April 25, 2007
Keeping an Eye on Your Search Engine Position
This is something that I do on a regular basis. You really want to do this when you start a new website or when you get on the top of the index.
If you have started a new website and have done all of the things that you need to do when starting a website you really should find out where you are listed on the major search engines so that you will know if your new website is going in the right direction or not.
In the beginning it will take time to find where you are positioned however it is well worth taking the time to do this.
There are a few ways to check where you are and how you are doing. You should do all of them when doing your evaluation. What you will want to do is to search your main keywords and keyword phrases as follows. Type these in the search field on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Run these three searches to see where you are listed. The allintitle you should be able to find somewhere right away providing that you used a keyword or keyword phrase that is not very competitive. If you are using a competitive keyword or keyword phrase you probably don’t have a very good keyword and you won’t be able to compete in the first place.
Click on every page of the results until you find your site using the above criteria. Use a spread sheet and type your position on each search engine no matter what position it may be.
It will probably take you some time the first time that you do this but after that you should be able to find your site pretty quickly for each of the search engines providing you document the results for each.
Check your position every day to see if your position has improved or has gotten worse. If you find that your website is improving, you will know that you are doing the right things to get your website ranked toward the top of the search engines. If it is getting worse then you will know that you need to make some changes to get it going in the right direction.
The thing that you need to understand is that your site will fluctuate up and down on the index. This is quite normal. What you want to look out for is that it is not heading in the wrong direction on a continuous basis.
Once you have found your website on the index of each search engine it won’t take you long to find it after that providing that do this on a daily basis. This is well worth doing and it will save you time and get you on the first page of the major search engines much quicker.
If you are already on the top of the search engines you definitely want to do this to make sure that you stay there. Things can change really quickly on a search engine index and if something happens to your position you want to know about it when it happens so that you can make whatever corrections necessary to get back on top.
March 5, 2007
Why you Need RSS
If your website doesn’t use RSS you really should consider setting up one for your website.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Since you have a website, I assume that you want to get visitors to your website. An RSS feed will help you do just that. An RSS feed provides short descriptions of a website’s content. If you were to take a run over to technorati and run a search on anything you like, you will get a snippet of the most recent content for each website that is displayed.
Here’s the importance of using RSS to you. Every time that you update your website with new content or with whatever change that is made to your website, your RSS will announce to the world, including the search engines, that changes have been made and in return will send people to your website to check out those changes.
Bottom line, using RSS will help drive new, as well as returning traffic to your website. Another great benefit of having an RSS feed setup on your website is that when someone visits your site and if he or she likes the content on your website they can subscribe your feed via email or through a feed reader. This is a great benefit because you can bet that this person will be returning to your website sometime in the near future.
As we all know the more often people come back to our website the better the chance there is that they will buy something. The returning visitor’s come back because they trust you and see you as an authority on whatever it is you do and some of them will tell others about your website as well. There’s nothing better than word of mouth. It really gives you, and your website, credibility.
RSS is probably mostly responsible for the increasing number of blog sites popping up because they have RSS built right in. You don’t have to have a blog to run RSS on your website. Any website can use RSS. If you are interested in setting up an RSS feed on your website, you can use this form to help you set one up. http://www.webreference.com
One last thing that you need to understand about RSS, if you don’t have a lot of content on your website and you don’t intend to update it on a regular basis, RSS will not do you much good. Regularly updated websites are the sites that do the best with the search engines and in general for that matter. RSS will help you get the most out of your updated content.
In a nutshell, RSS will help get you noticed with the search engines along with your visitors.







