The most powerful marketing tool you have online when you
start your business is your ranking on a search engine. That
does not mean it is the only tool you have, of course; you
should never slow content development down, shun link
exchanges, or ignore the possibilities of submitting to article
directories. However, you absolutely cannot afford to ignore
the search engines.
When you first develop your site, you learned the easy way
or the hard way that you must submit it to the search
engines before they can catalog it properly; and of course
you did. And you learned – again, easy or hard – that there
were automated submitters, free engines that would submit
your site to dozens of search engines for you. This, if you've
ever filled out submission forms by hand, is a godsend,
saving you hours and hours of work.
But after that first round of submission, you may never get
around to it again. That is a mistake. With every new article
you write and post online, you should submit the permanent
URL of that article. After all, each article is going to boost
your ranking. Each article should have a link back to your
home page, which may boost your overall ranking a little.
And each article should have slightly different keywords,
enabling your site to come up on many more searches than
it would have otherwise.
The Right Way To Autosubmit
The first thing you need to do is ensure that your new article
is search-engine optimized, with clear and frequent keyword
use, metatags completed, and headers and subheaders
complete with uses of your keywords. Make certain also that
you've designed your articles in such a way that they link
back to your home page. If you have other sites you want to
promote, putting links to these sites on your article page
wouldn't hurt, as long as the topic is still in the same general
field; this gives you the side advantage of promoting your
other sites as well.
Make certain your name is on the page somewhere, exactly
as you want to be searched for. One of the things you're
trying to achieve with your marketing is personal name
recognition, and that can only happen if you consistently use
the same reasonably-unique name.
Now that your article is optimized for your purposes, go out
to the autosubmitters and submit it with the article's URL.
Ensure that you have the article set up in such a way that
you won't need to move it; there are few things as annoying
as clicking on an interesting article link only to find it dead
or another article sitting in its spot! Make certain that the
keyword for this article is in its title.
You should not use exact same keyword for your articles as
you used for your home page. Keep it similar or at least
related, but give it a unique keyword of its own. That way,
people searching for something a little off your home page
topic but who are still potential customers can find their way
to your article, and trace that path back to your home page,
other articles, and stuff to sell.
What Else You Should Do
In addition to optimizing your autosubmission, watch your
web page statistics. If you are getting 500 hits per week on
your home page but 750 on your newly-submitted article,
you're doing something wrong on your home page. You may
be focusing on the wrong community, or you may not be
updating your home page enough. Compare what you're
doing on the two pages to see if you can figure it out. If you
can't, then try putting more content on your home page
related to the article that's getting high hits.
And if you optimize and submit all your articles in the same
manner (as you should), you can use statistics compared
between the articles to determine whether your customers
are more interested in one area of your topic than the
others. Take advantage of this information. If you can detect
an emerging trend in this way, you'll be in a great position
to exploit it.
