There are a few key things to remember when trying to create links to you web site

• Are they related to your business? You need to have some kind of content in your web site that relates to the site you are linking to otherwise the search engines will not consider this a subject relevant link.
• How popular or how much traffic does the site you are linking to generate.  By linking to sites that already have a high Google ranking pull your ranking higher.  Some examples would be your local Chamber of Commerce.  As a member, your company name is on their site and creates a relevant link
• It’s also important that they too are linking back to you.
• Have your site listed in as many directory’s as possible.  Yellow Pages would be one example.  There are many directory that are out there for about every business you could image.  Some require a fee, but many are free.  Yahoo Local or Google Local are a must. Take the time to sign up for these and update them regularly.

Blogging is a great way to keep in touch with current and potential customers. You can upload pictures of the “Latest Catch” or the “You’ve got to see this” sunset! Even pictures of the latest ash fallout – just to show everyone that it really isn’t THAT bad – “Come on up and visit us, we’re still here and everything is fine.” Besides seeing picture of what they could be doing or seeing, customers love to read other customers comments about your business. Often times it’s the comment of others that will bring you additional customers. Share those comments in a Customer Testimonial blog entry.

Constantly updating your Web Site will bring more spiders to your Web Site and gain you a higher rate on their Search Engines. You can pay someone to write a “Dynamic Web Site” (about $3,000- $5,000) and/or pay a Web Master up to $1000 a month to continually update your Web Site which brings those Search Engines Spiders to your Web Site OR, you can add a blog to your Web Site and update the blog yourself. With each update, you will bring the Search Engine Spiders to your Web Site looking for the new content that you have entered into your Web Site! Obviously, it’s much cheaper for you to have a Blog attached to your Web Site and update it yourself instead of paying someone to update your site regularly. Make sure you have a Web Master who is up on the latest Search Engine Optimization techniques and who is willing to help you attain inexpensive alternatives to reach as many customers and potential customers as possible.

One last great feature of a Blog is the RSS feed. You can have an RSS feed put on your home page, asking people to sign up to receive your Blog entries and you have an instant mini-newsletter. Each Blog entry will go straight to your customers In Box! It’s a great way to announce Sales, Specials or Upcoming Events. It’s a lot less work than a full Newsletter and it keeps you in the customers In Box and in their mind. The more you are on their mind, when it comes time for that vacation, guess who they will think of first? The one who has been sending all those great pictures and all those inspiring Testimonials, not to mention the Sales or Specials that you are running! It’s a win – win situation!

For more information visit our web site at http://gtlenterprises.com or email dave@gtlenterprises.com

Offline social networking is not only smart but can affect you web ranking as well.

Join you local Chamber of Commerce. Find different Local or business related organizations to join that post your name and business on the Internet. You’ll also find business opportunities within social clubs such as the Rotary Club or the Lions Club.

Search engines rank  your site higher when you link to other site that have better rankings as long as you share some kind of relationship to your business. 

Participate with these organizations, the more your business name appears, the more exposure you get.

Make sure the different phone directory’s has your business listing.  They too have their phone directory on the Internet.

Don’t be afraid to explore the different offline social networking opportunities that are available in you community. They help you both online and offline.

The new catch term you’ll be hearing alot about over the next few years will be Web 2.0. 

Web 2.0 is not some new way to design web sites but a new way of thinking. In the past we paid thousands of dollars to get your site on the first page of Google.

Web 2.0 now enable you participate in optimizing your site. The keyword here is Social Networking.  I’m sure you’ve heard of blogs, Twitter or Facebook.  These are all part of Web 2.0. Over the next several blogs I’ll talk about the different forms of networking and how best to use them.

Keep in touch over the next few days as I cover different forms of Social Networking.

A couple of day ago I decided to google our company name and found a bunch of blog sites that had our blogs attached to their blog site.  So I clicked to them and they where re-posting my blog on theirs without any link-backs.  Come to find they are automated systems that harvest blogs on certain topics and re-post them on their blog site.  Biggest problem is, Google considers this duplicate material and if your site is not the first one crawled by Google, your ranking with Google will be penalized!!

But how to stop it,  The easiest way is to add a plug in to your site that automaticly ads a copyright and link to your site at the bottom of each blog. You can download this plug at http://yoast.com/wordpress/rss-footer/ and install it into your Wordpress plug-in folder.

Or, you can add the code yourself.  Collin LaHay wrote an excellent blog about this and goes into much more detail on how to do it yourself. I would recommend you read his article. http://collinlahay.com/2008/01/11/protect-yourself-from-content-theft/ . He goes into more detail about blog theft.  DON’T LET ANYONE STEAL YOUR BLOG!!!

If your desire to see statics of the visitors to your site, Google Analytics is a good place to start but not the only place to go.  The great thing is, it’s FREE.  It also tells you how you rank with Google and lots of other great details about how your site is ranked.  You will need to add a few lines of code into the head of your index page, if you have no clue how to do this you can have your webmaster  do it for you. 

First, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up,  you’ll also get a good overview of what you will get.  You’ll then be asked to set up the first page of your site (the index.html page) with some lines of code specific to your site.

You’ll need to add your site to the your account then wait no more than a day and you’ll be able to see what pages people have been viewing and if there were any issues such as bad links hit plus much more.

But another source of much of the same information can be found in the admin area of your web site. If you don’t know how to access it, ask your webmaster for the user name and password.

  GTL Enterprises Web Design and Hosting uses c-panel. c-panel gives you a huge assortment of data such as  “awstats” where you can see how many unique visitors, visitors, pages hit, and bandwidth used each day as well as visitors, pages hit, and bandwidth used each hour of each day.  You’ll see the details of all the “crawlers” that have visited your site and which search engine they came from. You will see which keywords have been used and who’s been linking to you and bookmarking your site. You can visit c-panels website at http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpanelwhm/.

In conclusion, don’t overlook your websites optimization.  Much of it you can do your self or pay your webmaster to do. Some basic SEO services at GTL Web Design and Hosting are put into each site we build and we submit you to the major search engines but this is only the first step to search engine optimizing. For questions about optimizing your site  or starting a web site contact us at: http://gtlenterprises.com/contact.html

As we have said, Content is King.  Make sure your content includes your Key Words and Meta Tags – but make sure it reads well and catches your target audience.  In other words, don’t use only Key Words and Meta Tags as your content!  You need to write to be read! 
 
Don’t let some service or SEO Firm choose your keywords.  If you have someone research Keywords for your Business Web Site, ask them for the COMPLETE list of keywords/phrases that that search came up with.  You want to make sure when picking Key Words/Phrases that these words/phrases can translate into great copy.  Great copy isn’t written in the gibberish that sometimes Key words/phrases are.  Let’s say that you own a pet store and one of the Key Word phrases that came back is: ‘pet supermarket stores’.  Well, if you are not located inside a supermarket or next door to a supermarket, this would be a very difficult phrase to translate into good – readable – SEO copy.  So, skip this one and move on to the others. 

Write to be read.  Don’t use a Keywords or phrases just because it’s a Keyword or phrase.  Once you have completed a paragraph that you think is worthy to be published, read your paragraph out loud.  Does it make sense?  Good!  Now ask someone else to read it out loud.  Does it still make sense?  Great!  Go on to the next paragraph.  Reading out loud tends to highlight both the grammatical errors and the punctuation errors. 
 
Make sure your Keywords or phrases match your business AND each Web Page.  Now, this may seem like a “duh” statement, but hear me out.  Let’s say you are a Vacation Planner.  You plan it all for your customer, from Air Fare and Hotel/B&B’s to Charters and Flying Excursions.  Say you know that ‘Bear Viewing’ kicks LOTS of hits, but you put it on your B&B page as a Key Word, you will get lots of people looking for Bear Viewing, but finding a B&B page.  This isn’t good.  It means that your Key words don’t match your page and it creates a poor user experience – which will not lead to sales. 
 
In writing your own copy, you want to make sure that both the search engines and the humans that visit your Web Site see that you have original, relevant content that covers your Business Niche.

Content is King  – we’ve all heard that, but how do you write content that will get those awesome web rankings AND inform your customers about your business?
  
Use your Key Words and Meta Tags.  When setting up your Web Site, select Key Words and Meta Tags that will describe your Business.  Then use these same Key Words and Meta Tags when writing copy for your Web Site.  The Spiders will look at the Key Words and Meta Tags and compare them to the words in the copy.  The more they match up, the higher your rankings.
  
Make it short, sweet and to the point.  Experts agree that most people will spend from 15 to 17 seconds to decide whether or not this is a Web Site that they want to look through.  Make those first 15 seconds count!  Tell them why they need to stay and look at your Web Site.
 
Three to four paragraphs, three to five sentences per paragraph, and bold your topic (first) sentence in the paragraph.  I know, it goes against what we’ve been taught in school – but this is writing for the ultra rushed person to read.  Face it, how many of us have hours a day to search through a multitude of words just to find one or two golden nuggets of wisdom?  Not me!  So don’t waste words, bold what is important and people will pause to read the rest.

The basic difference between Google and Yahoo is the algorithms they use.  Yahoo leans on commercial results, Google leans more toward information websites. With that said, how do I get my ranking up on both engines when they use such different techniques.

If you have a business, you submit your site to Yahoo, have your site optimized well by your webmaster, submit to Yahoo Local and fill out your profile completely and you should rank well with Yahoo.  This also depends on your competition.  If your aiming in a small local community  you’ll rank much higher than if your in a large metro area with much competition.

Google on the other hand will look more at the information you provide on your website and if your updating that information regularly.  Simply submitting your site to Google does not mean you will rank high.  Getting involved in social networking helps immensely,  have your webmaster attach a blog to your site. Facebook, Twitter, join Linkedin or write ezines, all of these tools help your business rank better with Google because they look closely at your content when ranking your site.  Have good content that relates to your business and update it frequently.

Even though Google does a much better job with their query’s and alogrithims, I find if your looking for brick an morter kinda place, Yahoo does a better job with better results and fewer false negatives. If your looking for information, Google is King.

So, if you just use Google as a search engine or Yahoo as your only search engine,  you are most likely missing the target.  First determine what your searching for then pick the right search engine for the right job.