Light House Studio - Light House Studio - Seeing the world in a different light

You have a shiny new web site that looks great. Now what?

It seems that many site owners, spend great amounts of time and money creating a great new web site, only to abandon it when it needs them most. No, I don't mean they just leave it alone, although that sometimes is the case as well. What I am talking about is making sure your site can be found. If no one finds your site, then why have one?

First Things First

The very first thing you need to do is go to Google and make sure your site is listed. Right now Google is the big man on campus in the search engine world, so this is the best place to start. Go to Google (http://www.google.com) and enter the following search site:www.yourwebsitename.com. Obviously you want to put in your own domain name in place of the one above.

This will give you a list of links that Google has for your site. If your site does not show up, now is a good time to submit it to Google, so they will add it. Go to the site submission page at: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

A couple of other places you may want to get listed are http://www.dmoz.org and http://www.yahoo.com. Just go there and look for the site submission links.

I'm Listed But I Can't Find My Site When I Search

Have you tried to find your site on Google by doing a search? Let's say you are a Baptist church and someone looking for a Baptist church in Knoxville enters the phrase "Baptist Church Knoxville" into the search bar. Would they find you? What if you just use "Knoxville Church"? Does your church show up then? If so, how many pages did you have to go through to get there? If you were the one looking, would you go through that many links?

Some of you may have tried this and found your site in the first couple of pages, but most of you probably did not. In the next few articles I will cover some easy adjustments you can make to your site that can have a great impact on how well your site is ranked among the search engines. The great news is that most of them are free.

In the mean time, for specific help or for a free SEO evaluation, contact me at the information listed below. I will be glad to help.