After surfing around the Internet trying to find out how Google ranks your website, you will find information on content, meta tags, domain names, and all sorts. Yes, these aspects do play a role in Search Engine Optimization, but they are not the key to success.

So what is?

Linking! I will remain with my topic of ‘fishing’ to explain how this all works. Let’s say that you think that a great deal of people would use Google to search for fishing rods. Now, what they would do is click to Google and type in ‘fishing rods’ and hit ‘Google Search’, and retrieve their results. How on earth could you get your website to appear in the results? Your website is about fishing, it does have information on fishing rods, but it is not appearing in the results! I have a great solution, and here is comes..

Google crawls through thousands of websites daily, building connections between all of them, reading what links appear on what websites, and basically building a web. What you want to do is get your website to appear on as many other websites as possible, whether it’s a paid link, an inline content link or just any kind of link, this is what you need to aim to do. Now, when you normally put a link on another website, they will ask for a name, this is what the readers will read, for example, you might choose to have them write ‘fishing.co.za’, as your reader visible link if fishing.co.za is your domain name. This is great and all, but NOT what we are aiming to achieve here.

Here is an example of what would work many times better:

As you can see in the image, is a list of three links, each linking to a different website. If you look at position two, ‘Fishing Rods’, this is what we have used to link to fishing.co.za - What this will do, is allow Google to recognize your website with the words ‘Fishing Rod’. If you can setup links the same as this across a number of websites, Google will soon link your website to those words, and list you high up in their search results when people search for ‘Fishing Rods’. The code you would use to do this is:

<a href=”http://www.fishing.co.za”>Fishing Rods</a>

Would produce:

Fishing Rods

John Chow, over at John Chow dot com, has spent the last several weeks/months working on linking his blog to the words ‘make money online’, and the way he has done this is, is by offering people a link from his website to theirs, if they would review his blog on their site, and include a link to his website using the phrase ‘make money online’. Here is the code for this, just to show what I mean..

<a href=”http://www.johnchow.com”>make money online</a> with John Chow.

Would produce:

make money online with John Chow.

It’s an interesting concept all in all, and I hope I have explained it well enough. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a comment, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Good luck with the linking!

Earlier, I posted an article about holding your traffic. I covered some of the more obvious, and crucial methods available to you as a website owner, but now I am going to try and cover a few more methods, which are a little less obvious.

Something I have seen over the last couple months is various webtrepreneurs thinking of interesting ways to draw traffic to their website, and hold the traffic there - one such example is ‘competitions’. I recently came across a blog which offered a prize to any person who left a comment on his website. And a few days later, he then said that the more ‘relative’ (not just silly) posts you make on his website, the higher your chances are to win. Now, you might think to yourself that this is silly, and people will post silly posts, and once the competition is over, the commenting will end? This is not true, when you are commenting on an article, and you want your comment to be relative to the topic at hand, you will need to read the article. Once you have made 10 comments, you have read 10 articles, and will probably be fairly into the persons topic, which will lead to you returning even once the competition is over. Remember - there was a reason why you were there in the first place!

Another useful method is visiting websites with similar topics to yours. Each time you leave a comment behind on a persons website, they usually link your nickname to your website, which means that when someone else reads all the comments to do with an article, they might see your link and click it. If this is the case, and your website has similar content to the previous website, the chances are the ‘clicker’ will take a look around your website too. This puts me back onto the topic of a content, which I often talk about: If someone arrives at your website, you need to make sure that your content is ‘better’ than the other website, not so? How would you do this? Well, the best way, in my opinion is to learn your market. Spend time surfing the Internet for similar sites to your own, see how they do things, see what they write about, and try bring yours above theirs.

The last tip I have for you is ‘communities’. Communities are magical places, where people with similar interests flock together. There are thousands of community websites available on the Internet, but I have two in mind, which I know work really well! MyblogLog is a website for blog owners. Anyone who authors a blog, may sign up and start linking up to other blog owners. One of the best features with MyBlogLog is the ability to create your own community and have people join it. So, in essence, if you come across a blog you really enjoy, you can sign up (with a few simple clicks), and be part of that persons community! MyBlogLog also offer widgets (A widget is a kind of plugin feature for a website). You can see my widget on the right hand side of my website, the one which shows the recent visitors. Through my experience, when a person visits my website, and I see their face/logo in my list, I usually click through and take a look at their website, and often I see them return again! If you would like to join my community, simply click here, and look for the green button on the right which says “Join Community”.

Facebook, is another excellent community website, which has proven to probably be the biggest and most interactive one yet! Facebook allows you to link up to all your friends and family with the click of a mouse, and allows you to share news with all the people you have allowed to be associated with you, it is truly amazing, and I cannot describe it in words, it is better to head on over and take a look for yourself. Moving along, a feature, which I have found very useful on Facebook, is the ability to create a group. You are permitted to create groups, and invite people to your groups. Within these groups, you can write articles for your members to read, post pictures for them to look at, and post links for them to click. I have two groups on Facebook, one which is a personal group, which grew to 120 members within one week, and now I have a Webtrepreneur group, which I have just started, but have not invited anyone yet. 120 members in a week is a great collection of people, I am able to send personal messages to all the members, keep them up to date with what news I have, and invite them all to my website when I have something new to share! Head on over and take a look, it’s a great way to keep people coming back to your site!

And there you go! Give these methods a go, as well as these, and see what traffic you can get!

Right, so I have given you an idea on how to start things off, and have told you how to submit your site to google. Now comes probably the most important part - keeping your readers from only visiting once.

Getting ranked on Google at number one, or any result showing on the first page of search results is wonder and all, and will probably increase your traffic nicely, but what you don’t want is people visiting just once, and never returning again, so you need ways to hold your users.

There are many ways to try and ensure this:

1. Niche
Dictionary.com describes a niche as, “a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: to find one’s niche in the business world.” Last article I spoke about running a fishing website - And what this all basically means is that you have your website about fishing, you keep your content about fishing, and that is your niche.

2. Content
I have mentioned content before, but this is a subject which cannot be mentioned just once. If a person is looking for a website about fishing, and arrives at your website, and you keep your topic of fishing throughout the website, the chances are that the reader will find something he was looking for, and will most probably carry on looking around the website, as well as return again the next time he requires something to do with fishing.

3. Bookmark
Another useful little trick is to add a button to your website, which allows a reader to easily add your site to his bookmarks.
In order to do this, we need to use some Javascript:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”Text/Javascript”>
<!– //

var urlAddress = “http://www.yournamehere.com/”;
var pageName = “Your page name”;

function addToFavorites() {
if (window.external) {
window.external.AddFavorite(urlAddress,pageName)
}
else
{
alert(”Sorry! Your browser doesn’t support this function.”);
}
} // –></script>

This code gets placed between your <head></head> tags in the source code of the page, which will have the link to add your site to a persons bookmark. The second part to the following code, between your <body></body> tags on your website (where you want the link to appear) :

<a href=”javascript:addToFavorites()”><font color=”#0000FF” face=”Arial”>Bookmark My Page!</font></a>

This will put a link on your website, which a reader may click, and have your site automatically added to his/her bookmarks!

4. Polls, Comments, Interaction
People are like sheep, they follow what others do. When a person arrives at your website, if he or she sees that other people have been reading your site, and completing things like polls, they will be more inclined to participate. It is important to make your website look active! Voting Polls are an easy way for users to see that your website has been active, it is also an excellent way for you to get feedback from your readers. Comments allow users to comment on your articles, this provides you with feedback, as well as giving your readers a chance to start a discussion, which will ensure readers revisiting your website. There are all sorts of interaction techniques available, and I would suggest having a look through all the Wordpres plugins for examples.

5. RSS
RSS (Rich Site Summary) solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. I am not going to go into detail about RSS Feeds, as I will have a separate post to explain exactly how to go about setting this up. If you would like to read further, click here.

6. Newsletter
If a person has arrived at your website, and you have followed the above instructions, it is a good idea to offer your readers a newsletter. This is one of the most effective ways on ensuring reader loyalty. Your readers will be able to sign up for your newsletter, and you will be able to reach them via email. I have had great success with newsletter in the past. Here are a couple tips..

• Do not send out newsletter continually, state on your website how often newsletters will be sent out, so the user is aware that he/she will not be receiving loads of emails from you.
• Try and only send out a newsletter every two weeks or once a month at the most.
• Keep your newsletter to the topic at hand.
• Make sure you have links to various sections of your website in the newsletter.

Ok, there are six excellent steps towards securing reader loyalty. All these methods have been proven effective, there is plenty of information on the Internet to further your understanding on the topics covered here. I will post a followup article on this with some more useful methods soon.

You may sign up to my RSS Feed here.

In part 1, I talked about: domain names, titles, meta tags, content and valid formatting. Now I am going to talk a bit more about search engine submissions.

Once you have your domain name, and the website is live on the Internet, you face the problem of getting people to your website. The ‘easiest’ way to have people arrive at your website is via a search engine. There are two specific ways to have your website appear in a Google search, for example.

1. Submit your website to Google
In order to submit your website to Google search engines, you will have to do a couple things.

Firstly, you will need to sign up for an account with Google. Once your account is created, you will be able to login to the Google webmaster tools area. Towards the top left of the website, you will be able to add your website. Google will then ask you to verify your website, this can be done in two ways: Either by adding some code to your website, or by uploading a file to where your website is hosted/stored online. I often find it easier to just upload a file, rather than opening up files and editing the source code.

2. Create a site map
In my experience, I have found site maps to be an absolute gift, they have ranked many of my websites as number 1 on Google searches, and would without a doubt say that it is probably one of the most effective ways to get your website listed/indexed with Google. Here is a fantastic little tool, which will create your site map for you - Simply enter in your domain name, let the tool do its thing, and it’ll provide you with a site map. The sitemap.xml file will be downloadable, once downloaded, upload it to your website.

Right, now to tell Google about it. Back to the webmaster tools, there will be a link to provide a sitemap - click this option. Here you will be asked to choose a type of sitemap, choose the “Add General Web Sitemap” option. At this point, it will ask you to enter in the URL (uniform resource locator) for the sitemap. An example would be https://webtrepreneur.co.za/sitemap.xml. It is simply asking you to point it in the direction of the sitemap.xml file you uploaded. Once you have completed this step, you are done. Google will send its web spiders out and take a look at your website!

I hope my instructions have not been too complicated or complex, I have tried my best to make them as user friendly as possible, as it is vital to have your website submitted to Google. There are other search engines, which you can list your website on, but Google remains the most popular choice amongst web users.

Please remember: Once you have listed your website with Google, and submitted a sitemap, Google will not immediately rank you on their web searches. There are thousands of websites trying to get listed, so give it a couple days, before you try finding your website on Google! If you click here, you will see an example of webtrepreneur.co.za being ranked as number 1.

We are almost at the point, where we can start looking at advertising on your website!