SinghSuperStud

iTrader: (2)

Hi,

trying to add my business website to search engine results but haven't got a clue where to start. Can anybody suggest some good sites or methods please ?

Naturally interested in the freebies and the other options like Google Ad-Words but there's so much info and options out there I'm lost !!

cheers, Jai

RichB

Before you do that, make sure you read up on the do's and dont's of websites. Also make sure you have good, relevant content and are not doing and nasty things to try and trick the spiders. Best to have a reasonably good site to start with.
Try not to use frames.
Try and get other sites to lin to you.
Head over to www.dmoz.org and find the right section to be in and try and get listed.
Getting good ranking doesn't always happen quickly either so don't get disollutioned after a month and you're still not there.
SEO is quite a large (and sometimes grey) area.

Good luck.
Rich

GaryScoobNCBR

The main thing you need to worry about are called "meta tags"

These are keywords which the search engines use to log your site.

RichB

Gary, Whilst that used to be true it is not quite as relevant now. People used to simply cram the meta tags full of irrelant keywords and as a result many of the SE don't 'rank' just on meta tags. Yes, they can have an effect but relevant content, proper HTML (i/e valid to W3 stds) and inbound links will *probably* do more than your meta tags. I could be wrong but that is my general opinion.

I would suggest reading up on Google, I even found a book about Google in the local library.

bob269

Ask Google they seem to know best

http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html

RussBoy

Best advice is to decide your 'keywords' which best describe your business and spread these words or phrases as many times as possible through the text, in titles and headers and use bold and italics to extentuate them too. Richb is exactly right - meta tags are worth including but hold much less importance nowadays, but include the same keywords and phrases in here too as some search engines still use these in their ranking algorithym. Try not to use the keywords/phrases in a way that could construe a way to fool a search engines algorithym (i.e by writing "grommet, grommet, grommet" in the title!) and NEVER hide text in your page as this could lead to a total ban on search engines.

Use image 'alt's using the same keywords and limit keywords/phrases to about 4 or 5 maximum a page (i.e ensure each page is optimised for different keywords).

Get loads of links using the same keyterm to link to the same pages on your website (i.e always get sites to link using the term 'UK Grommets' for example...) This will help on Google in particular but Google is difficult to SEO for (I know as I do it for a living!)

Pay Per Click is a great starting point but again, from a professional point of view I find Overture more rewarding as it has far greater reach across the likes of Yahoo!, Tiscali, Wanadoo, MSN (at the moment) amongst others plus their charging structure is more transparant.

This lot should keep you busy for 5 minutes


Russ