How To Get Your Site Listed in the Search Engines

By Herman Drost
Posted Friday, October 22, 2004

Getting listed in the Search Engines these days is crucial if you want to attract consistent traffic to your web site. Yet it is not easy these days. A listing in the Pay Per Click Search Engines is beyond the expense of what most small business marketers can handle. Getting listed in the others takes many weeks of tweaking your site and even after all that is done, there is still no guarantee.

What's the answer?
The answer is to create a Theme-Based Site which will contain tightly focused keywords centering on the theme of the site.

Why are Theme-Based Sites so important?
Search Engines have become wise to the millions of doorway pages being created. Online marketers try to trick the search engines in order to get a high ranking. This has now changed.

As of last year, search engines are looking at the whole site as one page. Each page must relate tightly to the whole theme. This will alllow the person searching to pull up only those sites focused on the subject he is searching for.

How Does This Work?
1.The Theme-Based Site focuses on one product or service. You then build all your pages centered around this theme, being careful to create and weave researched keywords throughout your title, meta tags, headings and content.

Here's how the search engine indexes your site:
Indexing of site title
Indexing of meta tags
Indexing of major headings
Indexing of text content of pages
Finally the search engine looks at the links on your site.

2. The site should have its own domain name, so it is a stand alone site that then links to your main site. This will be your sales site. This site has all your products or services on it. You can develop a Theme-Based Site for each of the products on your sales site. Each of these Theme-Based Sites will then link into your sales site, driving traffic to it.

Here's an example of what it could look like:
car-care.com - your main sales site
interior-car-care.com - First Theme-Based Site
exterior-car-care.com - Second Theme-Based Site
engine-car-care.com - Third-Theme Based Site

All the Theme-Based Sites would contain a link to the car-care.com sales site. Your sales site will contain links to each of these Theme-Based Sites so visitors can go there for more indepth information.

3. The purpose of your sales site is to make the sale. It does not have to be optimized with keywords because the focus is to get the order. The purpose of the theme based site is to presell the product by providing all the information necessary to put the customer at ease, and bringing him into the buying position.

Suggestion:
Take one of your products or services and create a Theme-Based Site this week. Monitor its ranking in the main search engines in the coming weeks. If successful, you will see an increase in visitors to your main site and ultimately more sales.

About the Author
Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) and owner of iSiteBuild.com
(http://www.isitebuild.com)
Site Design, Hosting, Promotion
Author of "Marketing Tips" newsletter.
mailto:isitebuild@aol.com