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News & Articles
Improve Your Website's Search Engine Rankings in Just Five Minutes! | May 26th, 2005
Step 1. Submit Your Website to Search Engines - Difficulty Level 1
The first thing that needs to happen is the major search engines need to know that your website exists. Since it may take a search engine days or weeks to get around to visiting your site, you might as well submit the request as soon as possible.
Some of the above links require that you type in a strange looking code - jumbled letters and numbers. They do this in an effort to thwart computer-automated website submissions, essentially to level the playing field. Be sure to enter your entire website address, such as http://www.yoursite.com. What you are doing is asking a particular search engine to instruct its spiders (computerized website analyzers) to visit your website and follow all the hyperlinks within it, and then return with a report.
Are there other search engines you can submit your website to? Yes. Thousands. But don't worry about them - concentrate on the big boys. The smaller ones will find you after you're listed on the major engines.
So, that was easy, right? Five minutes, tops. But was it enough to improve your search engine rankings? Possibly a little. But if you want to improve your chances a great deal more, then let's move on to...
Step 2. Optimize Your Website - Difficulty Level 2
The term "optimize" is thrown around a lot when it comes to website marketing, and it can mean many things. What we mean by it is this: Website optimization is a process which improves the chances that a search engine will link your website with a particular search term. For example, if you practice divorce law in San Antonio, Texas, you would naturally want potential clients to be able to type in the search term "San Antonio Divorce Lawyer" and BOOM! There's your website listing! Well, the steps we're advocating will not guarantee success in that pursuit, but they will go a long way toward improving your chances.
The first thing you need to do to optimize your website is to find out what search terms YOU feel are appropriate to your firm. Try not to be too general, nor too specific. For example, "probate attorney" is not a good search term because there is too much competition for those terms - you'll never get it, so forget it. By the same token, "West Drexel Hill Pennsylvania Probate Attorney" may be too specific. You want to focus on search terms that are not only relevant to your areas of practice, but on those search terms that people actually use.
So how can you find out which search terms are best for your company?
Try this Keyword Selector Tool. Enter the search terms from your list and compare them with this service. (It's free, by the way.) The results you get are what Internet users are actually typing in across several major search engines over the past month. This will help you find out which of your terms are too generic and which ones are just right. Once you've arrived at a list that is both relevant and useful, integrate these search terms into your website content.
An important tip: Make your integration of search terms conversational. Put them in the form of questions, answers, etc. Do Not simply fill up your website with these terms, because YOU WILL BE BANNED from major search engines - they're too smart to fall for it, and even if it did work, visitors to your site will be disappointed by the nonsense results they find on your website. So it's best to play fair.
Step 3. Meta Tags - Difficulty Level 3
Step three involves a process of matching the content of your website with the titles and meta tag encoding within your website. It's not a magic bullet, but without it, your site's search engine rankings can be severely limited. Editing your meta tags will require that you know a little html, and can edit your web page yourself without screwing things up! A terrific article on how to edit your own meta tags can be found here: How To Use HTML Meta Tags.
Step 4. Get Linked Up! - Difficulty Level ?
It's vitally important that other websites have links TO your website - websites with common content and relevance, and preferably popular websites. This will prove to be difficult in the beginning, as sites that are more popular than yours will not benefit from linking to your website, but you will certainly benefit by being linked to from theirs. Try to establish relationships with webmasters from sites that potential clients of yours might visit. Eventually, if the top three steps are carried out properly, small but busy website will eventually add links to your site whether you want them to or not.
Step 5. Stay Fresh - Difficulty Level 0
Keep your website's content current. Write an article (Like this one! You think we're writing this for our health?) Search engines prefer a site that updates its content every once in a while. Static sites will eventually be passed over by sites that are informative and current.
So that's it! Good luck to you! Using the steps above, you should have no problem increasing your website traffic with potential new clients.
Copyright @ 2005 LawyerSites.net. All Rights Reserved.
NOTE: If search engine optimization and submission is something you're interested in for your website, but you don't have the time or inclination to do it yourself, please contact us.
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