Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the Series – Part III: Submit and Monitor
ByDuring this three-part Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series, we’ve discussed the crucial coding that goes between the head tags: a unique and accurate title tag, a good description, and appropriate keywords and phrases, as well as the content of your web pages between the body tags.
To conclude, I’ll discuss submitting your website to the search engines (SEs) and then how to monitor the results.
The Process of Crawling
When the search engine bot indexes your web pages (a/k/a crawling), it compiles a list of all the keywords it sees and where those words are located on each page. The bots also will look at the title tag, H1-H6 heading tags, and ALT attributes, which are used to describe graphics in the HTML code.
When a user searches on keywords and phrases (e.g., a query), the search engine runs through the indices it created of your website during the crawl process and looks for matches to the query. It then returns search results in order of importance; sites deemed most important or relevant will appear first in the results and so on.
Submitting Your Website to the Search Engines
Submitting your optimized website to the search engines is very important, because it puts your site in the cue of sites to crawl; it essentially lets them know about your site and where to find it. Even if you’ve submitted your site in the past, resubmitting it will let the SE bots know that changes have been made, which may or may not mean re-indexing is in order.
To that end, I highly recommend submitting your website directly to each search engine versus using an automated program. Even though this tactic is more time consuming, have no fear. You don’t need to submit your site to each and every search engine known to man. Rather, concentrate on the following search engines to get good results.
NOTE: When submitting your site, only submit your home (index) page. Most SEs will then crawl through the rest of your site, especially if it has a sitemap.
- Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
- Open Directory Project: http://www.dmoz.org/
- Yahoo! Site Explorer: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
- Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
- Ask: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22 (Note: You submit your sitemap to Ask. This link explains the process.)
Once you’ve optimized your website and submitted it to the major search engines, it is time to be patient. Sites are not crawled immediately; the process can take several weeks.
Monitoring You SEO Results
Now that all your hard work optimizing and submitting your website is over, it’s time to monitor the results. Aside from the obvious signs that your site has become more popular, you really need a way to track real results and be able to adjust your SEO accordingly.
Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer ways to track page hits and learn from where those hits came, which is a great thing. But sometimes, those results are difficult to interpret or lack the details needed to know if your SEO efforts have been successful.
For this reason, I suggest using Google Analytics (GA). You’ll need a free Google account to use GA. Then, when you’re ready, visit http://www.google.com/analytics/ to get started.
Once you’ve placed your unique tracking code into the HTML (immediately proceeding the <body> tag) of each web page you want to track, you can use Google Analytics to discover how many visits you’ve had to each page, the average amount of time spent on those pages, the bounce rate, how many of your web page hits were from new (unique) visitors, where those visitors are located, etc.
So, now that you know how to optimize, submit and track visits to your website, what are you waiting for? Organic search engine optimization is a fairly simple, free way to attract visitors (and potential customers) to your online storefront – your website.
The time you spend making your site more attractive to the search engines, and your site visitors, will be rewarded.
