FAQ - Search Engines

Q. I need my site to come up in search engines. Can you submit my site to search engines for me?
A. There is no need to submit to search engines like Google and Yahoo. They will visit your site automatically as long as there is a link somewhere on the Web to your site.

Do a few searches related to you products and services. Some of the results will include various directories where it is possible to list your business and have a link to your site. Listing with these directories is an important first step to getting search engines to locate and spider your site.

Now that there’s a path for search engines to your site it’s time to optimise your pages. Start with your Home Page and go into Site Editor.
Click on the 'Page Properties' button. You'll see a 'Page Description' and 'Page Key Words' – these two items actually go into the corresponding 'Page Description' and 'Page Key Words' meta tags of that page.

The trick is to match the words and phrases in the meta tags to the words and phrases in the content of your site. Your Page Description should be just one or two sentences and no longer than 255 characters. For your Page Key Words try using combination of words that include some specifics, like your city name or a specific product name. Think of the types of word combinations people might enter into search engines to find such products or services (ask your customers!).

By far the most important part of getting heaps of traffic from search engines is having lots of fresh content (text on you pages). Search engines can tell how recent your content is, so update it regularly and you will get better results.

Q. How can I improve my ranking?
Another thing you could do to improve the ranking of your site is exchange links with other similar sites. Google, for example, ranks sites partially based on popularity, which in turn is based on how many other sites are linked to your site.

Also, it is very important to keep your pages updated regularly. Search engine like Google will come back to check your site about every 2 weeks. If a particular page has not changed since its last visit, Google will take that into consideration when ranking and may give it a slightly lower priority. The longer your page stays unchanged, the lower it will go in ranking over time.


Q. How do I monitor the performance of my efforts?
It may take up to a month or so to see the optimised words and phrases pull up your site on Google. Often your site may not be on the first page and may be hard for you to find. Just searching for your site on search engines is not the best way to monitor performance.

A better way of finding out the effectiveness of your efforts is by monitoring your web stats (http://www.yoursite.com.au/plesk-stat/webstat). In your stats for a particular month, under 'Search' you will be able to see what search key words are leading visitors to your site. Under 'Referrers' your can also see which search engines are performing best. By monitoring your stats, with time, you will get to know what key word combinations work best, which search engines to focus on and how to best optimise your pages.

For more details on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), please read our Search Engine Optimisation article.