There are a number of methods that can be used to help get a website indexed by the major search engines.

Google, Yahoo! and MSN all have an Add URL page from which a website can be submitted to be spidered and indexed.

Google also have a Sitemap tool, which allows them a direct path to visiting a site on a regular basis. This method is typically used for websites that are updated frequently. You must have a Google webmaster account to enable sitemap submission.

Some of the fastest ways to get a website indexed without submitting a website to the search engines is to have quality and, relevant inbound links. Search engine spiders like and actively search for inbound links and seem to favour one way links rather than reciprocal links (sites linking to each other).

There are many a different effective search engine optimisation techniques which can be used to help getting a site indexed. For example;

Google owns blogger.com and checks the site regularly for new content and links. If a website also has a blog on blogger.com and the blog has links pointing back to the main site then this will increase the chances of Google’s spider (Googlebot) following the links back to the site and indexing its pages.

Keyworded links on the site will also be actively searched and crawled by search engine spiders. Therefore blogs should contain relevant keywords to the content. One thing to note is not to overuse keywords as the search engines may ban or more commonly penalise websites that come across as spam.

Social Bookmarking is also used to effectively help speed up a website being indexed. Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious are some of the more popular social bookmarking websites. These sites are constantly visited by search engines because of the high volume of new content that is submitted, following links and indexing pages along the way.

RSS Feeds is another means of increasing the visibility of a website to search engines as well as informing subscribers each time the site’s content is updated. With RSS Feeds it is possible to have all new content picked up by many a different online source. These sources will also provide a link back to your site enabling search engines to find links to your website on many different websites.

Relevant forum postings on forums which are content/theme related to your site should also be targeted as these are oftentimes highly search engine optimised and crawled be search engines. A post or thread you start should always end with a signature which includes a link to your website.

Whilst releasing a rich anchor text and relevant keyworded Press Release (PR) is a useful method to increase traffic from users and other sites, it also provides an excellent opportunity to create more links to your site that will be crawled by the search engines.

Google is the fastest search engine to act on indexing websites and is constantly crawling the web for the latest and freshest content. This enables Google to stay at the forefront of the online search industry thus providing its users with what they require when performing searches via its own website and search partners.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the term given to methods constructing websites/webpage’s to enable them to be found and indexed by search engines with the intention of having the website become listed on the first pages of search results.

The main aim of search engine optimisation is to first and foremost get a website noticed by search engine spiders. In effect, this will then increase your site’s pages being indexed. Thereafter, the main purpose of SEO becomes unlocking the potential amount of free traffic that search engines can send directly to your website.

Without search engine optimisation, a website has very little chance of being noticed. Commercial and business websites which do not have regular visitors will rarely generate sales and should be considered as pointless marketing and, just a catalogue for known clients.

It is well known that a vast majority of web users use search engines on a daily basis as their first stop on the web to help them locate the most appropriate information, products and services relevant to their needs. Search engines provide results of websites that match or are relevant to a users search query and then list them in order of importance and relevance.

Users will generally click on results of the first page listings returned. As such, search engine optimisers will endeavour to use optimisation techniques which will help a website’s pages get included on the first page to increase volumes of traffic and more importantly, keep them there for months and years to come.

In order to be noticed by search engines, there are a whole range of search engine optimisation techniques that can be used to make a website more visible to search engine crawlers.

Techniques for SEO are varied however; SEO generally follows the same theme as ensuring that each webpage is optimised with appropriate tags and titles, webpage content includes relevant keywords, keyword phrases and anchor text and, website navigation is clear, clean and succinct.

Competition on the web can be fierce. Although it is possible for website owners to carry out optimisation techniques themselves (presuming they have the expertise and knowledge), if SEO is to be successful and, oftentimes more cost effective and efficient, the services of a professional search engine optimisation agency should be considered.

As the services and costs of SEO’s can vary depending on world location due to currency, it is advisable to research and see exactly what is on offer and budget accordingly before employing any services.

Unfortunately, there are many agencies which class themselves as SEO consultants but are unprofessional and do not always use the best techniques for SEO. Such poor services can cause more harm than good to a website and in a worst case scenario get a website penalised by search engines.

An important point to note when searching for such services should be to find a site that is actually found in the search results of all 3 of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN/Live) and not from companies that are advertising on these search engines (pay per click) as they have already failed to impress in their services due to not being able to establish their very own site in search results!

This is not to say that they cannot do the job or have not got the experience to do so but could merely mean they are just not yet established as much as the bigger players are.

Search engine optimisation or SEO as it known to many for short is the work undertaken on a website for improving search engine results to gain free targeted traffic to a website.

Many companies today are taking their website advertising revenue and spending a large chunk of it on search engine optimisation.

By optimising their web pages for search engines, not only are they positioning themselves for less advertising expenditure in the future but they are also targeting their website to real visitors who go in keyword search for their products and services via the search engines.

Oftentimes search engine optimisation is mistaken to include link building. This we believe are two totally different entities and should not be spoken of in the same light.

Where building links to any website is concerned it should be deemed as a form of website promotion.

Website promotion should be seen in the form of link building, gaining one way links, buying text link ads, banner advertising, TV and radio advertising etc.

Search engine optimisers are increasing in huge numbers around the world. Many of these search engine optimisers are not certified optimisers but have proven experience in doing what is right for a website to take it to a higher level in search results making it easier for potential buyers and visitors to find their website.

Some of the work undertaken by SEO consultants include editing a website’s source code, adding and removing content, further development and design etc.

This is all undertaken to make a website more ‘search engine friendly’ – a term that has become familiar with SEO for websites that are deemed to be easily read whereby search engines can crawl the site’s pages easily, find new content and index the website’s pages for inclusion in their search results.

If you own a website and are wishing to promote it then look no further as we have listed some of the best ways to get your site promotion off the ground.

When promoting your website, one of the most important aspects to know, and remember, is who you’re targeting your website to.

Website promotion, one must also remember is the continuing work undertaken to drive targeted traffic to a website so that visitors can use its online services or buy products and generate sales.

Many natural techniques of promoting a website include adding unique content to your site, search engine optimisation (also referred to as SEO), directory submission, press releases and more.

Below we have listed many ways to promote your website from the basics to the more advance promotional methods.

Depending on the type of website you own and would like to promote, you must choose carefully which methods would be most beneficial to your site promotion.

Do use:

• Submit your website URL to search engines
• Seek quality related websites for advertising on using all the major search engines
• Add your website URL to all your business stationery
• Write press releases or have them written for you and submitted to the press
• Start a blog. Blogs are excellent for writing about your field of expertise and new content created is generally picked up by all the Major search engines which in turn will bring you good targetted traffic to your website.
• Ensure your website has good flowing content throughout
• Write unique articles about your products and services and submit them to article submission websites with a credit link back to your website.
• Submit reviews of your site to the media such as news and online magazine websites
• Join topic related forums and add a link in your signature to your website
• Submit to directories in categories that relate to your website
• Start an affiliate program to help boost the traffic to your website and generate sales
• Submit your website to specialist niche related directories
• Advertise in local and national newspapers
• Support charities by making donations and have them give support credit back to your website
• Buy text link adson other website’s or company email newsletters
• Prompt users to your website to subscribe to RSS Feeds or sign up to your own email newsletter
• Announce great contests and giveaways in your email newsletter to drive visitors back to your website
• Advertise your website on search engines using Pay Per Click (PPC) ads
• Have your products listed is popular shopping comparison and auction websites

Do not use:
They have been tried, are general a waste of money and do not reap any results.

• Traffic Exchange programs
• Automated Link Exchanges
• Link farms
• Buy redirected traffic
• Offers of submission to 1 million directories and search engines
• Offers of top ten search engine results

FFA links – Free For All

Travel Website Promotion example

As an example website we would like to promote here to give you some idea of a good website promotion, we will take a travel and holiday website that sells package holidays, hotel bookings, cheap flights, travel insurance, car hire and ski holidays.

Because of the grand scale that a travel website can be in terms of content pages, if the website is optimised correctly and the content is unique then the website has a high probability of gaining free targeted traffic directly from search engines when keyword searches are performed.

The travel industry in the UK is one of the largest industries online therefore competition for sales is very high and search engine keyword searches are very competitive amongst travel websites.

To ensure that our travel website is gaining good market share an excellent website promotion campaign is required.

Oftentimes and for a website of this nature, internet marketers are brought in to handle the promotional side of things leaving the website owners to concentrate on what they do best – add content and make sales.

Ensuring the website is search engine optimised for free search engine traffic (this is priceless), then the following are what we would do to promote our travel and holiday website.

• Start an affiliate program using a top affiliate program such as Affiliate Future, Commission Junction or Trade Doubler
• Pay per click campaign such as Google Adwords
• Price comparison websites such as Cheap Flights, Travel Supermarket, Travel Zoo, Teletext Holidays and Kelkoo
• Advertise on TV Teletext such as Teletext Holidays for holiday, hotels, cottages, car hire and more products and services
• Submit to travel and holiday directories
• Submit to the travel and holiday categories of general directories
• Write excellent press releases and submit to press release websites
• Advertise on other high traffic travel related websites such as Trip Advisor
• Start a blog – excellent for receiving more free search engine traffic

The above are just some of the areas of website promotion a travel and holiday website would benefit from.

Of course, there are more ways of promoting a website – some more successful than others. Please check back regularly for more in depth website promotion information.

Link Popularity has been the talk of the webmaster community for years.

You must be wondering why link popularity is so popular! I am going to explain it with some real life examples so to give a true understanding.

Link popularity can be explained simply as the total number of links pointing to your site. But, bare in mind that link popularity is not all about quantity. It is a mix between quantity and quality.

Step 1
Suppose a patient wants to channel a best doctor from his local area. The first factor they will consider is the qualifications of the doctor. Suppose the patient finds several doctors who are qualified. How will the patient now choose the best doctor?

We can apply same theory for search engines. This is like on-page optimisation of your website. Doctors should have basic qualifications. Likewise your website should have basic qualifications to get indexed and ranked.

If a search engine finds several websites with the same type of content, service and on-page optimisation, how then will the search engines determine the best one?

Step 2
Now the patient needs to take advice from others, get reviews and recommendations.

Option 1
Suppose a professor who has a good name in medical industry recommends doctor “A” as the best doctor. Its a strong motivation for the patient to select doctor “A”.

Option 2
Suppose a few patients who were already treated by doctor “A” recommend him. It is also a strong motivation to choose doctor “A”.

Option 3
Suppose one patient who was already treated by doctor “A” recommends him. It is also a motivation to choose doctor “A”. But it is less powerful than option 1 and 2.

Option 3
Suppose a few people who know doctor “A” recommend him. It will also help to select doctor “A”. But it is less powerful than option 1, 2 and 3.

Now you can see there are different types of recommendations for doctor “A”. Some are stronger motives while others are weaker motives. But all of them helps to choose doctor “A”.

We can apply the same theory for search engines. Search engines will appreciate high quality, authority links to your site the most. Then they will favour related links followed by unrelated links in descending order.

As a summary, you can see any link will help your site. If you do not have high quality authority links pointing to your site, some less quality relevant links may help you to get the same rank. If you do not have few related links, more and more high quality unrelated links may help you fill the gap.

This article was written for us by an SEO consultant who runs an affordable one way links building service.

If you’ve owned a website for a while, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Alexa Rank”.

Although you wouldn’t guess it from the name, the Alexa ranking system is one that ranks every website on the Internet in order of traffic.

Each day, every website is ranked – the website with the most traffic is ranked first, the website with the second most traffic is ranked second, etc.

Unlike the Google PageRank system, you actually want your Alexa score to be lower, rather than higher.

A website’s Alexa rank is based off of traffic. However, it’s not just pure hits that boost your score, otherwise it would be very easy to game the system by refreshing your browser a few hundred times each day.

The Alexa score metric is actually a triad of three items: number of hits, number of visits, and number of unique visitors.

Although the number of hits and visits are important, the only way to effectively improve your Alexa score is by driving a constant stream of unique visitors to your website each day.

Each visitor is counted as a unique visitor to your website once each twenty-four hours, so it is in your best interest to have a constant stream of visitors to your site each day, possibly by keeping a constant stream of fresh content.

If you spend much time exploring Alexa’s official website, you may notice that each website has three different Alexa rankings. It may look confusing, but each number actually has a logical explanation.

First of all, each website has a “three month ranking”. This ranking is the most important, and is what will show up on various web-info toolbars.

As you would expect, the three-month ranking is an average of a website’s traffic ranking over the past three months.

For a new website, this will usually start out at around the seven million mark and then work its way down from there with a steady flow of traffic.

Secondly, there is the weekly ranking. The weekly ranking, as you probably guessed, is an average traffic rank for your site based off of the past seven days.

The best use for this data is determining if a current marketing strategy is working, and for evaluating concentrated trends in traffic flow.

Thirdly, there is the daily ranking.

For the majority of websites on the net, the daily ranking will display as “N/A” – this is because a daily ranking is only assigned to the top 100,000 websites on the internet.

The daily traffic ranking is more of a novelty, so don’t worry if one isn’t displayed for your website.

There is a small bit of controversy surrounding the Alexa ranking system. Although the people behind Alexa do their best to count traffic as accurately as possible, their sources are limited.

For the most part, only people surfing the net with the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser will be counted towards the Alexa ranking metric.

If you don’t have the Alexa toolbar yet, it is worthwhile to consider installing it. By doing so, your surfing habits will be reflected across the rankings of both your own and other websites you visit.

Furthermore, the toolbar can display the Alexa traffic ranking at the bottom of each page, which allows you to quickly make judgments about a website. (i.e: do I want to buy an ad here? Is this website fairly well known?).

To install the toolbar, head over to Alexa’s website (www.alexa.com) and click on the “Alexa Toolbar” heading at the top of the page. At this point, it will automatically display the appropriate toolbar for your browser.

The latest version of the classic “Alexa Toolbar” for Internet Explorer, or “Sparky” if you are using Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

From there, all you have to do is install the respective version of the toolbar, and you’re all set!

Because the Alexa toolbar is more common among people who own their own website, many webmaster or technology related websites have an innate advantage over those of more “classic” topics such as sewing or cooking type websites.

Although you should not use the Alexa ranking score as your sole source of monitoring traffic trends, it is a very useful source to see how your website fares in comparison to others in your own niche.

All websites on the internet are assigned a ranking by Google – this ranking is known as the “PageRank”.

There are a lot of mysteries behind the Google ranking system, partially because the algorithm that Google uses to formulate the rankings is top secret.

The ranking system is on a scale of zero to ten – zero being the worst and ten being the best.

The scale is believed to be on a logarithmic scale. This means that each respective level of ranking is supposedly ten times harder to achieve than the rank that comes before it.

Therefore, a rank of 10 would be around one million times more difficult to achieve than a rank of 1.

Of course, very few websites have ever achieved a ranking of ten, but don’t worry; you don’t need an exorbitantly high PageRank for your website to be successful.

As long as your website has a PageRank of better than zero, you’re on the right track and will probably be able to sell advertising, services and or products on you website.

Although it is impossible to determine exactly which way is the best to increase your Google PageRank, plenty of SEO (search engine optimisation) specialists have spent many cumulative hours researching and testing their ideas.

According to those SEO specialists, there are three important factors to improving your PageRank.

First of all, having any type of backlinks at all is thought to improve your ranking. The only exception here is that links to your site from spam-related, illegal, or obscene websites will not affect your ranking, as Google usually ignores those types of websites.

Secondly, backlinks are believed to be more effective in improving PageRank if they are from websites of similar content to yours.

For example, if your website is about fancy cars, then a backlink from an auto-repair website would be more beneficial to your site than a backlink from a website about home mortgage resources.

Thirdly, your site’s PageRank will be more likely to improve if it is linked to from other sites with a higher PageRank than yours.

Although it is still helpful to amass links from lower ranked sites, it requires a larger quantity in order to make any noticeable difference in your PageRank.

One major difference that PageRank holds against Alexa’s traffic ranking system is that Google only updates their ranking metric about once every three or four months on average. Because of this, it can take more patience to work on improving your Google PageRank without seeing any visible results for a few months.

It should also be noted that PageRank may not accurately reflect the true popularity of a website. In many cases, old websites that get little or no traffic are found to have been assigned a decent PageRank.

There are two main ways to check the PageRank for a website.

There are various websites that offer a “PageRank check” where you enter the URL of a website and it displays the current ranking for that site.

The Google toolbar is the most popular way to check PageRank. To download the toolbar, go to http://toolbar.google.com and click on the “Download Now” button.

The Google toolbar is available for the most popular browsers, including Firefox and Internet Explorer.

PageRank 10 websites:

http://www.adobe.com
http://www.w3.org
http://www.energy.gov
http://www.nasa.gov
http://www.google.com
http://www.nsf.gov

http://www.whitehouse.gov

http://www.real.com
http://www.usa.gov

PageRank 9 websites:

http://www.apple.com
http://www.statcounter.com
http://www.freefind.com
http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.microsoft.com
http://www.amazon.com

http://www.aol.com
http://www.bbc.co.uk

http://www.bloglines.com

http://www.cisco.com

http://www.cnn.com

http://www.columbia.edu
http://groups.google.com
http://www.wordpress.org
http://www.drupal.org

http://www.en.wikipedia.com
http://www.excite.com
http://www.firefox.com
http://www.gamespot.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk
http://www.stanford.edu
http://www.intel.com