January 2006 Archives
When you start out into the world of seo and online marketing you will be bombarded with new terms to describe what you are seeing.
PR? I thought Google had a public relations department and what has that got to do with my website??
SERPS? It sounds like some kind of virus!
If you find all the terminology confusing then I'd recommend you check out this page which explains most of the terminology you are likely to encounter
A question I keep seeing time and time again is "how quickly can I get my site indexed?" or "Why hasn't my site been indexed yet?"
The first question I have to ask is:
Is it a new domain or a previously owned one?If it is a previously owned com/net/org/info/biz domain then you may find that it is sandboxed for quite some time. This is because domain name speculation on dmoz listed sites is becoming a serious issue. In either case I would recommend that you start by making sure that it is optimised and spider ready. You should then try and build links to it (without spamming) from other sites that you manage. If you do this carefully you will see an increase in spider activity. The other obvious thing to do is submit it to search engines and directories. NB: Ensure that you have actual content before you do this, as lack of content will hinder your seo strategy
There has been a lot of debate in recent months about the importance of pagerank.
Is it still important for webmasters?
The problem lies in the subjective nature of the web. In many respects there are very few accurate barometers of how "important" or "popular" a site is.
Google PR (PageRank) used to be one of the defacto measures of a site's "importance", but it never was the only one.
Another barometer some people like to use is Alexa, but it's not the most accurate for several reasons, not least of them being that only users with an Alexa plugin contribute to the "rank".
Of late Google has been taking longer and longer to update the PR of sites, so you might be better off looking at inbound links and other metrics....
There is a new forum to discuss search engine optimisation and online marketing to cater to webmasters and small business owners.
