In part I of our series of how to make your website more successful we already showed you some important tricks to build a more successful website. This time we are going to expand the scope a little to further improve your website and to make it work harder for you on the Internet.
A) Outbound links: Search engines love to see outbound links every once in a while. It proves to a search engine that your website is related to a certain topic and industry. Make sure you use a keyword for the link and not just the plain URL. Linking to http://www.webhostingresourcekit.com is less valuable than linking to the same site as "Web Hosting Help" (with the same link underneath of course). The keywords here are "Web Hosting Help".
B) Insite Cross Links: We're not done with linking to other places yet. Insite Cross inks (links from one page of your website to another web page of your website) will be an important part of the future of your website. Imagine article "A" getting high feedback and many external people linking to it. This article page will receive a higher page rank than other pages of your website. This cross link will now share the page rank out to other web pages of your website and therefore eventually boosting the page rank of the page linked to.
C) Submit to Search Engines: You've built your website and are ready to go live. How will search engines find your new website? Unless you link to the new website from an existing website you will have to let search engines know about it. Submit the homepage to: Google, Altavista, WiseNut, DirectHit, and Hotbot (and all the others you know). Also submit the website to DMOZ. I'd personally stay away from paid listings unless you think it is needed. Anyway - now comes the tough part - forget about the submissions. It might take a few weeks or months for a site to be spidered.
D) Web Server Logging / Website Tracking: To be able to work properly with your website you will need good logging tools. You want to know how many website visitors you get, where they come from, what pages they look at and how long they stay. A counter on your website does not do it. You need tools like Webalizer, AWStats, Urchin or Webtrends. If your web host does not provide any of the first 3 options (Webtrends is fee-based) you should move to a new web host. Proper log file analysis is important to your success.
This article can be published by anyone as long as a live back link to http://www.smallbusinessland.com is provided. (this note can then be removed)
About the Author
Christoph Puetz is a successful small business owner (Net Services USA LLC) and international author.
Guides, Tutorials, and Articles for small businesses - http://www.smallbusinessland.com