SEO - search engines

One of the most important things to remember when you make a website is that its content matters more than anything else. Over time, the most important link-building work for your website will be done by others. The more content your site has, the more likely some of that content will appeal to a site visitor. Adding content to your website also increases the number and variety of key words that search engines can associate with it.

Previously, we’ve seen how important it is to choose the right key words when you create a website, and the role they play in ensuring people find your site using search engines. We’ve also looked at backlinks, and at ways to start adding them to external sites. One of the most common ways to begin building backlinks is to use site directories. But as a beginner webmaster, you’ll need to understand how links are seen by search engines.

Knowing a little more about the interaction between search engines and backlinks will help you to shape the site links you build, and to make a website that’s destined for success.

Our last look at getting your site found on the web focused on search engines, and how to ensure they find and list your site in results pages. If you’ve just begun to make a website, you’ll need to figure out the kinds of search terms your potential visitors will use when looking for your website.

Understanding how your visitors think and preparing your site as a consequence will go a long way towards improving your site’s visibility – and potential success – on the web.

Last time we chatted about how to how to make a website people will find, we looked at how search engines work. Building a new website – no matter how good it looks or what it contains – doesn’t mean people will find it. Whether you’re making a free website for your family and friends, or an online store to finance your future, it’s important to do a little work on ensuring it figures prominently in search engine results.

Today, we’ll look at how to take the first steps towards improving your site’s visibility on the web, and at one of the most important factors in search engine ranking algorithms.

When you start to make a website, it’s easy to get caught up with thinking about the details. It’s true that framing that amazing cat video, realizing your super blog idea or getting your killer e-commerce concept up and running is important to your site’s future success. But it’s just as important to get your site found on the Internet to assure it has a long and happy life.

This is the first part in a series of articles on how to do just that: getting your site found online. Over the next few weeks, we’ll cover the basics, such as how search engines work, and see how applying a few basic principals when you create a website can go a long way to making it a success.

Starting out with a new website can be a lot of fun. Getting hands-on with tools to make a website is a little like finger-painting: your hands get dirty (ok, not really), and you get instant results with fairly minimal effort (plus it can be a whole lot of fun). Though you can create a website to share photos online or publish a personal blog for close friends and family, a lot of beginner webmasters are looking for a way to start their own online business, or to communicate with a wider audience. And for that to happen, you’ll want to get your site found in search engines with appropriate keywords.

Keeping tabs on your site’s key word ranking on search engine results pages will give you an insight into its potential for attracting visitors, and you’ve probably already using external tools like Google Analytics to follow your search engine traffic. Using a rank checking tool complements Analytics, by helping you find out just how easy it is for visitors to find your site on search engines.

Here are a few free key word ranking tools you can use to do just that.

We’ve recently taken a look at the basic principals of giving your website a good start in life. Much of the work of ensuring your site is visible on the web takes place on your pages, or through link building.

But there’s more to your website than meets the eye; your site code contains invisible meta information that defines key aspects of your site. Search engines often use this information as a way to classify and rank your pages for relevant search terms. It’s therefore just as vital to pay particular attention to this meta information when you make a website, as it is to choose the right keywords.

Over the last few weeks, we've taken a look at getting started with improving your site's search engine ranking. Obtaining a good position in search engine result pages is a vital part of ensuring your website is a success; doing so will significantly increase the number of new visitors your site attracts, and help position you as an authority in your field, thus greatly enhancing your ability to communicate effectively with your audience.

If you've decided to make a free website to share a few holiday snaps with family and friends, then you needn't worry too much about search engines – your audience is sufficiently limited that you can simply email your site details to those that are likely to be interested.

On the other hand, if your potential audience extends beyond those in your immediate circle, then you need to think about building links to ensure your site gets noticed in search results, whether you've chosen to use a free website builder or invested in an on-site website development team for your company. This is especially true is you are looking to develop a widely successful website or online business.

Last week, we took a quick look at backlinks and how pertinence and relevancy were central to the way search engine algorithms analyze and rank pages for keywords. When you make a website, it's vital to ensure your pages can be understood by search engines and ranked correctly, to ensure the site is “visible” on the web.

We'll take a look at how you can use the website builder tools integrated into doomby's free website maker to optimize your pages automatically a little later on, but today we'll be focusing on backlinks, and the way they are used by search engines to rank pages.

As we saw last time, one of the first things to do when you make a website is to ensure that search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, know your site exists. Although search engines routinely scour the Internet to update their databases with new sites and pages, this process isn't instantaneous: the fact that you have chosen to make a free website (or to make a pro website for that matter) doesn't mean you'll instantly appear in search engine results once it's online. And it won't make a difference whether you use a free website maker or have invested huge sums of money in expensive website builder software and hosting – search engines will include your website in their results pages when they're good and ready.

Though submitting you website and its sitemap* to search engines is one part of ensuring your site gets listed as quickly as possible, being listed is only the first step on the road to search engine success: it's one thing to figure in Google's database, and quite another to get to the number one spot, on the very first page. One of the ways to get there is to build backlinks.