If you want to get the maximum possible potential
from your website a little time and planning can really help you build your online presence and develop your brand.
One of the greatest challenges you will face with your new website is trying to encourage your customers to visit you. Unfortunately
there is no guaranteed method for making your website popular, but there are a number of techniques you can use to improve
your search engine rankings.
There are several ways to improve your website's visibility in SiteBuilder...
Choose your keywords carefully
You can specify your own keywords on each page , which search engines will use to index your site.
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Choosing keywords for your site always appears easier than it actually is. The first thing to consider is what search
terms people may use to search for your site. It is always best to ask a few friends what keywords they may use as quite often
you will find them different than the keywords you were expecting. The other thing to take into consideration is competition
from other websites. Some keywords are hotly contested by many of the largest companies in the world.
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Why not ask us about our TrafficDriver service to help you optmise your keywords and put your website ranking in your
control.
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If you ran a second hand book store in Edinburgh for example, initially you may want to concentrate on the keyword “books”.
However you will also be in competition with books.google.com, barnesandnoble.com, nytimes.com, abebooks.com and amazon.com.
While you are technically on a level playing field with these big companies, they can afford to hire teams of dedicated specialists
working on keeping their rankings as high as possible. If you want to spend some time running your business then it
may be better to concentrate on other areas.
‘Books’ is a very generic term encompassing a number of products that you may not supply anyway, so by specializing
with your keywords you will be able to compete in a less heavily contested market for services that more match your services.
The keyword phrase “rare books” or “classic books” will be easier to work with when trying to achieve
high rankings in these slightly more specialized searches.
Choosing your keywords is always a balance between having keywords that customers use, and keywords that you can compete with
in the market. If we take the previous example for instance, we may have considered “precious books” as a good
keyword. This would be very easy to attain high search engine ranking for, but what’s the point in having a high ranking
for “precious books” if no-one will use these keywords to make a search?
More information on Search Engine Optimisation, along with advice on choosing your keywords, can be found in our guide Making the most from your website.
To add keywords to a page...
Click on Site organiser at the foot of the page.
Find the page you want to add the keywords to, and click Page Properties.
Scroll down to the section titled Add meta tag content and enter your keywords into the Keyword Meta Tag
text field. Enter a description for the page into the Description Meta Tag text field and click Done
to save your changes.
Add a site map
A site map is simply a page with links to all other pages on your site. Adding a site map to your site not only helps your customers find their way around, but it also helps search engines index and rank your pages.
A search engine robot will examine your site, look for the site map, and will follow any links it finds. It will mark links
directly on your website with high importance, encouraging the search engine to index your entire site, and therefore potentially
improving your search position.
Promote your site
SiteBuilder includes a handy feature to help you let your customers know about your newly published site.
From the All my sites page (if you are not on this page click the All my sites icon at the
foot of the page) click Announce your site.
Choose the site you want to promote. You will only be able to select your site if it is already published.
Enter the email addresses of the people you would like to notify of your new site, seperated by a comma.
Enter your
name and email address, and the message you would like to send, and click Send.
