Search engines are an effective way to bring targeted visitors to your website. With almost 75% of visitors use search engines to locate new websites, search engines are a prime channel to attract potential customers. However, for your search engine submission to be effective, it must be done right.
Here are the top 5 mistakes that companies making when submitting their website to search engines:
Mistake #1 - Not checking that their site is search engine friendly before submitting
There are several reasons why your website may not rank highly in search engines, or even included in the search engines databases. You should at least make sure that your pages have:
- Appropriate and descriptive titles
- Good copy that is written for people and not search engines
- All of the pages in the site can be accessed by the search engine, e.g. don't use Flash or JavaScript as the only way to navigate between pages in the website
There are several tools that can assist you to assess your website against these criteria.
Mistake #2 - Not having effective links from other websites before submitting
Search engines make significant use of links between websites to evaluate the quality of the content of the site. A crucial component of any search engine optimisation strategy is to obtain a wide range of links from strategically selected websites.
Obtaining links from other websites can be a time consuming process. It is recommended that you implement a system that involves these stages:
- Locating relevant websites and assessing their suitability to obtain links to your site
- Write to the owners of these sites with an offer to exchange links. It is wise to have already added the link to their website first and draw their attention to this
- Follow up in 14 days if you have not heard back from the site owner
- Drop their site from your links page if you have not heard back in 30 days
Mistake #3 - Not having a system to monitor when search engines are updating their databases
If your site is larger than just a few pages, there is a good chance that your site will not have every page on it included in every search engine's database. Additionally you should identify how frequently your site is being updated in the search engine.
If you have added new content to your website or have changed the existing content, it can take a month or so for this to be reflected in the database of the search engines. Once your site has a higher credibility in the search engines this will occur more frequently.
Mistake #4 - Not testing the keywords, copy and headlines of the web pages prior to submitting the site
All major search engines now offer some form of paid placement advertising. This is a useful tool to testing which keywords and advertising copy works best to attract sales. The key advantage of using paid placement advertising is that a large number of tests can be conducted in a relatively short period of time to determine the best combination of keywords, offer, headlines, copy, etc., that suit your site.
Only after you have identified which particular keywords are suitable for optimising pages on your site should you then start to fine-tune your web pages to rank highly against these keywords. You should also test headlines in your advertisements and these headlines should be added to the titles of your web pages.
Mistake #5 - Not having a system to monitor and measure the effectiveness of their search engine listings and website
Search engine marketing is a continuous process that involves far more than simply obtaining high ranking positions. You need to constantly monitor how many people visit your website from search engines, what keywords they are using, how many of them convert into a sale or sales lead, etc. The secret to success is test, test, test and test again.