Do you want a fast and easy way to improve your search engine rankings so that your website and content marketing gets found more often? Having fresh content that is rich with keywords and phrases is a must, but you also need to make sure that the search engines know about your site and make regular visits to see what’s new.
While we’re
all familiar with search engines thanks to our friends at Google and Microsoft,
people are generally less familiar with web directories. Web directories are huge libraries of
websites on the internet. Unlike search
engines that use “spiders” to automatically crawl through the different pages
on a website and catalog the results, most directories are manually compiled by
volunteer editors. Search engines crawl
through web directories so appearing in web directories will help your search
engine performance.
While the
reasons to be favoured by search engines and web directories are well
documented, let’s quickly review why you want to let them know that you exist
rather than waiting for them to happen upon you by chance:
- Improved search engine ranking – If the search engines don’t know about your site, you’re not going to rank in search results. The search engine “spiders” will probably encounter your content sooner or later, but why wait?
- More inbound links – Registering your site with web directories means increasing the inbound links to your site, and that’s good for directing more traffic to your site but also for increasing the credibility of your pages. Search engines keep a close eye on the web directories so showing up in the web directories will also help your search engine performance. Also, web directories are searchable and some people use them to find companies that they’re looking for.
- Keywords and key phrase targeting – When you register with search engines and web directories you get to specify your keywords and phrases. By selecting the keywords and phrases that are in your sweet spot and are consistent with your content marketing platform you’re going to show up in the searches that you want to show up in.
Here are the
top search engines and web directories and a brief note on how to sign up:
- Google – With 85% of the search engine market share, this is a must. Go to www.google.com/submityourcontent and there are four options that you can choose from. You’ll want to start by clicking on the ‘Website Owner’ tab and then the ‘Add your URL’ link but you should look at the other three options on the page. You should also submit a sitemap so Google knows how to index your site – http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is a great site that will build your sitemap.xml file, for free, that you can submit to Google.
- Bing – While Yahoo has the second largest search engine market share, Bing provides the organic search results for Yahoo so by registering with Bing you’re also registering with Yahoo. Go to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url, enter your URL and you’re on your way. You can also submit your sitemap to Bing through their Webmaster Tools to make it easier for Bing to crawl your site.
- DMOZ.org – This is the biggest directory on the web. To submit your site, go to www.dmoz.org and drill down to your business category. Drill down as deep as you can and when you’re in a deep as you can get click the ‘Suggest URL’ link near the top of the page. Enter your URL, title and site description and you’re on your way. Be careful in submitting: these entries are supposed to be objective and are reviewed before they are accepted so don’t use the site description part as a selling platform. Simply state what your business does and include your keywords and phrases.
If you
submit your site to Google, Bing and Yahoo you’ll have more than 96% of the
search engine market covered, but if you want to go for the full 100% you
should also register with Baidu, Ask, AOL, Excite and Lycos. There are other directories that you can find
through various search engines – see what other directories are available and
appropriate for you particular business.
Conclusion
A strong
content marketing platform is vital for many small businesses. Creating fresh and engaging content that will
resonate with your target audience is great, but you can boost its
effectiveness by submitting your site to the major search engines and web
directories. By doing the minimum of
submitting your website to two search engines and one directory you can
significantly improve your online visibility and get more traffic to your
marketing content.
Got
something to say? Leave a comment below, we’d love to hear from you! Got a
question that we can address in our blog? Contact us through our website or email me directly and we’ll put our
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Other Blog Posts
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liked this blog post, here are some other blog posts that you might also like:
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- Do Your Sales Quotations Leave a Positive and Lasting Impression?
Steve
Hartley, Managing Partner
Fering Communications Inc.
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