Help with search engine optimization

Evening all, can somebody please explain to me how to get my site on google, msn, yahoo, ask etc. Dont have the 1st clue where to start. Have searched the forums but it seems everyone is slightly ahead of me and its all going over my head.

As a TINY business im not looking to pay for advertising, i would like for when people put in certain words they have some chance of finding my site. Am i right is saying there is a way of assigning words to your site so that when people search for those words you are included? or am i way off? do i have to register with the sites i want to be featured on?

Any type of background info or advice greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

give me your link and I will put it on the forums of my auction site and that should help you get indexed faster and will give you a back link.

you want your site to be full of content that people want to see, it should have plenty of words within the content that represent the types of words people would search for but not overdue it and look obnoxiously spammy.

you want the <title>, meta description and an <h1> to represent the major keywords you want to gear your site for on the home page and all other pages should be different to represent those page contents.

you want a dozen or so keywords in teh meta keywords that represent your site/pages... but that tag is not as important as content.

If you want to get yourself well ranked, it is not going to be a quick process. First, stay well away from anything that says that it will list you on hundreds/thousands/millions of sites at the click of a switch!! These will absolutley harm your chances of being well ranked.

Start listing your site on directory sites, in particular those that have a good page rank. You can check their page rank by downloading the Google toolbar and enabling the 'view page rank' option.

If there are sites that are in a similar field to yours but not direct competitors, you could approach them to ask for a link exchange which will help your page rank if they are well ranked themselves.

All of the above will help your page ranking, but there is more to it than this. You must also make sure that you optimise your site internally for the search engines. You can do this by making sure that you have good content on your site. You should also make sure that you have your major keywords in your meta tags and that you have the correct amount of keywords within the content of each page.

If you would like more info you can visit my site as I have articles written by SEO consultants WSI who have helped me with these things. You can read these by going to:

http://www.regencyexpress.co.uk/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=453_460_462

There are a number of articles there which will help you to get things right based on my own experience and also profession advice.

If you need more let me know and I will be a bit more specific. What I will say is that I followed the advice of these people and within 2 months of going live I have a page rank of 2 which is pretty good considereing the tome involved. I have not finished by far as this is an ongoing thing that you should be constantly doing.

Good luck!

Hi Festus, what is the address of your site? I'd like to take a look if may (curious).

haha, same here
i am going to advertise my site soon
well, i tried google, it told me to add a site map
well, it seems hard, i have no idea how it works
anyone got a clue how to make a site map?

There is already a site map built into Zen Cart v1.3.x ... is that what you are looking for?

ya...but google ad doesn't up support php sitemap
i forgot which format they support
(well, html is acceptable)
and two other forms are okay~~

anyone got a clue how to make a site map?

There is a contribution you can install for a Google Site Map:

Download it here

Forum support thread

:D

Gee- I think we added the sitemap to the 1.3 as a stock feature ... Maybe upgrading instead of adding on would be a better idea :)

Kim:

Gee- I think we added the sitemap to the 1.3 as a stock feature ... Maybe upgrading instead of adding on would be a better idea :)

Are you sure 1.3 does sitemaps in .html?

I submitted the url to my site map (1.3.0.2) to the Google web master tools secton of their web site and it said that it did not appear to be in a supported format. So I too am wonderig if the new site map in 1.3.0.2 does me any good or if I should try somethign else.

Getting your page to rank high can be a frustrating task but it can be done. As mentioned Titles, H1 and Alt tags and most of all Content and Keywords.

A tips for ranking on google. Google reads your site from top left to bottom right reading from tables, rows, colums. I've seen some ZenCart customization to where their categories are down the left side and the main content is in the middle. Depending on how the tables are set up. Google may read down the category column before reading your main content and thus falsely categorize your site.

The list of tips can go on. Here is link to a ebook that describes some of the steps I mentioned here and a whole lot more.

http://www.keyword-seo-elite.com/download/SEO_Advantage.pdf

Best of luck to ya