Unearthed® has been optimizing and placing travel and tourism websites in Australia for the last 3 years. Its a competitive category and we need as much help as we can get ! So you can imagine how pleased we were when the AddWeb Version 5 update came along. The easy to use interface makes it easy to navigate, even for those of us who never stop to read the instructions.

So enough shameless promotion for the great product - just because they let us write for their newsletter ;-) Let's get onto the goodies - how to use software tools for maximum online marketing benefit when you're just too busy to wade through the instructions. We call it the point, click, double-click, right-click, reboot method and it works for us.

GET A SYSTEM

Every good Search Engine Optimizer - SEO - has a system- a tried and proven set of steps, different algorithms and formulas, procedures and superstitions that have worked over and over again - so that's why we use them. If you have some high-ranking pages, learn from them - analyse word counts, metadata, keyword frequency, placement and tagging of images, number of images, submission frequency, incoming links and the rest. Dare we say, even learn (not steal) from competitors placements. There's a number of software tools that help you with this, and AddWeb is one of the more intuitive. Just run "Page Advisor" and follow the prompts.

Keep a journal of everything you do to your pages : our headings in the usual placement spreadsheet are : client / domain / target words / page name / title / meta desc / meta key / content / action / date So on any given day we can go back to see that we submitted's Fred Flintstone's page rock-crushers.html at www.yabbadabba.com with a title of Rock Crusher to Google with some fresh content on 12th May. We could diarise to manually check its ranking in a month's time or set up an AddWeb Schedule job to do it for us. (more on that next month).

So the old saying is "you can't manage what you can't measure" - don't blindly submit in the hope something good will happen. Be professional, careful, methodical and thorough. Learn from mistakes and successes. How would you feel if you went to a doctor who knew nothing about you, lost your history, forgot your name and appeared vague about the last time he operated on you ? Not good ? So you know how your SEO clients would feel if you don't have systems in place ?

CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT - say it again - CONTENT

Don't care what you say - you can build smoke and mirror pages all day long but nothing - NOTHING - beats content-rich pages. ie. lots of information relevant to the THEME of your site, keyword and key-phrase loaded (in the right ratio), interesting, bulky, lovely TEXT - the one thing that all search engines go looking for. Got the hint ? Build your client's content rich pages FIRST. AddWeb is a fantastic tool, but its there to help you promote useful informative pages, not to try to trick your way up a search engine list with irrelevant content. Analyse your pages with Page Advisor after you have all your content pinned down, formatted, spell-checked and palatable to search engines and the human eye, for those engines or directories using human editors (gasp!)

INSTANT GRATIFICATION

Now comes the good part - upload your completed, carefully recorded, content-rich pages to the web - then complete the final stage of your new procedures - addition of your site in AddWeb Scheduler. Why ? Because anything which submits to thousands of minor engines without any input from us is a winner ! Go to Profile Setup. Input the http:// location of your page and click "Populate". That was easy - all the hard stuff pre-populated - some hard work finally pays off. Choose the Country of Origin, and Link Page if you're reciprocal linking. Go to Website Content and choose a relevant category, and in Website Owner we suggest creating a specific email address for this site alone. That way you have a different submission email for every site submitted - you're not a spammer after all so don't accidentally get treated like one.

Now here's where we suggest something a little different - in Search Engines select all the minor engines, but don't click the major US engines or the major engines in your locality. 24 hours after we run AddWeb Scheduler we go to the major engines and manually submit the relevant URL. In fact we submit from 3 or 4 different IP addresses or ISP accounts. Once again you're not a spammer but you don't want to be mistaken for one. And our research shows it is a safer bet to manually submit to the majors, after AddWeb has helped you set up your pages and schedule the smaller engines for a regular submission.

Anyway, follow your nose through the rest of the Profile Set Up.

GET LAZY BUT SMART

Then off to Scheduler, click New, choose the Profile you just created, choose a schedule date and frequency, and choose "Submit this profile" from the options at the base, then "Save" - You're scheduled ! Just "Turn Schedule On" on a regular basis and the AddWeb elves do the repetitive work for you.

We also suggest scheduling submissions with some space between - and also avoid peak load times for US search engines - aim for a submission between 2am to 6am in their time. For example if we have 30 sites to schedule we will split them across the days of the week and the weeks of the month. eg. Site 1 7am Mon Week 1 - we call this Mon0700Week1SiteName and Site 2 7 am Tue Week 1 - "Tue0700Week1SiteName" so we can see at a glance which slots are open to add further sites.

If you spread the load, you're more closely imitating human submission behaviour and you're not slamming the resources of the search engines that are there to help us all. (Well most of 'em ;-) ) Make sense ?

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES ?

Presumably we are preaching to the converted because you have read the basics of SEO - a term which is becoming outdated because "online marketing" is really what we're all about. Next month we're going to deal with the ways AddWeb helps you respond to the changing envrionment including pay/bid engines and link popularity.

And in the meantime, point, click, double-click, right-click, reboot !

Unearthed® www.unearthed.com.au
Online Marketing Brisbane Australia