An Incomplete Guide to SEO : Launching your web site

Launching your web site


So you have designed your web site, and now its time to put it online. I’ll leave the actual process of installation for another time. I will mention hosting however.

Joomla!Note
Not every host will meet the needs of a Joomla site. One issue is safemode. It’s a server setting and it needs to be off for Joomla to work properly. Other issues that often crop up are ones involved “ownership” of files on the server. I have a few reviews of recommended Joomla hosts here.

Ok, so we have our site up, what next?
Open your doors to the spiders

To start showing up on rankings, your site needs to be indexed. This means a program called a spider comes to your web site and crawls it. Crawling involves looking at the tags, text and following all the links it can find. Make sure your site is easy to crawl:

All pages should be linked to more than one page on your site. This is easy to do with Joomla, it happens with the mainmenu and other menus. Also try and make all pages within two levels of the root (home page). If they are buried, try and add more specific sections to hold that content.

Joomla!Note
Two Common Joomla Mistakes!

* Flash menus. I showed my bias against flash in my last article. Spiders struggle to follow flash. If you really must have flash navigation, then you need to include some plain old text links somewhere on the page. An easy way to do this is in the footer. Go to /includes/footer.php and add your links there. They will then turn up on every page, easy eh?
* Don't put it online before you have a quality site to put online. It's worse to put a "nothing" site online, than no site at all. You want it flushed out from the start. Its very easy to fall into this trap with Joomla as its so easy to put a site up, especially with the built in templates. Better to work off line with MSAS and import the SQL database (note to self: write guide to working offline)

One last thing, to actually be indexed, the spiders need to know you exist. This happens by submitting your site and linking.
Submitting your site

The first part is real easy. Go and submit your site by hand to all the major engines, here’s a few to get you started.

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

When you do submit, take note of who supplies the search. Alltheweb is done by yahoo for example, you don’t need to submit there.

The second part is much harder. Forget about you submissions for a few months. That’s right, submit them and forget about it. Don’t even think about using one of those “submit your site to 89768 engines for $20” deals.

Also go submit to a few directories. If you have the right contacts, sacrifice a goat or something and submit to dmoz.org. It’s the grand daddy, with a page rank of 9, but almost impossible to get on.
Linking your site

Getting links to your site is perhaps the most important part of SEO and perhaps worth a topic all in itself. Needless to say, the more links from quality sites you can get the better. Also ones with the same topic

An easy submission is in the community news section of Joomla.org. Hey, its free, will give you a link and also might trigger a spider to crawl you. If you have a useful site, announce it o the community!
Logging and Tracking

Get a decent tracker that can track inbound referrals (where someone came from). Most hosts have several built in, I use awstats. Whatever you do, don't use a lame graphic counter, it doesn’t give you want you want and looks unprofessional. If your host doesn't support referrers, then back up and get a new host. You can't run a modern site without full referrals available 24x7x365 in real time.

For the more compulsive amongst us, you can start watching for spiders from search engine’s. Make sure those that are crawling the full site, can do so easily. If not, double check your linking system (use standard hrefs) to make sure the spider found it's way throughout the site.
Buying Traffic

One underused way of SEO is simply buying traffic. You might not think of advertising when you think of optimizing your site, but the ultimate goal of all this is traffic, so why not just skip the middle man.

I recommend using Google AdWords. It’s a Pay-per-click program that has somewhat revolutionized online advertising. Basically you only pay (usually a few cents) when someone actually clicks on your link. Your actual ad is designed based on certain keywords you want (remember part 2?), this means it targeted traffic, the best kind.

I’ll probably do a guide at some point, but to get started, you need a Google account. Also, to help you figure out how much to bid, and on what words, I use this tool the most:

http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/

It does the bid and terms at the same time.
Where is all my traffic?

In March 2004, Google implemented a new filter, now referred to as "The Sandbox".

Google's thinking was, A new web site shouldn't be able to get good ranking, until they prove themselves. Spammers generate millions of new pages daily, along with millions of new links to go with them.

Google withholds high ranking ability on new sites, by de-valuing the new links for 2-4 months. If the domain and backlinks have existed for a certain length of time (4 months?), then you are OK, and escape from the sandbox.

This penalty is new-site based. Long-standing sites have no trouble ranking new pages. Over time, the newly generated links are given weight, and eventually the sandbox effect goes away.

Don’t get too worked up about instant traffic, its probably not going to happen anyway because of the sandbox. For the next few months you are better off spending your time writing content, a page every few days.

Part 4 Summary

* Use a Joomla friendly host
* Make sure your site can be spidered
* Submit and forget
* Buying traffic is surprisingly cheap
* You won’t get good SERP to start