Archive for September, 2008

One of the first thing that should be done to give visibility to a new web site is to ensure that search engines (and Google is certainly the main one) will know about it. I would suggest two tactics:

• Directly inform Google (and some other search engines). It is often quite easy. Each search engine has a page where you can tell about one page or one web site that you want them to know about. For Google, it can always be reached through the “About” link (at the bottom of the search engine main page).

Submit your content to Google
Add your site, Google Base, Google Sitemaps…

• Even if this works quite well for a small number of search engines, it becomes more than tedious for more than 2 or 3. Totally avoid the more or less grey offices that offer to register you to thousands of search engines. First, 3 or 4 major engines will always provide 99% of your traffic, most of the others are plain swindle or a chance to be spammed to death. No! It’s even simpler: Don’t do anything! If Google knows about you and if (important!) your site contains somewhat useful data, you will soon have links from other web sites (even small ones). And this will be enough for ALL search engines to find your site. Don’t go further than Google (and maybe Yahoo! and MSN) and start typing content in. Possibly, if you have another web site or a good friend with her own web site, a small nice request could get you this link (but do not ask to strangers; For now, you can only loose good opportunities for later).

In any case, remember that the first visit from Google may be quite long in coming. They do not commit to anything, but 2 or 3 weeks of wait is perfectly normal. It would only be after 2 months with nothing that you could be worried. It leaves you a lot of time to work. And you will have plenty of good surprises.

I created this web site, this blog, tout keep traces of my efforts to create several web sites. While I was already equipped with Roumazeilles.net, I wanted to split some of its contents in several independant sites. My main objective was to maximise the readerhsip (I want more visits) and to maximise the earned money (these sites are a source of revenue through -mainly- advertising).

As it is often told that advertising is quickly diluted when subjects are multiplied (Roumazeilles.net had already more than 100 categories/themas), I wanted to test this hypothesis in a larger scale (larger for me) and I satrting creating several web sites. Since I start from ground, this is the opportunity to practice some of the best SEO principle (Search Engine Optimisation) and to share my own observations, my remarks and my advice with other web site creators. Obviously, some of these are also based upon the experience gained with Roumazeilles.net and a few other web sites receiving from 2000 to 5000 visits per day and bringing me a nice income of about 10% of my Engineering management salary (web site design and maintenance is not my day-to-day job, but a lucrative side activity).

So, along the coming weeks, vous will be able to find my trials (and errors), my advice. If you want to create your own WordPress-based blog, you will notice that since WordPress is also my web site engine, some posts will be specifically targetting it and could be more useful to you (I hope).

Nevertheless, your participation is welcome, by your comments to posts or even the writing of specific articles.