You can write the most brilliant blog ever created. And it won't do you a bit of good if no one can find it! You need to find ways to allow potential readers to find your blog. In this post, we'll discuss the first step you should take...getting your blog indexed by search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an emerging science the goal of which is to increase the number of visitors (volume of traffic) that a blog (or website) receives from search engine results. Search engine results are the equivalent of billboards along the highway. Just as billboards direct people to a product or service, links in search engine results drive people to relevant blogs (or websites). All search engines use different proprietary methods to analyze the contents and keywords of blogs for purposes of generating search results. Google, the big Kahuna of search engines, gives every web page a rank (called page rank) and pages with a high rank appear in search results before lower ranked pages. Many factors go into generating a web page's rank score such as key words, relevance to search terms (which is based on key words) and quality of links to the site from other pages. Most experts agree that your page rank will eventually increase as your visibility on the Internet increases.
Therefore, having your site linked to by other websites (preferably ones with a high page rank) and indexed by a variety of search engines will help your site become more visible. As a starting point, you should submit your URL to a number of search engines to increase the chances that a search engine will index your site. Most search engines do not guarantee that they will list your site (or that it will rank highly in search results). But by submitting your URL to the search engine, you ensure that the search engines' automated agents that crawl the web looking for sites to index should eventually locate your site.
You only need to submit the main URL of your blog, not the URL for each individual blog posting that you have. For instance, when submitting this blog for indexing, we only submitted the URL http://bloggingacrosscurriculum.blogspot.com.
Below is a listing of links to search engine submission pages. You certainly don't need to submit your URL to every site on the list. But the top 4 are an absolute minimum.
List of Search Engine Submission Links (List obtained from Tips for New Bloggers)
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Marketing Your Blog 1: Get Indexed in Search Engines
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