If I build it, they will come.

Short from telling friends, family and colleagues you’re going to find yourself stuck. The Internet is fiercely competitive, you could find traffic to your website drying up quickly. How can anyone visit your website if they don’t know it’s there? Learning how to promote your website is key to your online success.

Search engine submission guarantees my website will get listed and is all I need to do.

It’s a start, however there are more strategic ways of insuring search engine listings. Search engine submission will get your foot in the door but will not guarantee you a good position. Studies have shown that on average only the first 30 results are viewed by users, if your site is 186 from 2000 results the chances are you’re not going to get found, achieving high rankings within a few days of submission is unrealistic.

META tags are the key to achieving high search engine rankings

Unfortunately this used to be the case but it’s not true any more. META keywords and description tags were abused by webmasters to misrepresent their websites. META information is not visible when viewing a website so it can be manipulated easily without effecting what the user sees. META information is rarely used by the major search engines, however it’s probably worth including for the search engines that do.

Submitting my website to search engines and link directories is search engine optimisation

Search engine submission is a very small part of the entire search engine optimisation process. Here’s a snapshot of what Search Engine Optimisation involves:-

• Optimisation of site structure
• defining keywords and key phrases which summarise and describe the website and the website content.
• HTML optimisation and cleansing to emphasise keywords and key phrases.
• Construction of a targeted reciprocal link program
• Establishing contextual links deep into the website.

Once my website has achieved top rankings it can be left alone

The internet and everything associated with it is evolving. Competitors will notice the improvement in your search engine position and will respond. They will get their marketing team to analyse the current situation and suggest counter measures. Without constant monitoring and manipulation you could find yourself behind your competitors once again.

Multiple domain names will increase visibility

Having multiple domains will not improve visibility. Search engines will only index content once, duplicate content will be ignored. If you have a website with two domains you’re running the risk of confusing potential referrals, and quite possibly halving it’s effectiveness. A search engine spider is likely to index the first visit and ignore subsequent visits to the same website from alternative domains because it assumes the site is a mirror.

Doorway, gateway pages and hidden text will improve my search engine rankings

Hidden text on a web page is likely to get you blacklisted. Once blacklisted it’s very difficult to get your website back in the search engines good books and be re-included. It’s a big price to pay for a very ineffective gain. You can buy software which will generate a mass of doorway pages from a list of keywords, all containing meaningless text, and all referring traffic to your website. Again if detected your site will be blacklisted. Keep Away! It's Bad News!

I should resubmit my site every week

The world wide web is a very big place and contains copious amount of information. Once a website is indexed by a search engine it will revisit it every month or so  to check if there's any new content or if things have changed. Resubmitting your site will not make this happen any faster.  The more times a spider visits your site and finds new or updated information the more frequent its visits will become.  Google will visit the BBC news site several times a day to index new content.

ry coder

Ryland is both our chief organizer and project analyst, and he still finds the energy to 'head-up' the wight365 technical team. A computer science graduate, he spent time with the MOD before being invited to join us on the south coast. We're pleased to say, he's still here!

As a 'coder' Ryland has wide ranging experience of current Microsoft technologies as well as many of the 'open source' alternatives.