Your Home Business Web Site on the Search Engines and Directories

August 24, 2008 by Herb Stalk

When you launch your Home Business, whatever it is, you will almost certainly want to have a website and begin marketing on the internet either for prospects or customers. After you have built your website, the next step is to make sure that it is well optimized. That simply means that it’s content, body text, title and meta tags all have the keywords you are trying to come up on the Search Engines for. While the search engines are very important for your website and the focus of this particular article, you should not rely entirely on the Search Engines and directories for hits to your website. You will eventually want to try other tools like opt-in lists, online newsletters, free and/or paid online classified ads and message boards, among several others.

The first lesson about search engine promotion is simply to do it yourself. Being an upstart Home Business this will also save you much needed capital that can be better spent elsewhere. Even though here are numerous automatic submission programs you can find on the Internet, it is wholeheartedly advised to submit your site to the main Search Engines manually. This is because the main search engines are so important, and some of them automatically reject any submission made from a software program. In addition, each engine has different allowable numbers of keywords and they vary on how long your site description can be and so on. Submission software, even if it was universally accepted, is not flexible enouph to cover all these basics. Furthermore, manually submitting your website is so easy any amateur can do it, and I mean anyone. You basically just go to the Search engine you want to submit to and click the “add url” button. Then insert the self explanatory information. Actually a few are a tad more complicated than that, but most are really that easy. That is what somepeople are paying people big bucks to do, except those individuals are often using mass submission software which is generally ineffective.

Some Search Engine spiders or crawlers will ultimately find your site if you submit your web address to them or not. They will find your site by following links from other websites. For this reason you should consider setting up some reciprical links to other similiar but non-competing websites. Doing this will also give you website a higher ranking on some of the major earch engines. This is due to the fact that certain search engines, such as Google and MSN, rate your website partially on it’s “link popularity” with other websites. This is also a free way to help your site recieve more hits and being a Home Business entrepreneur without wheelbarrels full of venture capital you will need all the free methods you can get. Ironically, these free methods are often more effective than more expensive strategies and do not necessarily take up much more time.

Although meta tags are not as important to your website as they once were, they are still of some value. Concentrate mainly on the title and description tags and make sure the keywords you want to come up high for are there. To find out if your meta tags are optimized, go to scrub the web dot com as they have a free meta tag checking service. They will automatically spider your webiste and give you suggestions on how many keywords each of your tags should have, etc. Some search engines, such Inktomi still give a relatively high relevence to these tags. The main Search engines and Directories you should focus on for your Home Business site include Google (which is perhaps the most popular), Yahoo(you need to pick a category to submit your site if you are submitting to the directory portion. Some categories are free to submit to and others are not), Alltheweb dot com, Inktomi(used in several search engines. Pay for inclusion or you can wait untill the spider finds your site for free), Open Directory Project(crucial to be listed here, go to dmoz.org), Looksmart(free and paid listings) and Aol Search (search results are “enhanced” by Google).