Go go Google and to the right you will see Preferences.  Inside of Preferences you will see many options that may be of interest to you but the one we want to look at right now is Safe Search Filtering.  Select Strict and at the bottom of the page click Save Preferences. 

 Bare in mind that directory links will not likely bring you traffic at all.  They simply give your site more visibility to the search engines which equals link popularity.  It is just a search engine thing!

This is a list of directories that have higher review costs their strength and their review fees.  These you will want to budget for as they can’t be included in the starter package.

(Page Strength 10) http://dir.yahoo.com $299 per year  This is very steep but well worth the review cost. Google has stated that they approve of Yahoo charging the review fees and apparently like them and it shows in the results!

(Page Strength 9) http://www.business.com/ $199 per year  I have not listed any sites in this directory but it is definitely strong.  There are some questions on whether it passes link juice and to date I don’t know of a difinitive answer.  Proceed with caution on this one.  I say this because they have changed their minds multiple times on their position with link juice, nofollow and the like which makes me nervous with $200.

For the past year, I offered free directory submissions with web design/hosting packages and this worked for many small regional sites to give them a boost in the search results. Over the last few months we have noticed a huge change in results from this and believe that Google is discrediting many of them for various reasons.  One reason is likely that this approach has been abused by others. 

We will continue to submit your sites to some of the free directories, but if you are looking for search engine ranking you may want to look into our SEO services.  We are structuring a simple approach that will offer a solution to fit your budget and needs.

When your site is first published to the internet you have visions of visitor stampedes to your site.  Then perhaps disappointed that that stampede was 23 friends and family members being supportive.  The search engines take a considerable amount of time to efficiently list sites.  Just ponder for a moment all of the things that have to take place before your great site is found in the search results.

• Site is submitted to the search engine
• Site is submitted to directories so that the search engines develop trust in the site.
• Webmasters of the directories visit your site and approve your listing in their directory.
• Search Engines spider your site a little bit at a time reading and discovering more each visit.
• Search Engine Spiders visit the sites and directories that link to you causing the search engines to follow the link to your site and thus explore a little more of your site.
• Data is continually growing as the search engines learn more and more.
• With each link your site gains more trust and is raised in the rankings.

This was a very simplified version of what all goes on after your site is launched but in reality it could be many months before a new site sees the benefit of their efforts.  Especially if the market they are in is very competitive.

How competitive are your keyword phrases?  The more competitive your keyword phrases are the more important Search Engine Optimization and promotion will be for you.  You can imagine how competitive the keyword phrase “web design” is.  Consider how many web designers are competing for the top position for web design in Google.  Staggering to say the least! 

Most sites vie to be in the first 3 pages of search results.  Well, think about it, when you search for something, how many pages are you willing to go in the results before you do another search or abandon the search completely???  The average is probably 3 pages. 

So what can you do while you wait for your site to be in the search engines?  If your site is a compliment to your B&M (brick and mortar) business in a noncompetitive market, then you wouldn’t need to be as aggressive.  Aside from adding the web address to every document, advertisement, submit to directories and such you might only need a couple of well placed links to do the job more quickly.

For the competitive keyword phrases this is not possible.  The first 3 pages are where most of your visitors come from and in a highly competitive market there may be thousands vying for those 3 pages.  How can your site be seen more quickly and near the top of the search engine results?  Well you have many things to consider but here are the major options.

Pay Per Click

Adwords is one of the most popular pay per click options.  The general idea is that you pay to be listed on the right side of Google.  The more you budget for clicks the higher you are in the list of ads.  The more competitive your market is the more it costs per click.  You set the budget, demographics, search terms etc…  So you are in control of your advertising.  Perhaps your budget is tight and you want to make sure your advertising dollars go as far as possible.  You can achieve this with some creative adwords campaigns.  It takes a good bit of time, creativity, research and a little bit of advertising money to get some traffic into your site.  If your advertising budget is larger then you have many more options and can rank at the top of all of your favorite search terms.

Advertise on other sites

Advertisements on the internet work very similar to any other type of advertisement.  You pay for your banner, link or other ad to be listed on another site.  The higher the page rank of the site, the more expensive the advertising.  Some sites would be beneficial for driving traffic than others.  It certainly depends on your market and the sites available. 

Fine tune the external part of your SEO

Much time can often be taken off of the excrutiating wait by doing extensive optimization of your site internally and externally.  Your internal SEO is done mostly during construction however, external is done after the site hits the internet.  Pay Per Click could get very expensive in this market as well.  SEO professionals have not only the know how but have an inner circle of connections to get the job done.  They know how to read the stats of potential advertisers, how to strategically place a link where it counts and much much more.  This service is expensive but could be worth it depending on your market.  Magnolia Web Design is preparing to offer an affordable SEO package for the business that needs a jump start in the search engines.  More about this later.

There are many other things you can do, but we have covered the most popular methods.  Contact us if you feel that your business would benefit from any of these options.

Many sites use Photoshop images and even the text is in pictures.  Yes, they are awesome sites but where is the text to help the search engines know what your site is about?  In a picture?  How do they expect a bot to read words in a picture? 

There are ways around this problem but the fix entails deep pockets!  Yes you will find sites that are picture laden or full of Flash that actually rank in the search engines.  How???  Money, an SEO expert, tons of links with just the right anchor text etc…  Depending on the competitiveness of your keywords and niche this may be many thousands of dollars! 

When I build sites you will notice that most of my sites have as many words as possible, most often 200+ on the front page.  Let me explain my philosophy here.  Magnolia Web Design builds AFFORDABLE web sites and provides AFFORDABLE SEO.  In order to keep both of these things affordable we build sites that use as many words as possible thus reducing the need for as much SEO money and time to achieve the desired results.

So because we offer affordable websites, hosting and SEO services, you can expect that there is a reason why we build sites a specific way.  Most of the sites we build are ongoing works in progress, growing and improving all along the way.  The result…. Our clients get a web site that is attractive, functional and professional that incidentally works well in search engines with the least amount of effort.  All of which saves both time and money. 

We will end this article with a little trivia for you.

Graphic Design = Graphically designed site.  Graphic Designers create wonderful works of art.  Prepare to need an SEO to assist with search engines as most of them do not do SEO!

Web Development = Site or template improved and developed to the customers desires.  Could be a more graphical or textual site.  Most often includes programming, database and/or ecommerce solutions.

Web Design = Exactly what it sounds like.  Designing the structure, look and feel of a site. 

Generally SEO enthusiast prefer the Web Development or Design areas of the web arena for the sites they build.  I absolutely love to look at the graphically designed sites but that is not my area of expertise.  Another words, TOTAL website affordability rules at Magnolia Web Design. 

First of all, manually searching through the search results pages are less than accurate.  Google is moving toward personalized searches more and more.  You and I could do the same search and perhaps see different results.  Another reason you may see different results is various data centers (of the 700 at Google) may not be updated.  Our searches could come from different data centers.  Here is a very nice simple script to check your serps.  It gives the results for Google MSN,  Yahoo! and AltaVista.  This script just gives the average position which is fine for general checking.

Search for the placement of the broader search terms over a period of time.  Check singular and plural forms of the search terms. If you see a consistent issue with the same search term, a few simple adjustments could correct the problem.  Monitoring your position gives you an edge on the competition that has likely built a website and perhaps hasn’t continued link building or updated content.  You can appreciate any little edge you may get in search results. 

The placement of your site in the results page is very important.  You should aim at the first page and if your market is not terribly competitive you should aim at the #1 spot increasing the traffic to your site by a huge margin.  In some markets just simply being on the first page is sufficient.

Don’t expect to be in the #1 spot for your search term right off, these things take time with a lot of little tweaks.  Studying the results page positions help you to understand what actually is in need of attention.  Perhaps you need to adjust the title of your page, add some links to gain some rank or perhaps you just need to adjust some of your content verbiage.

Magnolia Web Design is presently working on providing an SEO solutions to meet the needs of Small Business as well as Church and non-profit organizations, helping you reach the first page or the first position with your search terms.

The keyword phrases are then constructed into descriptions of your site using the least amount of fluff words and usually using the most relevant descriptive words.

Once keyword phrases and descriptions are selected, your site is submitted to all of the major search engines for inclusion.  In general, the major search engines feed to the minor ones thus there is little sense in submitting to the minor search engines. 

Good links are like gold in Google Searches and can come from anywhere! Even though Magnolia Web Design is your Webmaster, there are things you can do to help your sites search engine rankings without ever touching HTML.  The more RELEVANT links pointing to your site that you have, the better.  You can ask your dealers, business associates, or anyone you are in contact with to add a link to your site.  One way links (those that point to your site but your site does not point to theirs) are the absolute best but reciprocal links are also valuable, especially when it is relevant to your site’s business.  For our local customers who are members of the Chamber of Commerce, we ensure that your link is added to their database.  There are tons of places that would be more than happy to add your link to their site. 

Other places to consider are, if you have been listed on sites without a link because you didn’t have a site before.  Or perhaps you have changed domain names and there are sites listing incorrect links which could easily be corrected.  Online yellowpage ads are sometimes interesting to get straight but they do provide a link and therefore worth the time.  We do as much of this as possible, although sometimes the business owner has to address the link situation by phone or mail.

Natural linking will come with time and is best accomplished with content.  A church for example can add sermons, articles or any number of things on their site for content.  Visitors find the article interesting and share it by placing a link on their site pointing to the page on your website.  This is another way to help your site in the search engines without doing one html tag on your website.  You type the content and email it to us and we will place it on your site within 48 hours (most often within an hour).  We love to see your site grow and would be happy to get it on your site as fast as possible.  The article, sermon or some other content is added to your site, google indexes the page which in turn causes a chain reaction of potential customers searching for phrases from your article and ultimately end up at your site.  You are essentially feeding the search engines!

In order to gain links, we do a lot of Directory submissions.  We try to find as many free or low cost SEO Friendly directories and submit each client’s website to them. This is very  time consuming but absolutely necessary. 

For additional links, we often create a web page within your site for Link Exchanges.  We locate other like sites which aren’t in direct competition with your site and exchange links.  This is another time consuming task but essential.  Before we exchange links we check the content of their site to ensure it is relevant to your industry.  We then check to see if they are doing anything that is unethical.  Some websites will agree to exchange links with you but they have a meta tag telling the search engines not to index or follow the links.  These are unethical and if we were to exchange links with them, it would essentially create a one way link to them since the link on their site pointing to you would not be followed by the search engine.  Another trick some websites pull is adding your site to theirs and after a week or so they remove it hoping that the webmaster doesn’t notice.  If it is not noticed, then the unethical site is getting a free one way link.  There are many unethical sites with many tricks such as this.  We try very hard to avoid any associations with these sites.  We manually check the links for all of our clients periodically and remove any link exchanges if the reciprocal was removed by the other site.  The unethical sites cause the rest of us a lot more work!!!

All of these pains are taken to see to it that your site has as many relevant links pointing to it as possible.  You can help your site gain popularity by creating fresh unique content (no copying) and asking others to link to your site!

Search Engine Optimization is a weird science with many changes (staying ahead of the unethical sites for one), twists and turns and as you can see the process takes a lot of man hours to accomplish.  Page rank is grown and nurtured with all of these little steps tweaking here and there as we go.  You can do your own SEO and there is no reason why you wouldn’t be successful, but for those of you with more important things to do with all this time….. like run your business, then Magnolia Web Design will do the work for you.

In the next article, we will explore Search Engine Placement (SERPS)