How do you Make Your Site Visible? SEO!

How do you Make Your Site Visible? SEO!

So, now that you have your site up you want to drive traffic to it, right? What's the use of having a site if no one will visit it?

If you have been following my blogs you know that I created a website for my personal portfolio which you can find here Brandon Shoals Portfolio. I chose to go with Weebly.com for three reasons: it is very easy to use, they have many different layouts to choose from, and IT'S FREE! I plan on upgrading at a later time to paid hosting in order to get some of the bells and whistles they provide, and  it's at a very reasonable price, but for now this will work.

After all the painstaking work of creating content for my site, now it is time to work on Search Engine Optimization. I am sure glad they call it SEO because that is a mouth full. SEO will allow for the  robots or spiders (creepy) that all search engines, like Google, use to rank your site, and list it higher in the search results. Back in the day people would use keywords to put their site higher in the rankings, but a good thing got way out of control when folks started repeating words hundreds of time in their code to improve their rankings. Just in case you don't know these keywords are not seen by the end user, nor is any other of the meta data that is used in SEO. However, these days things are different, and search engine ranking websites is big business and their algorithms are proprietary information. Every search engine uses your description of your website, the pages and or advertisement that you have linked on your website, and how many visitors you receive to rank your website. You will also need to register with search engines either through a service or manually on your own. BUT DON'T BE LAZY....AND DO SOME RESEARCH! 

Ok, so here's the meat of what I did below for my marketing:

1. WRITE A GOOD DESCRIPTION

Search engines use your website description to find and rank your site. So you need a good description for the robots that crawl the web. In Weebly, this is located under the settings tab. Make sure your description is concise and accurate to your website or else the search engine overlords will drop your site. If you need some description ideas google web sites like yours and see what others are doing that rank high on the list.

2. REGISTER YOUR WEB SITE WITH SEARCH ENGINES.

I went to Submit Express and registered for free, but only 5 submissions of your URL in a 24 hour period is allowed, because the search engines might think you are spam. Submit Express submitted to several search engines for me and this worked well for me because I was being lazy. I also went to Google Site Submission to manually submit my site, you might have to do this as well.

3. KEYWORDS

This might not be as effective as it use to be but it won't hurt, so I went to the settings tab in Weebly and put in key words that people might be searching, but don't be a keyword maniac or else they will drop your site ranking.  

4. SOCIAL MEDIA

I also created a Facebook page Brandon's Facebook, and a twitter page Brandon's Twitter this will allow for me to link to my website and drive traffic. Just be careful with linking to existing social media you might have, because people are watching!

So, in the end these are just a few things I did to start driving traffic to my site, but this will be an ongoing project.

 Have a comment, question, or just want to say hi, drop me a line!