17 Sep Promote Yourself

If you know your customers’ needs, finding the right content for them is easy. The difficult part is volume. Search Engines need content to index. If your site has very little, you will get a low ranking no matter how good that one perfect article is.
Spiders (eek!)
And it must be optimized for the spiders to index. SEO analyses how your site flows, what information it has, and how recently it has been updated. And your site must be designed for spiders (not the insect kind, of course, but the little guys that wander the web powering Google, Bing and a host of other search engines).
Imagine you’re a spider and you’ve just arrived at your site. You’re going to click every link on the first page and see where it goes, and on each new page, you’ll click all those links to see where they end up. You keep doing this until every link has been followed to its end. If you have a particularly large site with hundreds or thousands of links and pages, the spider will take its time; it’ll visit over the course of a few days to get all your content.
The next time it comes back, it will do it again. It will look to see if anything has changed. That new content gets priority and raises your status. Material that hasn’t changed does nothing for you. If your whole site is the same, the spider will lower your priority and instead of visiting every week may extend it to ten days, then twenty-one then thirty… If, on the other hand, you’re a news outlet, it sees new content at every visit and raises the priority, spidering the site every couple of hours… Understand?
Don’t stagnate
New content is King! No, you do not have to change your landing page every day. Some information is rudimentary, basic, and essential; people need to know who you are, what you do and how to get a hold of you. But don’t stagnate either.
Comment sections are good for that if you have the sort of business that invites it. Every time a client makes an entry, new content! And you had to do nothing to generate it except provide your usual service. Of course, you should read your comment section, since it gives you valuable feedback about your customer’s thoughts and opinions.
Reuse & Recycle
You’re going to be getting your regular customers visiting often (we hope!) but you are going to have new visitors, too. They didn’t necessarily get the benefit of your earlier blogs and pearls-of-wisdom in the articles that you wrote. Here’s a chance to re-write a particularly salient bit and introduce new clients to good solid concepts.
They get to learn something vital, and your regular customers get to see it again and keep it fresh in their memory. And not incidentally, the spiders see “new content”. Win-Win-Win!
What a site!
If you don’t have a Site Map, you’re killing yourself. Spiders LOVE site maps. They get a look at that and say “Oh Boy!” because it simplifies their whole process. Now instead of me explaining it, since there are experts that have already done a fantastic job, I’m including a link at the end for you to follow and get a sitemap for your webpages. Just do it!
Suffice it to say that there are (essentially) four types of site map. They come in Plain text, HTML, and a couple of variants of XML. The XMLs are for Google, Bing and so on. They give you some control about spidering frequency and alerting the search engines to new content. HTML sitemaps are so your knowledgeable visitors can find content, and Text just tells you about all your links and pages, alerting you to dead links that you need to fix or broken links you need to repair.
Share and share alike
If you’re popular, people will link back to your page by putting a hyperlink on their page. Guess what? Spiders follow those links! Each linkback to you increases your importance in the eyes of the spider and that raises your positioning in the search results.
If you regularly network in your business, ask your associates to exchange links. It helps them and you.
Summary
It sounds like you’re back in High School, but believe me … you need to be the popular one if you’re going to succeed.
1. Help the spiders any way that you can
2. Keep your content fresh
3. Recycle good material – don’t let it go to waste
4. Make sure you have a Site Map
5. Share links
Now get out there and get to work!
 
Get a SITEMAP! http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/