Search engine optimization is never a smooth sailing ride, as many would say. Because the trends on the internet change drastically over time, a website has to keep coming up with good strategies and SEO campaigns to keep it on top, or at least listed in the search engine results pages (SERP). At times, the competition will have an edge over your site, so they rank higher and are therefore more visible to potential visitors. In this regard, you might have to rethink your SEO plans of action to be sure you are listed or indexed.
The question now is, what aspects of SEO are sure to help you get your site listed on major search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN, and others? At times, you cannot only rely on search engine bots and spiders to crawl your pages and index you. This is why manual submission of your URLs is important, and should be done on a regular basis, or whenever you make updates on your site. On Google, there is the “Add URL” function, and on Yahoo, there is the “Submit” option. All you have to do is type in your complete URL, plus some comments to help the search engine reference back to it later on. However, both search engines explain that submission does not necessarily guarantee the ideal page rank on SERPs, but it still helps to do so.
As it is always explained, you can get your site to be indexed more often by spiders and bots if you provide a lot of stuff for them to devour. Spider-food, as many would call it, include keyword-rich texts, as well as links that point to your own site. If you want all pages of your site to be indexed, and not just your home page, you can set up a sitemap. These are more for the purpose of crawlers and bots, and not necessarily for website visitors to see.
The sitemap is just like a table of contents, listing down all the pages in your website as URLs. When bots come across this sitemap, they are sure to crawl through all the links included. Of course there are times when you make additions or deletions to your sitemaps. If you want to resubmit your sitemap to Google or Yahoo, you can ping these search engines, which is like sending a request for them to include you again.
Furthermore, search engines today provide tons of tools to assist webmasters in their quest for good page ranks and high traffic. There are Google webmaster tools that you can check out, just so you have an idea that your SEO efforts are leading your site on the right path. There are also Google webmaster tools that help you monetize your site, so that you also get income from the traffic that you direct, as well as the ads that you post on your site. You can learn more about these nifty tools when you visit the Webmasters/Site Owners Help site on Google.
Great Article!