Search Engine Optimization 101

New on WebMarketCentral.com is a page on Search Engine Optimization Basics, a how-to guide to getting at least decent placement for your site on the major search engines. While expert search engine position services offer more sophisticated techniques, this guide covers the basics of text optimization, meta tagging, alt-text for images, page naming, links and code tweaking for those without a big search budget.

Having exposed my knowledge and experience on improving one's search position, it's embarassing that the WMC site isn't showing up more respectably on the search engines yet. Through yesterday, a Google search for own press release brought up a number of sites where the release had been posted -- but missed the press release on my site! (Google is finding it today.) Also up until yesterday, Google couldn't find the name "Jay Lipe" on my site, even though it's in both the text and meta tags for my marketing-related blogs page. Again, that's working today. The Web's most popular search engine still won't find all of the words "Bronto Topica Silverpop" on WebMarketCentral, even though they are all listed on the Hosted Email Marketing Services page.

The bottom line on all of this seems to be that the final paragraph of my SEO basics page is spot-on: "The final step in improving your search engine positioning involves the least effort, and yet is the hardest -- waiting...It can take several weeks for Google to find your site, and about the only thing you can do to speed this up at all is to try getting your site linked from more sites so you are easier to find." Hopefully, within a few weeks, I'll be able to report much improved results -- and validate my own advice.

Gratuitous key phrase of the week: WebMarketCentral, the Portal for Web Marketers, Officially Launched (my press release -- we'll see if/when the search engines find this)