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This page is specifically for those who have web sites for their business, and/or those who may consider having a home page on this site. The rest of you may find it a little boring, but please read on if you wish.
There are currently close to one hundred million domain names that have have been registered with ICANN. With that many web sites out there in the ether, how are people going to find yours or mine?
I am sure that you have typed a few key words into a search box, and in a few seconds have had thousands, if not millions of results. If you used a Google search sometime during 2006, you are in good company because there were a staggering total of 1.4 billion Google searches completed during the year 2006. These figures were released in April 2007 by Nielsen/NetRatings.
Other statistics released included the fact that Google during 2006 had 50.8% of the search engine market. (an increase of 22.5% on their 2005 figures). In second place in the Search Engine popularity contest came Yahoo, which scored 23.6% of the market during 2006.
Now, there are many hundreds of search engines. Those of you with web sites that you want optimized for Search Engine rankings have no doubt seen advertisements from firms that will offer to submit your site to 600 or whatever search engines for a fee. In fact I have the software which will submit sites to hundreds of search engines automatically, which I have used on numerous occasions.
But, having studied the Nielsen/NetRatings figures for 2006, I have to ask the question of myself and others, WHY BOTHER?
You see, other figures released show that those in the first seven places of the ‘2006 Search Engine Popularity Contest’* accounted for 98.4% of the total search engine market. Now, it is fairly simple maths to determine that the hundreds of others share a total of 1.6% of the market between them! (* my term)
So, as I said, “why bother”?
Personally, I am going to stick with the big guys, and concentrate on the biggest, Google.
Now, why am I concerned about search engines, and web site optimization and all that sort of stuff?
Well, it does not matter how flash your web site looks, and how chuffed you are that it has whiz bang movies or whatever, if the search engines can’t find it. This is a fact that I discovered several years ago through a very painful and expensive personal experience.
My company, at the time had contracted the services of a well known marketing firm to market a new program we had developed. Part of their contract was to design a web site for this new innovative program for us. This they did, and initially we were pleased with the results. We did not know much at the time about this thing called “Web Site Optimization”, but we soon learned.
One of the things that the spiders sent out by the search engines to crawl over web sites look for is content. Well, our beaut looking web site had good content, but it was all embedded in graphics and could not be found by the search engines. So, we went back to the drawing boards. That particular exercise cost our company many thousands of dollars.
Since then I have personally completed courses of study in search engine marketing and optimization, and I am pleased to report that our web sites are getting much higher rankings with Google and other search engines with selected key words and key word phrases.
If I still have your attention, then thanks!
I assume if you have got this far that you either have a web site or you are thinking about getting one, and/or you plan to have a home page on this site.
I want to help you.
Well OK, I shall come clean. I am not being totally altruistic. You see, by helping you, I am also helping me.
It can be a WIN/WIN situation for both of us.
Let’s get back to Google and some of the things that are used in their algorithms to decide which sites get higher rankings than others.
But before I do that, I want to make the point that most web sites are initially found through a search engine search, and as already discussed the most popular search engine is Google. If you do a search of some key words and thousands of results come up, you are not going to go past the first ten or maybe twenty. So, if your web site comes up as the 100th or 1,000th result it does not really matter because no one is going to search that far. So, the whole aim of search engine optimization is to have people find you preferably in the first ten results of a key word search.
Let me share a few web site optimization secrets with you.
A few years ago one of the important factors in getting search engine rankings was the metalanguage on a web site. Metalanguage is hidden in the structure of the web site. It consists of key words and phrases that your web master would have discussed with you before publishing your site. It can not be read, but can be read by the search engine spiders. It is still used by some search engines, but is no where near as important as it once was.
Other factors are much more important to get high rankings with Google. Let me make the point also here that no one knows exactly what the algorithm is that Google uses except for those at Google. We also know that the algorithm is constantly changed. So, if you are getting high rankings now, don’t become complacent because you may not in six or so months time. There are software programs however that can reverse engineer ranking results, and give us an indication of the factors that Google is looking for.
Here are some of the important ones:
Good content - you need to write plenty of information about what ever it is you have in your web site. This content also needs to include the actual words that people type into the Google search box. So, often you will need to say a similar thing in different ways. Back Links - Google did not start operating commercially until September, 1998. The search engine was developed by two young men, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They originally called their search engine “BackRub”, because of its unique ability to analyze the back links going to any given web site. Hits - The more people who land on your web site, that is, the more hits it gets, the higher you will rank with Google. Fresh Content - Many web sites are “tired” and out of date. Make a point of keeping your content current, and make regular changes, every four to six weeks, so when the search engine spiders crawl your site again, they have something new to look at.
Good Content
You will notice I have a Google search box on each page of this site. It is on each page of this site’s twelve companion sites also. The search box on each site has a facility for completing an external search, and also a facility for completing a search on each of the sites on which it is placed.
When this site is well established, more and more users will be completing an internal search to obtain the information that they need. If they type in the search box for example, ‘swing dance Saturday’, and you have a swing dance on Saturday and it is listed on your home page on this site, then the information will come up in the search results.
This is certainly one place where I can help you and you can help me. By providing good content on this site, you are helping improve the quality of it and are helping it become more Google friendly. The more people who have good quality information on this site, the more users it will attract, which will in turn help everyone who is listed on it.
There are other dance sites that charge quite a substantial ongoing hosting fee for having a home page on their site. I am not making any hosting charge at all. There will be only a once off set up fee for the time involved in getting your information listed. And this fee is a mere $110 including GST.
I want your content on this site. It will certainly help your business to have good content on this site, whether you have your own web site or not.
Think logically about it. It will cost you a couple of hundred dollars for a small display advertisement in any capital city newspaper, for one insertion to appear one day only. Your web page will be there for years to come for a minimal once off cost only.
I am happy for you to have a few photos and logo on your home page if you wish, but the important thing from the search engine point of view is the actual words that are written. I don’t care how much- 200 words- 500 words, even 1,000 words if you wish, whatever you need to write to get all the information across.
I have published twelve other web sites on dance in Australia apart from the site you are currently reading. At the time of writing this page, the first site I published “Dancing in Brisbane” has been published for less than two weeks and has already scored hundreds of hits. That’s not bad for a brand new web site is it?
I do plan on continuing to tweak each of these thirteen sites on an ongoing basis for search engine optimization. They will rank well. This will benefit every business that is involved on the site.
Back Links - Back links are important as I have explained. If you have a web site, and you have a listing on this site, or you plan to list on this site, please consider placing a link on your site to this site’s URL. I will happily reciprocate with a back link to your site in your listing. If you have a home page on this site, that home page will have its own URL. I am quite happy for you to make the link from your site to the home page URL of this site.
Hits - As I have mentioned, the number of hits that a web site receives is also a part of Google’s algorithm for rankings. It is my hope that this group of web sites will be the first choice of dancers traveling around Australia. I believe these sites will become that within the next few months. My initial market research has been most favourable, both with dancers and dance teachers/studios. The more hits, the higher the ranking and the better it is for everyone involved.
Fresh Content - There will be fresh content on this site at least monthly. The “Out & About” page will feature a different, dance teacher, dance studio, dance club or dance venue every month, with all the previously published “Out & About” pages archived for continued viewing. Also there is a page for special events “This Month” and “Next Month” on these pages I will list in chronological order any special events that have been planned. From August 2007, these page titles will be changed to whatever the current month and the next month are. For example “August Events” and “September Events”.
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