Determining Your Plan of Attack

[Rijas]

Determining Your Plan of Attack

Now you know what you’re facing. You can more or less forget those thousands of search sites and focus on no more than nine search systems. The next step is to figure out how to get your Web site into these search systems and, more importantly, in front of the people using those systems to search the Web. Here’s what you need to do:

 Do the keyword analysis. To rank high in the search engines, you better first determine what you want to pop up as a high-ranking search result in a particular search engine. In other words, you have to decide for which keywords and keyword phrases you want to rank. You can take a wild guess, but in my experience working with clients, you’ll almost certainly fail to pick all the right keywords. A keyword analysis is the best way to select keywords and decide which you should target.

 Create readable pages. If you want your site to appear in the search engines, you have to create pages that the search engine spiders or bots can read. (This isn’t an issue for the search directories, but if you expect a searchbot to read your site, the pages have to be readable.) You might be surprised to hear that millions of pages on the Web cannot be read by search engines. For the lowdown on how to determine whether your Web pages are being read by the search engines,

 Create keyworded pages. Having readable pages is just a start. Next you have to put the keywords into the pages — in the right places and in the right format.

 Register with the search systems. When your pages are ready to be indexed, you need to let the search systems know where those pages are and get the search systems to include the pages in their indexes and directories — sometimes a harder task than you might expect.

Get other sites to link to your site. Find out how the number and type of links pointing to your site affect how high you rank in the search engines.