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Social Media Marketing SEO Search Engine Optimization

While You’re Waiting for Google

December 17th, 2008

Learn French. Take a Palates Spin class. Read Proust.

Still waiting? Try these simple add-ons to your SEO marketing plan.

Tighten Up Your Website’s Robots.txt

One of the least well known, but most important elements of your website is the robots.txt file. Not all pages are worthy of indexing. In fact some should not be indexed at all.

The robots.txt file directs the search engines to the files you want them to see. By blocking some files or directories like the .css files or your image or flash directories you increase your “indexed page” saturation. Search engines will see that a very high percent of your pages are directly related to your topic.

The robots.txt file will prevent search engines from crawling pages or directories that list the private data of your email list subscribers, have “duplicate content” because you’re a product site, or contain information not specifically related to your market. By properly structuring your website and the robots.txt file you can get the search engines to spider all your important pages effectively.

Add a Sitemap

Build a sitemap that has all your pages in the top three levels. Adjust the linking on your site to reflect the sitemap. I have seen excellent content buried in the 4th or 5th level of a website. Be sure all your content can be reached on the 3rd click because not only to your visitors find that annoying, most of the search engines do too.

The search engines see a page buried deep in your site they assume that you don’t think it’s important. If it’s not important to you its not important to the search engines.

Google will spider a good sitemap and hopefully index all your pages. Be sure only to include the pages you want indexed.

Stumble Upon StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon.com is a website that allows members to “Stumble” your website. This adds your site to StumbleUpon.com. This gives your website exposure to over 6,000,000 members of StumbleUpon, one of the largest social bookmarking site on the internet. Open an account with StumbleUpon.com, install the toolbar to “stumble” and “stumble” yourself. Have a few friends stumble you too and see what happens.

This gives you a backlink from a very high PR site and hopefully some click thrus. Add tags and reviews on your Stumbles – this gives you visibility in a Stumble search. You can exchange Stumbles too. Get enough Stumbles and you might be a featured site on StumbleUpon.com.

You can get PageRank for your profile on social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon. This backlink to your website from your profile will leak some PageRank back to your site.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is frequently the first result to pop up on Google for a topic. Establish yourself as an expert in your field on Wikipedia. Add your biography and credentials as well as expert information on your market. Add your backlink in the “references” section for an excellent backlink.

Keep your Wikipedia page very current and it will become an excellent source of traffic and value added to your brand.

Have a question? Call John at 206-335-6162 in Los Angeles or email marketone[at]gmail.com

Keyword Saturation:2%
Keyword Value: 2/10

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