Well, mainly it’s a problem related to the search engine “bots” (robots) and “spiders” or “crawlers” going over your site repeatedly, noticing changes in it, and reindexing your website. 

To reindex your site means that the search engines are sending out their little machines to go over your site and notice any changes in it. They are generally looking for major changes, such as fresh content, major rearrangements to your site, and brand new pages. 

If you add new pages to your website, Google Sitemaps may be a program which could provide you with some help when it comes to reindexing at least the sitemap for your site. Currently only a beta program being tested by Google, it could start a new trend in site reindexing. When you make a Google sitemap, you lay out several details about the content of your web pages, and you can get Google to download the changes as reflected by your sitemap on a regular basis; constantly, if the pages are continuously changing, daily, weekly, or even monthly. Please look into this potentially worthwhile program for all of the details on how to properly make a sitemap for your site. 

If you submit your site to many search engines, preferably the greatest amount possible, you will get massive exposure for your site when it climbs up to the higher rankings as listed on each of these engines. It’s not enough to only submit your site to search engines, but it’s the only way to start when it comes to your site eventually climbing its way up each of the search engine’s rankings for your site. And if you submit your site to as many search engines as possible at least twice per month, you will get maximum results from this. It is only the first major step, but it is the only way you will be seen by visitors who use search engines to find your site. Then as you resubmit your site twice per month, it will most likely be reindexed, or recrawled by the search engines, and each change you make will be updated by the major search engines and probably also by many of the minor ones as well. 

To really maximize exposure, blog about your site’s contents with links pointing to your site, then submit your blog or blogs to search engines twice monthly. Also submit your site to directories, which you often only need to do once. You can also submit your blogs to the hundreds of blog directories available on the Internet. This will increase the number of inbound links coming in to your site, which is still helpful when it comes to your site making it up to the first page level of SERPs (search engine results pages). 

Increasing the amount of incoming links pointing to your site is always helpful. Use every method you can find to cause sites relevant to the services and products offered on your business site to place a link to your site on their sites. This can be through directly offering to trade reciprocal links with relevant sites, joining link exchange services and using them to help you find sites which are willing to trade links with your site, and starting your own links exchange program, which generally involves free exchange of links. You will want to only trade relevant links, because Google, the major search engine presently on the face of the planet, now punishes sites for trading links which are not relevant, i.e., “any old link” will not do. You must make sure the links are organic and relevant, which means they must relate to the topics of your own site. Make sure your keywords are arranged so that when you send out your links, the links contain your most important keywords in the title text and the description of the site as well. The title text is the one that links directly to your site, and the description immediately follows it. 

Also, make sure that you have proper title tags, keyword tags and meta tags for your site. You can go to Submit Express for help with this and for help with submitting your site to multiple search engines, both through their free and paid programs. You will also want several other types of tags or codes in your website that will help you optimize your pages for search engines and get your site onto the first page of search engine results. 

You will need to make your site HTML (hyper text markup language) compliant, that is, it will have to pass the various kinds of “checkers” on the Web today that make sure your site’s HTML coding is correct and compliant with modern standards. Some WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and other site editors and programs do not run code that is compliant with some of the stricter standards for HTML compliance. Microsoft Front Page is especially non-compliant when it comes to a complicated, not text-only website, as it rewrites its own code and is often found to be not compliant with modern standards. 

There are all of these steps, and many more that you will discover by looking around and by

Don’t worry too much about fancy Google “algorhythms” and whether or not you can keep up with all of the Joneses, especially if you don’t have a lot of money to spend. Work, work, work on your website. Set aside an amount of time every day to thoroughly find and employ methods for optimization that will cause the indexing of your site on a regular basis. Resubmit twice a month, change your site’s content daily, make sure you have plenty of incoming links from sites relevant to yours pointing to your site, subscribe to Internet newsletters so that you can get the most recent information about how to optimize your site for search engines – do everything you can make the time to do. 

And use the latest in xml code technologies, such as making pages for your site in rss, atom and ror rdf information code. It is easy to find the formats for these codes and information on how to employ them by researching this on the Web. Submit information about content relevant to your business and website to Wikipedia, the Web’s new major encyclopedia. Post to blogs, wikis and message boards, using your website’s URL as often as you can. This creates more incoming links pointing to your website, which you need. Submitting to thousands of FFA (free for all) pages may help increase your incoming link count, which does matter to search engines. However, Google is frowning lately on irrelevant links coming in to websites, and it may count FFA links as being “irrelevant,” so you will want to consider that. Also, one-way links count for more than links exchanges, apparently, so you will want to consider that carefully as well. 

Remember: the most important things are fresh daily content and getting the search engines to reindex your site, as often as humanly possible, more often than daily if needed. Some search engines will only reindex your site on a weekly or monthly basis. Some will do it on a daily basis. But we are fast moving toward an era where the search engines will be continuously crawling your website, looking for any changes, for the bad or for the good, at all whatsoever. So the more often you make major changes, especially to the keyword-related content of your site, the more often your site will be reindexed. 

Pay the price to list your site with Yahoo. It’s worthwhile. Pay the price to list with multiple directories, if need be. And set up with as many beta testing programs through Google, Yahoo and MSN as your site qualifies for. This will get your site reindexed and crawled repeatedly by these three major search engines. And look into programs being set up by the other major and minor search engines as well. 

Whatever you do, don’t despair. On your way in the climb up the SERPs, you will probably find many other advertising methods, such as simply being listed for free with services related to your site, visitors coming in from your relevant links, and organizations such as WebRing, where you can list your site by joining webrings for free and advertise your site for a low amount of money. There are also PPC (pay per click) services where you can avoid the entire organic optimization process by simply getting listed above the general search engine results -- by paying for it directly. The two major PPC services are Google’s AdWords program and Overture’s PPC program, which covers Yahoo and almost all of the other major search engines. 

But remember: whatever methods you use, you will want to see your site get reindexed on a regular basis by the search engines. This is if you offer a business or service where you want to be included under you own niche keyword search terms on the first page of results under such keywords. And you will want to see your business name displayed in a forthright manner so that you can attract visitors who type your carefully chosen search terms into the major and minor search engines. So get ready, get started: optimize!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RAINBOW WRITING, INC. -- We offer inexpensive freelance writing, copy editing, ghost writing, graphics and CAD, Internet marketing, publishing help, search engine optimization, professional free services and supercheap dedicated web hosting and site development. Copyright © 2005 by Karen Cole-Peralta