WEBSITE OWNERS BEWARE!

DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU

You've built your web site, you've got content on there, and you've got a product or service that's going to, if not make you rich, at least give you a comfortable income doing the work you enjoy.  So what's the next step?  Building traffic on your web site.

There are several good ways to build up your search engine presence, and I'll cover them later.  First, though, we're going to run through what not to do.  High on the list is "search index stuffing".  Back in the dark ages of the late 1990s, when solid analysis of search engine traffic direction was just getting out, there were several tricks that could be done to gimmick high page rankings; as search engine providers learned about them, most of these tricks got filtered out.  Many marketing companies still advocate using obsolete techniques like 1 point text and "meta tag stuffing" to draw search engine 'bots.  These don't work, and often do more harm than good.

One stunt that absolutely does more harm than good from that era is Automatic Search Engine Submissions.  In a nutshell, this is using a script to submit a web site to the search engine submission forms.  Most of the outfits that do this will promise you the moon, the top of the page listings on Google, and everlasting fame and fortune, for a mere few hundred dollars to submit your site to every search engine known to mankind. 

What they don't tell you is that their script is hitting those submission forms about every 30 seconds to maybe 10 minutes at most.  This is great, you're thinking.  I'll be top of the page ranks before I wake up next morning!

However, all the major search engines out there (and in spite of claims of being submitted to hundreds of search engines, there are really only five or six that matter), watch out for the same data hitting their submission forms from the same IP address multiple times.  It's the tell-tale trace of a spamhammer script, and they'll filter whatever data is submitted that way out of the search results in no time flat.  It's in their best interests to do so if you think about it – their mission is to provide information to the readers who hit the site, and provide advertising to generate revenue for their stockholders; having their search results be so easily manipulated isn't good for their business model, and so they take measures against it.   

They blacklist sites that get submitted by spamhammers, and they do it fast.  Once a site is blacklisted on a search engine, particularly Google, its value as a means of generating revenue goes functionally to zero.  Unfortunately, getting your site off of a blacklist is difficult; more difficult than it should be.  I've had to help clients of mine recover from automated search submission vendors, and it's not easy.  In two cases, the best result was to pull all the content off the site, have it rewritten, and launch a new domain name.

So, what are the good ways to get your site submitted to search engines?  First and foremost, there's doing it manually – set up a couple of hours a week to go and manually enter your site to the search engines.  If you're feeling paranoid, re-set your router each time to get a fresh IP address before submitting.   

Second, go read up on blogs and news sites and article directories on the topic of the service or product you're selling.  Notice that most of them refer back to a web site?  This is a valid strategy that uses contest of the link to determine authoritativeness, and is one of the best of them.  In similar vein, there's the "social intelligence" link sites like Digg and Reddit and del.lcio.us.

Third, and in some ways the most important, if any of your customers have a blog, and are pleased with your product or service, have them link back to you.  It's better to have the link come back from a review or article than from a static page that's nothing but links; search engines learned to filter out link farming six years ago.

Finally, remember that your web site needs to build a sense of community as well as traffic.  If your web site doesn't do that, all the traffic is doing is raising your bandwidth.  Update your content often, make sure it's written for human beings, not just for search engine spiders, and keep it topical to the product or service you're selling.  It's all too easy to get wrapped up in traffic reports and forget the real reason for your web site: Giving your customers what they want.

Purchase My Search Engine Optimization Book, Sem Gorilla for more ways to promote your web site and stay out of the blacklists... You can also learn more by signing up at http://www.randyzlobec.com which is my personal blog about search engine marketing.