Search engines and promotion (lecture 9)
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
December 3, 2008 [1342 views]
Recent activities have been a bit harder (deliberately) and fewer students are completing them but those that did generally experimented well and discovered new useful ideas for their sites and for their future IT careers.
I thought search engines find every web page, so why do you need to submit your site?
Search engines can only find sites and pages that are linked from other pages. This means that a brand new site may have no links at all and the search engines will never find it. Submitting your site to directories and search engines speeds up the process.
How are advertising only sites such as million dollar homepage successful? Surely noone would visit them if they have no content?
Such sites are like car crashes; people are fascinated by them and go and have a look. Dancing hamsters, sneezing pandas and nude celebrities all attract the same sort of audience and some companies will pay to be put in front of that audience.
How effective do you think RSS is?
Increasingly effective and part of a much bigger story surrounding data syndication and mashups. RSS allows one site to monitor another and the process of browsing to be semi-automated.
What is the best way to promote your site?
Get it talked about on other high ranking sites, PR and understanding Google. Add "link bait" and use social media to promote it.
How often should I submit my site to search engines and directories?
Professional marketing companies suggest adding inbound links steadily but often – about 5-10 a week. If you keep adding new content and you syndicate that content through RSS you may be able to get new links simply by writing content.
Will the search engines still have my website if I stop updating it?
Yes but your ranking will fall and fairly soon you will be out of the search results for most keywords. You may still be there for your domain name but that’s about it.
Do you know of any web development classes so that I can improve my site?
You should have enough of a start so that you can start experimenting on your own. I would suggest buying a few books and working steadily through the examples. I would learn xHTML and CSS.
I really don’t understand RSS at all.
When you write a post in your blog it consists of a headline, some text and perhaps some links. RSS takes the same content and makes a summary available as an XML feed (a structured format that can be understood by many different systems). This feed can be automatically read by special RSS news reading software. You will see that the BBC publishes a wide range of RSS feeds and if you look at those (through an RSS reader) you will perhaps understand better.
Do I need permission to use other RSS feeds on my site?
No. RSS feeds are provided by sites to be read and republished. If you offer the feeds in a proper way the originating site gains from click-thoughs from the feeds (and perhaps Google reputation).
How do I know that my feed will be updated every time I publish a new post?
It is built in to WordPress. Just as your new post appears in your blog so a new entry appears in your feed.
Can these analytics programs show details of the visitors to your site?
You will have seen already all the information that can be accessed from the logs. This includes the IP address of the browser making the request. This gives you a good idea of where they came from but not who they are.
Is there a way of finding out which sites link to your site without having users referred by these sites?
Yes. You can use the link:www.site.com query syntax inside Google or Yahoo! This will show you the links that have been picked up by the search spiders.
Can people obtain competitors site stats to see how they are doing against the competitors?
Sometimes this can be estimated. That is what the site Alexa (owned by Amazon) aims to do.
Is it too late to change web domains?
The sites belong to you and you can use them as you will. Why not add a new domain instead of closing down the first one?
Can you explain user agents?
Every request for information comes as a structured query and this query includes information about the type of browser and computer. This is known as the user agent and tracking programs can report on these.
Do you use Google Analytics?
Yes for almost all our sites. I will demonstrate some of these in the lecture.
As part of an experiment to help Stanfords Travel Books and Maps promote it's site here is a link to a new part of Stanfords selling Globes.
10 Top tips for improving the ranking of your site
- Write regular excellent content that is worth linking to
- Make sure that your site is built for SEO (titles, headlines, links, urls)
- Ask potential partners for reciprocal links
- Run another blog to discuss your site and its reputation
- Use social media (Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon) to generate links
- Become an active participant in relevant forums and communities
- Understand content syndication through RSS
- Measure your positions and reputations every month
- Analyse your results in analytics and use this to inform changes
- Be patient!
What do you think?
