and techniques you can use to do
this.

Meta tags & keywords - Meta tags are included in the
section of your site and are read by the search
engines. The two most important kind are "description"
and "keywords" Description is a description of the
content of your site and keywords is a list of keywords
relevant to the page.

Research what people are searching for and use those
searches (relevant to your site) in your meta tags.
A great little keyword search tool is available here:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Find more great info on meta tags here:
http://www.metamend.com/search-engines-meta-tags.html

Site content- Make sure you match your site content with
your meta tags. Also, keep updating your site content.
Search engines love new content. Try adding articles to
your site or doing a blog. Do NOT let your site get old
and stale!


Blogging - A blog is basically a journal that is posted
on a web site. A person who blogs is a blogger. Blogs
are usually updated daily or every other day. Blogs
can be used on personal or business websites. Blogs
can draw a lot of targeted traffic to your site. You
can create your own blog here:
http://www.blogger.com/start

Site map - A site map is simply a page that lists all
the links on your site. This makes it easy for the
search engines to spider your site. A site map page is
a good navigational tool for your visitors as well.
It contains links to all important pages of your web
site and it gives your visitors an overview of your
web site structure all in one page. Take a look at
these well designed site maps.
http://www.ireland.com/about/map/
http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

Links page - Having a quality reciprocal links page
can benefit your site in several ways. First of all,
it gets your site listed in more places on the net
which can bring you more traffic. More and more major
search engines will rank your pages higher when there
are more links to your site. Also, quality links can
help the spiders find you more easily each week,
therefore keeping you indexed longer and dropped less
frequently. Take a look here for an example of a link
exchange page.
http://www.seymourproducts.com/exchange/index.shtml

Articles - Not only do you want to post relevant articles
on your site, but writing and submitting them to other
sites will help you as well. Posting new articles on
your site will keep your content fresh and new so the
spiders like your site. It will also keep your visitors
coming back for more.

Writing and submitting articles can increase your link
popularity and bring you more traffic as well as helping
your search engine ranking. A few places to submit
your articles is listed below:

http://webmarketingspecialists.com/articlesubmit.html
http://wahmteam.com/submissionform.shtml
http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/articles/submit.html
http://www.webpronews.com/submit.html
http://www.creativehomemaking.com/submit_article.shtml

Using these techniques and others will greatly improve
your rankings in the search engines and bring you more
targeted traffic which in turn can increase your sales
substantially! For more info on search engine tactics,
visit http://www.searchengines.com/


About the Author
*************
Terri Seymour and her husband Terry offer
a no-cost, non-MLM home business opportunity.
They strive to help you build a successful home
business. They also provide a very affordable
website building service. Free ecourses, decorating
tips, business resources, and much more at:
http://www.seymourproducts.com FREE ecourse at:
business-building-ecourse@getresponse.com

****************

Dear Bill Gates, You Clever Fox by David Leonhardt

Dear Bill Gates, You Clever Fox by David Leonhardt

Dear Bill Gates, You Clever Fox
By David Leonhardt

Dear Bill Gates.

You did it. You casually left a live grenade at the Grand Charity Gala and walked out of the room to see if anybody, especially Google, will notice.

Once again, you have created an innovation in marketing that is poised to take the world by storm. What I love about it is how you have just tossed it out into the public for all to see, and yet nobody seems to be noticing it.

Flitting from forum to forum, everyone is talking about your new MSN beta search engine ( http://beta.search.msn.com/ ), but nobody seems to have discovered the secret marketing bomb you left ticking there.

Google sure was clever with its PageRank gimmick. In fairness, PageRank is not just a gimmick, but it was marketed as much more than it is -- the big ka-boom that sets Google apart, despite being only a small part of its algorithm.

But your ka-boom will be bigger. You have actually given searchers like me control over my own rankings. While other search engines are talking about "personalized search", you've given us the levers to incrementally change rankings in searches themselves.

You are probably aware that webmasters are kicking the tires on your new search engine to see how high they rank. Those who are more adventuresome or who earn their living understanding (or trying to understand) search engines are taking some of your special features for a spin. Most of those features are fairly mundane. Like "links to" (although it might just be the most comprehensive listing on the Internethint to webmasters) and "language".

But what's this at the very bottom, almost falling off my screen?

Results Ranking.

Hey, this is cool. I can control the results myself. I can give more weight to recently-updated sites, which is great when I am following a breaking story (After the America's Cup, I do not want to find all the pre-race predictions, for example.). Or I can weight the results in favor of static pages if I am trying to find again the health information I had read last time my daughter broke out in blue and green splotches all over her body.

And you let me decide whether to weigh heavily exact matches, if I know exactly what I am looking for, or approximate matches if I know only that the itchy splotches come from some rare Polar virus transmitted by stampeding trans-Atlantic penguins.

I even get to choose to boost rankings for popular sites or, if I'm feeling like a rebel, for less popular sites. Yes, you have even appealed to my deepest psychological mood swings. This is really cool.

But what really counts is this: I control MSN!

I can just imagine the TV ads you have already planned: The ad character (a student, a construction worker, a nurse?) says, "Move over Bill Gates, I'm in charge now." The voiceover says, "Search MSN" PageRank will taste like yesterday's chewing gum.

I decided to find out if I really do control MSN, using one of my client sites. I chose Dotcom-Monitor Web Site Monitoring ( http://www.dotcom-monitor.com ) and the search term "website monitoring". As I write, the site sits at #3 for that search term.

I turbo charged the popularity lever to 100%. Whoa. Dotcom-Monitor lost a spot. What does that mean? Somebody who does not rank as highly as my client got a boost by weighing link popularity higher (and, by extension, on-page content lower).

This tells me that my client's on-page content is in good shape. It also tells me which competitor has the best backlinks to check out.

PageRank was an effective gimmick for wrapping webmasters and SEO consultants around Google's fingers. But this results ranking thingy could wrap both the public and webmasters around MSN's fingers.

Just one word of advice, Bill. Results Ranking? Is that the catchiest moniker you could give it?

Bill, you are to be congratulated for devising such a clever marketing tool, and for purposefully leaving it right out in the open like a live grenade without even a hint that it is there. That is what you did, isn't it? You did do it on purpose, didn't you?

If not, please let me know, so I can send you my invoice for your next great marketing idea.
About the Author
David Leonhardt is an SEO consultant
http://www.seo-writer.net/freelance/seo-consultant.html
and a website marketing consultant:
http://www.seo-writer.net
Pick up a copy of his SEO e-book:
http://www.thehappyguy.com/SEO.html