Many new web owners have don‘t know how to start their website to actually receive visitors and that‘s quite common. People sit and wait for a miracle to happen and their website to rank high and get listed on the search engines, but in reality this does not happen that easy and a lot of work is involved before you get your deserved traffic.
Usually when you make a website (designed by someone else or even yourself), and then get it published on the Internet you‘d expect that people will suddenly swarm and start visiting your site and your business will start receiving numerous phone calls from new clients attracted by your new website, but in fact things are not that easy. In most situations we advise people to get professional SEM (Search Engine Marketing) services and help them jumpstart their websites, but that involves a certain amount of money that some of you are not willing to spend or you simple want to do it yourselves. Here I‘ll explain you some simple tricks to get your website listed on the search engines
If you have a brand new website, the best way to spread the word is to submit it in as much as possible free directories. This is done relatively easy, but first before starting you must know two very important key features that each web directory will ask you for:
- First Website Title: The title usually is the name of your website (not the domain name aka www.mywebsite.com) or even better the services that you‘re offering. I strongly suggest that you should choose the services to the name or even a combination of both — Joe‘s Laundry Repair Service in New York for example. This way you‘re telling the search engine and also the visitors what your website is all about not only the company name.
- Second Website Description: This is a short text of about 300-400 character (60-70 words) of what you‘re website is about. Here you should describe in details (as much as you can with 60 words) your services and I strongly recommend that you put the year when your company was established (if you have one) because this helps build some trust rank. For example Joe‘s Laundry Repair services should have description like this one : Quick and Affordable Laundry Repairs in the New York City area. Your satisfaction will always be priority for us and that‘s why we give you 6 month guarantee for each repaired part. Give us a call at 899-999-0000 or click here to visit our website. That‘s plain and simple with some good advertising text
- Third, some directories might ask you for META KEYWORDS. Those are the words/combination of words that describe your services. Make sure to make them as simple as possible and its not advisable to use technical stuff. For example for Joe‘s website we can use: laundry repairs, laundry machine repairs, new york laundry machine repairs, ny laundry machine repairs, professional laundry machine repairs or you can make up more words but keep them very relevant to what you do.
- Forth, some websites even ask for Meta Description This is not really interesting and you can leave it blank or copy the original description text here.
- The last thing that some websites ask you is to place Reciprocal Link on your website. Most of them give you a code that you have to copy-paste on a page on your webiste (for example called links.html). To most free directories this is optional and you shouldn‘t bother with it. If they require reciprocal then you don‘t have other option but do it.
Now you should be ready to start submitting your website to web directories. You can visit the Directory Critic List of Free Website Directories as they have quite large (3,000 +) website directories that offer free listings and this should be good start. Note that directory submissions takes a lot of time and a new submitter can post not more than 300-400 listings per day (and I mean doing this all day long), therefore there are a lot of companies that offer directory submission services and most of them charge like $30-$40 per 500 directories which is relatively cheap compared to the time one must spend to do this.
If you submit to about 1000 website directories, your website should be listed in about half of them (note that not all web directories are accepting all listings and that‘s why I‘m giving the 50-50 chance of being listed). This amount will most definitely help you get the Search Engine‘s spiders attention and get some nice organic listings. The next thing you should concentrate on is building quality content and continue submitting to new directories as more links make your website more popular and therefore your website visitors will continue to increase.
For conclusion I‘d like to underline some very important characteristics of one good website. The amount of time you should spend on link building (submitting to other websites and directories), the same amount of time you must spend on improving the website itself by adding more and more content. If you overdo one of those you wont get the maximum benefit and only if you do both at the same time your website will flourish.
