Author: Tiara Rea

I’ve taken a great many sales calls here at Lunarpages, and one of the things I get asked about the most is whether or not your site will be found in Google and the other search engines immediately after purchased. My answer, “That’s up to you”, tends to frustrate some people.

But the reality of the SEO situation is, in fact, up to you entirely. The amount of effort you put into your website, blog, store, or business is ultimately all that can help or hinder your experiences. For example, when I decided to pick up guitar and learn how to play it, I didn’t buy the guitar and ask the salesman, “So when can I expect a Billboard Top 10 Hit and a record deal and tour with the Ataris?” Okay, maybe I did ask that…

At any rate, the point I’m making is that the people who tend to rank high SEO-wise are the same people who have put the greatest amount of effort into receiving such results. If you’ve ever seen a poorly-designed website, you know exactly what I’m talking about. As you flee from the pink text on yellow background, I’m sure you all think exactly what I do – “What was that guy thinking?!” Bad design is one way to scare your customers away, and if that’s what you’re after then you can quite easily succeed (I’d be happy to help for a fraction of the price of my competitors), but if you’re looking for ways to rank in Google and retain customers as well as gain new business, you’re going to have to get to work – and really take some time to learn.

For now, I thought I’d share some of the simpler SEO tips that can help. These are certainly not meant to be the end-all of SEO, but they’ll definitely be your first step to getting recognized and building a respectable site.

1. Content.

And let me also add that it must be relevant content: i.e. if you’re selling cows but writing articles about goats, you’re not going to get the right kind of visitor.

One good way to produce a lot of content within short periods of time is to start a blog. Years ago, blogs were mainly used by kids and were not taken seriously at all. These days, if your business doesn’t have a blog, it’s considered abnormal and a bit old-fashioned. Blogs not only allow you to keep in touch with your clients and produce a customer-friendly image for your business but they are easily-indexed and crawled by the major search engines. I use WordPress for my personal blog, (we use it for the Lunartics’ Blog too), and I know for a fact that the majority of my traffic finds me via weird searches in Google that have shown up in the content of my posts. So the more you write about cows, the better your chances of targeted Google traffic taking interest in your site.

2. Domain Name Relevancy

Lunarpages.com ranks pretty well for a search on “Lunarpages.com”. So “cowfarms.com” is going to have immediate relevance to a search for “Cow Farms”. That doesn’t mean a great domain name will put you in the #1 position, but it certainly helps.

If you’re having trouble coming up with a domain name, here are some awesome resources that may help you out!

PickyDomains — This is my favorite, by far. For a one-time $50 deposit, you enter words, phrases, or ideas that either must be or could be included in your domain name choice, and a group of individuals email you their ideas. If you like one of them, you pay the $50. If not, you get a full refund. They’ve created some pretty cool domains, like KindBuyers.com, GymGenius.com, and SEOmantic.com. Well worth the $50 gamble, I’d say.

2.0 Generator — This one’s more for fun and some cuter domain names that may not have as great of relevance. It’s a “Web 2.0 Name Generator”, so they’re definitely poking fun at some of the 2.0 names (Flickr, Digg, etc), but when clicking through, they did offer some cool suggestions for names, so it’s worth a look. Only downside is they send you to another site to check availability, but still, some of the names may be just what you’re looking for.

JustDropped — Another great idea, Just Dropped offers you a list of the domain names that are dropped/expired every day. Enter a word or several words, check the boxes for .com, .net, .biz, etc, and even search via Registrar to see which domains are dropped and immediately available for your snatching! This could be a great opportunity to steal an incredible deal.

3. Ping!

Pinging is just a cute word for alerting search engines and websites that your site is active. Normally, if you update your website, Google doesn’t necessarily come over to take a look, even if you just wrote the coolest article in the history of cool articles. By using a pinging service, you can alert Google and other search engines that your new content is available.

Be careful; pinging every 5 minutes isn’t going to do any good. If you have new content daily, it’s safe to ping every 24 hours to alert Google that your site’s updated and that it needs to be crawled.

My favorite all-encompassing pinging sites are: PingOMatic, Pingoat, and Feedburner’s Pinging Service, as they have options to ping your blog in multiple engines and zines.

4. Simple Submission

Were you aware that Lunarpages offers Search Engine Submission? For free??! Well, we do! And yes, it’s really incredibly awesome.

With our Simple Submission tool, you can submit your site to 20 popular search engines for free, which means you’ll be recognized by the big guys ASAP. This doesn’t mean you’ll be #1 in your preferred search terms overnight, but it does guarantee that at least the search engines know your site is live, and that’s important.

5. Keyword Analysis

Bidding on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) terms in Google, Yahoo, or MSN can really be the key to getting some traffic and relevant linkbacks to your site. But if you don’t know what words you need to bid on, you’re going to lose money – and fast.

Enter the Keyword Analysis Tool, which you can find via Lunarpages as well! This helpful tool allows you to find the terms that are related to some keywords you may have automatically thought to bid on. For example, I want to bid on “Lunarpages” but that’s dense and the bids are too high. I type in “Lunarpages” to the Keyword Analysis Tool and it shows me immediately that I could also bid on “Lunarpages review” or “Lunarpages Web Hosting” to get similar results.

So those are 5 quick tips for some SEO strength. While they may not put you in the #1 slot, I think if you follow them you will see some good results and your customers or audience will see the difference. Remember, SEO isn’t an overnight or magic solution – it takes a long time to garnish the kinds of results you need, so study up and hopefully I’ll provide more solutions and tips for future newsletters!

And of course, if you guys have any tips, don’t be shy – post replies and share them with others!