Search Engine Optimization: Caveat Emptor (Buyer Beware!)

The Internet world is filled with companies offering to have you ranked number one with all the major search engines, promising huge profits and immediate results. I am often asked by clients, colleagues, friends and even family what can be done to improve search results and ranking. They often ask my opinion about a certain SEO solicitation or offering and my first recommendation is caveat emptor (buyer beware). Don’t fall for promises of huge profits and immediate results. It simply doesn’t work that way.

If you decide to choose a company to help you with your search engine optimization and search marketing, I recommend you pick a company you’ve worked with in the past, one you can trust to have your best interests in mind. If you already work with a web design firm or marketing agency, there is a very good chance they can help you formulate a game plan to start seeing results.

In the meantime, there are some things you can do on your own. Get busy, get involved, stay engaged, and you’ll start to see good things happen. There are no guarantees of huge profits or immediate results, but here are 10 things I have picked up over the years that can make a difference, in no particular order:

1. Navigate to your website with a Google toolbar enabled browser such as Firefox.
2. E-mail your website address to a friend using Gmail.
3. Navigate to your site on any of the lower end Internet connections including Comcast, AOL, Time Warner, Netzero, etc— as those logs are used to find new sites.
4. Navigate to the “Site Profile Page” on aboutus.org and create a profile page there.
5. Create a Wikipedia entry for your site.
6. Submit your top pages on well-indexed directories such as Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web.
7. Issue press releases via major press release distribution services (PRNewswire, PRWeb, etc.).
8. Buy some inexpensive Google Ads for your website (this forces Google to crawl to these pages to assess your quality score).
9. If your site has pages with generic data that is common to other sites (e.g. business contact info), then you should figure out ways to add unique text to each page such as a new review of the business.
10. Submit your domains to all of the major search engines via their submit URL pages:
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
Ask: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml