Jason Silver

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Getting Your Site in Search Engines

A friend of mine asked an important question today, which I get a lot. I thought I should post my response here to benefit as many people as possible:

The way most search engines work now, is to rate how important your page is by how many people are linking to it. It's called site "popularity."

The best way to start getting higher in the search engines for your topic, is to comment on lots of other similarly themed sites, with the hope that they will, in response to your comment, find your content and link to it because of it's intrinsic value.

There are all kinds of ways to get links back to you by devious means, but they tend to have either short-lived, or harmful effects. Search engines recognize these sorts of links as being a type of spam-- you can possibly have your site blocked by search engines.

My trick? I subscribe to custom search engine RSS feeds for various keywords, so that when posts and articles are made anywhere on the Internet about these keywords, I can go and leave a comment. Often comment boxes will allow you to leave a URL, and so always leave yours when you respond.

By doing this, a link from sites relating to your keywords will be pointing back to you, and if your comment is informative, actual visitors might follow your link when they read your comment.

Just remember: don't make your comment look spammy, or advertisement based at all.

For marketing on the Internet, location, location, location is better said as "Content, content, content."

Hope this helps!
Jason Silver

~Jason