Google is the clear leader among search sites and that should affect your promotion strategy.
Make It Easy for Google to Love You
Google's main mission and the reason they make money from advertisers is that they’re popular with Web users. They’re popular with Web users because they deliver good search results. Do things that help Google do that.
Make sure your pages, especially your site's home page, are content-rich and helpful. Have good, clear textual content and have it toward the top of the page.
Have a descriptive title tag on your pages. I suggest that the title tag include two components.
First, on the left, there's the page-specific component. It should describe the page in a few words, preferably keywords that are repeated on the page itself. This is for both machine and human consumption since it appears at the top of the browser when folks visit your page.
On the right side of the title tag is some general material for the site. This is mostly for the machines, since it won’t show on most folks’ browsers.
Increase the Number of Links to Your Site
Google's PageRank system gives lots of weight to the number of links to your site from other sites. That means you should look for ways to increase your number of links.
Affiliate programs require folks to link to your site. Suggest that other folks link to articles they like. Set out on a campaign to increase the number of legitimate links to your site.
Wait, did I say “legitimate?” Sure did. That's because there are some links that Google doesn’t like. They don’t like links that try to fool the search engine. That means links from link exchange programs should be avoided. Links from “link farms” are pretty valueless, too.
But the good news is that some links count more. Google gives you a boost in your score for quality links.
Increase the Quality of Links to Your Site
Google considers a link a quality link if the page that's linking to you is on a high value site. This can be one that lots of people link to, or it can be a site like IBM's which simply has lots of great content. A quality link is one from a site where human reviewers check out sites before linking to them.
Does that sound familiar? It should. That's what directories do. So if you are listed on top directories, it should help your positioning on Google. There are two major directories for you to be concerned with.
Yahoo is the Big Kahuna of directories. It's big and it's popular. Yahoo also carefully reviews every site that it lists. It may even change the description or category. Even worse, in some ways, Yahoo will charge you to review your site, with no guarantee that they’ll even list it. Then it will cost you to maintain your listing for a year, after which you have to pony up again.
Is Yahoo worth it? Yahoo is a very important search tool all by itself and being on Yahoo helps your ranking on Google. But only you can decide if that's worth the $300 per year you’re going to pay for the privilege.
The other important directory is called the Open Directory Project. On this one the rating is done by volunteers who are doing their part to make the Web a better place.
