If you are just starting your site you know how tough it is to anyone to look at it. Drawing eyeballs is the key to success in any internet venture but obviously the most difficult. The easy way to accomplish this is to buy them. Since most new net entrepreneurs don’t have an advertising budget I’ll skip this for now. I will cover it late. there are affordable ways to buy page views but you need to have some knowledge so you are not throwing money away.
I know many people are wary of Google’s hold on everything internet. I have a little uneasiness but I do trust them to a degree. The fact is that there is no better place to get your site noticed. They own internet search. Getting your site on the first page of search for your key terms is imperative to success. This is why I believe a narrower topic is easier. Niche websites are easier to get ranked than scatter shot approaches. Remember the vastness of the internet and keep in mind that getting a small percentage of viewers could make you a success. The approach I’m speaking about is counter-intuitive. Aim at a less popular topic and do it well. Get yourself ranked number one in a tiny niche and your traffic will skyrocket.
What should you do? The first thing I do with every site is create a site map file. This is an easy task that is overlooked by many if not most small sites. A sitemap is an file, usually in the xml format. It acts as a roadmap for Google and other search engines. Most engines allow you to upload a site map every time your site is updated. It puts them on notice of changes and clues them in on what part of your site has changed. They can then crawl that part sooner. If you are creating a Wordpress blog there are several plugins that will automatically create a sitemap every time you post to your blog or change a page. They do not stop there, they will also submit the file to key search engines. I’ve had great success using ‘Google XML Sitemaps’. I cannot stress enough how important this is. This will almost certainly get you on Google and Bing sooner.
A second step is to sign up for a Google account. I suggest setting up an account for use with your web businesses that is separate from your existing personal G mail accounts. You’ll be using this account to use an incredible cadre of absolutely free tools Google has created for webmasters. Why, you may ask, is Google doing this for free? Won’t they eventually charge for this great service? I highly doubt they have any interest in monetizing this. It’s in their interest for your site to do well. They are an advertising company and they want you to succeed using their ads. They do not require use of their ads but when you work with them I don’t know why you wouldn’t. Google has proven they are very adept at developing loyalty among webmasters.
Step 1. – Set up a Google Analytics account. You’ll want to start off with a basic set up but eventually you’ll learn how to use this free tool to do amazing things. Follow the steps to add a website. I also always add a ‘filter’ to block Analytics from counting my visits. It’s easy to add your IP address to a filter. This way you don’t get stats skewed by visits you make for maintenance. Eventually you will need to add a snippet of code to any web page you want analytics to track. If you are using Wordpress you’ll want to inject the code into the “footer” section of your template. There are many instructions out there that can get you through this if you haven’t done any editing before. I always save a backup copy before I make changes to the template. NOTE: Many Wordpress templates have a pre defined option that allows you to simply enter your Analytics code and it does the rest. One that I use often is Crowd Favorite’s Carrington Theme. It is very flexible and allows you to paste the Google code snippet in a box in its setup screen. It then adds Analytics to every page and post. Another handy Wordpress plugin is ‘Google Analytics Dashboard’. This handy gadget gives you Google Analytics stats on your Wordpress dashboard. It also gives you stats next to each post and page in your list (when in edit mode). Simply a great free plugin. Google Analytics is more than fancy graphs. You can use this to decide what to focus on. Since analytics gives search terms that have led people to your site, you can see what may be a hot, trending subject. Use these tools to focus on what your readers want. There are far more features in Analytics than I can give justice to in this session. I’ll do a separate post focused on Analytics in the future.
Step 2. – Set up a Google Webmaster Tools account. This site takes it all to new levels. This site will help you discover errors you’ve made or things that may hold you back in getting ranked. The truly useful information becomes available after Google spiders your site. It will give you great tips on meta tags in your site. It will pinpoint problems on each page of your site. this is huge. Google is actually telling you why they may not rank this page highly! Putting it bluntly, anyone who does not take advantage of this free information is simply foolish. A very useful piece of information you can glean from Webmaster Tools is the list of search terms on which your site appeared. This can give you incredible insight. It lets you know that you are showing up in results for various terms. If the terms make sense for your site you can concentrate on gearing more content to those terms. If your site is appearing in the top ten results for a category you should focus on moving up the list. If important terms are not showing up here you should focus on adding meta tags and content toward that goal. Again, there are so many useful features these tools I can’t get into detail in this post. I’ll do posts addressing things as I stumble upon them. Almost every time I spend time poking around in this tool I find another interesting way to use the info. The best thing you can do is to invest a few hours in here exploring. It will take time but it is time well spent. I’ll do an article in future focused on things you can do with Webmaster Tools information.
Step 3 – I always set up a Google AdSense account. I usually try to place at least one Google advertisement in my Wordpress sidebar or footer. It generates a little cash but I use it as a real time (almost) monitor of traffic to my sites. This info is reported on a small delay but it gives a good heads up if traffic spikes. Later I’ll get into using Adsense to make more meaningful money via niche sites. (Also see my previous article.)
Hope this article is helpful. It’s a high level guide to some things you should do to improve your site’s ranking in Google and other search engines. Please keep in mind that all of this is useless if you do not have high quality, fresh content. In the end that is the most important factor in search optimization.
i was wondering if there are webmasters who manages several thousand websites at a time.`;*