Installment 2 In The Series: How To Get Your Website Seen On The Internet

This is the second in a series of articles on improving your website ranking for the all important search engines and some tips on how to promote your site. I will cover the necessary elements needed to achieve rankings high on all the search engines.nnn Where do I begin? We’ll I guess that depends on if your just starting out or already have a website. I’ll start you out at the very beginning, your domain name. What’s a domain name you ask? It’s that stuff that follows www and comes before .com. You’ll probably use it as your company name if you can find a domain name that fits and isn’t already taken. You can search for availability at many domain registrars on the internet. One of the best known is Godaddy.com. Your hosting company may also be able to supply the domain name. Never the less choose a company that is likely to be around for the long run. Not that you would loose your domain name if they went out of business but it could make it difficult to manage during bad times.

Your domain name is the first step and it’s a major one. Why? Because it is the first thing a search engine web crawler will see. Your choice of domain name won’t mean the difference between success or failure but you want to take advantage of choosing the best name possible. It’s one factor out of dozens that you can control.

Let’s say your business is selling fish. You might think a good domain name would be www. oceansdelite.com, but stop a minute to think. How many people looking to buy fish would ever type in “oceans delight” into a search engine? Not many unless they have already come across your name somewhere else, like the phone book, business card, or newspaper ad. In that case they won’t be searching the internet for a place to buy fish will they? How about www .freshfish.com? That probably would trigger a search engine to put you in the results a lot higher than www. oceansdelight.com. Lets suppose that when you go to your favorite domain store that “freshfish.com” isn’t available. You might research that domain to find out who owns it and contact them to see if they might be willing to sell it at a reasonable cost, or you can try some domain variations. You could try www .fresh-fish.com, “www. fresh_fish.com”,”www. freshfishtoday.com”, “www. fresh-fish-seafood.com”, or you could use .net or .biz. I think you get the idea. I realize that when you have to give someone you URL (domain name) verbally it can be annoying to double check that they have it right every time, but having the best search engine friendly domain name is worth it.

Here’s something to try. Check out your competition on Google, search your most prominent keyword or key phrase in Google search and take a look at the results numbers at the top right hand corner of the page. This will give you an idea of the task at hand. Only 30 or less websites will be listed in the first three pages of the results. If you’re not in the top thirty your chances of being clicked on are about 10% or less. It’s going to be a tuff job but it can be done. You won’t get all your keywords in the top 30 but you can have the majority. You’ll even have some in the top 10 and maybe some will be #1. nnn A final note for this installment: If your company name is “Oceans Delight” that won’t keep you from having www. freshfish.com as a domain name. Lots of companies have domain names different than their company name.

The next installment will be choosing keywords, web creation software, and a hosting company. All of which are critical decisions you’ll have to make. n