datuk’s ramblings

These are what I believe to be the top 10 most important things (not necessarily in order) that you need, in order to get your website found in the search engines.

There are many other factors as well, but if you follow these guidelines, you’ll stand a much better chance, and you’ll be off to a good start.

1. Title Meta Tag
The title tag is what displays as the headline in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It’s also what displays in the top blue band of Internet Explorer when your site is displayed.

Your title tag of your website should be easy to read and designed to bring in traffic. By that, I mean that your main keyword phrase should be used toward the beginning of the tag. True there are websites being found now that do not use the phrase in the title, but the vast majority still do as of this writing.

Don’t make the mistake of putting your company name first, unless you are already a household name, like Nascar or HBO. People are likely searching for what you have to offer, not your name.

Your title tag should be written with a capital letter starting the tag, and followed by all lowercase letters, unless you’re using proper nouns. Some people prefer to capitalize every word, too.

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Link Popularity

Link building has always been a hot topic. In the beginning of the web hyperlinks were virtually the only way to get visitors to a site, because search engines were in their infancy. When search engines grew to be the major source of the web traffic, links didn’t lose their weight, as search algorithms started to rank sites according to the quantity and quality of their incoming links. And today links become increasingly important with the growing significance of the new Web 2.0 social networks.

Link Popularity Building Strategies

Thus, links rule the Internet. Once a routine task of a webmaster, link building has emerged itself into a full scale industry with millions of dollars in turnover. Ranking algorithms perceive links as a proxy for a human judgment, or a user’s positive endorsement of a page. The idea is as follows: a user discovers a page, likes its content, links to the page, and the page gets higher ranking. This is the so-called ‘natural way’ of acquiring links.

The natural way of acquiring link works is too slow and can be pretty unfair. New pages on big and established websites are far more likely to be discovered by web users, and these pages will get the major part of the new links (like 90%); while new pages on fresh sites will get trinkets. This is a serious defect of the link ranking system which is discussed more in details in my article Popularity Ranking Faults.

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PR Professionals need to be trained so they avoid the pitfalls of online PR…

Over the past two years the internet has been changing from a depository of static information to a vibrant, live conversation. Now referred to as Web 2.0, the live web is a very different place. Instead of using online photo albums we now have Flickr and YouTube. Instead of the Encyclopedia Britannica online, we have Wikipedia. And as Fortune Magazine said, we have blogs - for better or worse.

Web 2.0 has given the average person the power of voice. The barriers to online publishing are gone. Anyone can set up a blog in mere minutes and have their say online. In text, images and video. They can podcast and videocast. They can syndicate their thoughts and ideas in an RSS feed, making their comments visible to the entire world. And unlike print, it won’t disappear in a few weeks or months. It’s there for the duration.

What does this mean for public relations? No longer are we crafting one way messages that we can control. We are not doing media relations anymore - it has indeed become public relations. There is a public conversation going on and as a PR practitioner you need to learn how to be a part of this conversation.

What works in traditional PR does not always work in PR 2.0. Of course the basic rules of communication are still the same, but the online world has its own set of rules.

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Do you have a brand new site? How long will you have to wait before it appears on search engines? The truth is, that it could be several months. If you do nothing, it could be years. We offer a couple of suggestions for getting you started on launch day.

One important thing I should mention is that I assume you have a website that is SEO friendly. If it is completely designed in flash, it is not. If it contains frames, it is not. If it is made up of images, it is not. This will make things a lot harder. I have seen some websites that are beautifully designed in flash or contained within frames that have been invisible on search engines. Even after 3 years, their sites did not appear anywhere. The content of this article actually assumes that you have appropriately designed your website. If not, then I recommend hiring a company to perform an seo assessment or audit to increase your potential.

One of the main things you need is to start building a network of incoming links. We’ll tackle relevancy later on but for now, let’s focus on ways for getting sites to link to you.

Incoming Links: (external links)
Significant links are those who have a Page Rank in excess of 3/10 (as determined by the popularity of a website). Yahoo.com, for example, has a Page Rank of 10/10, which is very valuable. Consider getting additional links to your site by submitting to directories that have a high page rank like Yahoo! (Page Rank - 10), Superpages.com (Page Rank - 8) or Dmoz.org (Page Rank -9) to take advantage of valuable incoming links. Some of these are free, others charge a nominal fee while Yahoo! charges $299 for submission to their directory. A better place to start is http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php where you can find a list of directories, paid and free, that could be valuable to you.

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