Video: How Do I Get My Pet Sitting Website In The Search Engines?

Today’s question is a good one. A pet sitter has just completed her website and is ready to publish it online. How does she go about informing the search engines?

Additional Notes

Spiders

What is a search engine spider and how does it work?

For that, we turn to the official search engine spider page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_spider

Getting Good Clean Code

Also, one of the points I make is to create good clean code using a good web authoring tool.

All too often some of the more popular tools add extraneous and often unnecessary html code to your pages. This becomes counter-productive to your goals since the search engine spiders crawl through your html code to identify the content of your pages.

If the actual content is jumbled with a bunch of excess code and is difficult to read or understand, the search engine spider will have a difficult time returning your site to the Mother Ship for inclusion in the results.

Through The Eyes of Google

Here’s a great resource to see exactly how a search engine spider currently views your site. Visit the search engine simulator to get started. The more content the simulator produces, the better.

Ideally, you’ll want to see relevant keywords and text relating to your business.

If you’re not happy with the results of your current web building tool, I spotlight 5 free web building tools that may do a much better job for you.

Choosing Your Pet Sitting Keywords

Sure, it’s easy to say ‘target the keywords your potential clients would use to find a service like yours,’ but how can you be sure those keywords are really being searched for?

We turn to the Google Keyword Tool for help. Enter a search term into this handy free tool and Google will tell you exactly how many searches were performed for that exact phrase in a given month.

It’ll also go on to suggest related search terms you may want to consider. Bookmark that tool and use it often to arrive at a handful of the best keywords for your pet sitting website.

I expand on choosing the right keywords and how to go about using Google’s Keyword Tool in a previous article.

Submit Your Site Directly To The Search Engines

As mentioned, search engines can generally find your site once it’s uploaded and online.

However, if you are new out of the gate, you can manually submit your site.

Submit to Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Submit to Yahoo http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Submit to Bing (formerly MSN) http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
Submit to DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/

A note about DMOZ: This is a popular directory that evaluates each site for submission by hand. Drill down to the most appropriate category for your site, then click on ‘Suggest URL’ on the top right menu bar.

Ask Joshua

If you have a question about starting, marketing or growing your pet sitting business, we’d love to hear from you. Ask Joshua here.

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