By: Mike McCoyness business owner wants top search engine rankings and this month’s article provides 3 quick and easy things you can do today to help your website’s chance at ranking #1. • Submit Your Website to the Search Engines • Write an Article and Distribute It • Start a Blog and Make Your First Post Submit Your Website to the Search Engines This is probably the first thing you should do. Login to each search engine and submit your website to them. Detailing each step of the process for each search engine is beyond the scope of this article, but here are some pages you can start with. I do recommend reading this entire section before submitting your website. Google: Sign up for a Google Webmaster Account here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/ From this point you’ll be taken to your dashboard where you can enter your website. If you have a sitemap you can also submit it in this account. Just click the “Sitemaps” tab. Yahoo: Sign up for a Yahoo email account and then go here: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit If you have an XML feed you can also submit that information on this screen. MSN (live.com): http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx *** Do NOT submit your website to any search engine that already has your website listed within its index. That means if Google or Yahoo or Live already know about your website… do not resubmit it. Doing so will more than likely violate the terms of service and you could face a penalty. *** Write an Article and Distribute It I cannot express thoroughly enough how important it is to receive legitimate incoming links from article distribution. Take 30 minutes and write an interesting article. Once you have an interesting article that speaks to your target fitness business audience, you should distribute it to as many websites as you can. If you are doing this manually do not spend hours submitting your article. Instead submit it to the m
ajor article directories such as GoArticles.com, EzineArticles.com, and fitness-nutrition-weightloss.com. Start a Blog and Make Your First Post This one is pretty big. Blogging is the future and it’s important to know the difference between a blog and a website. A website is your foundation. It is the rock that provides weight to your fitness business’ online pursuit. A blog is merely a vehicle that allows you to communicate with your blog readers. It is very difficult to receive high search engine rankings and that difficulty level will only rise in the future. It will become harder and harder for your fitness business website to rank in the top positions at the engines. The trick is to get started now… before your competition. Build a solid foundation now and 5-10 years later, you’ll be thrilled that you did! A blog is even more difficult to rank than a website. The point of your blog should be two-fold: • It should be a vehicle to communicate quickly and easily with your readers. • It should support your website and NOT be its competition. Start your blog today and make your first post! The Bottom Line These are three things that you can do right now to increase your online presence. They all will help your website move one step closer to ranking. As you move forward with your online marketing, keep in mind that once you do the work… multiply your efforts as much as possible. If you write an article, distribute it to the article directories, send it to your local media, see if you can tweak it and turn it into a press release. Record your voice as you read the article and offer it as a free download (after someone opts in, of course!) on your website or offer it as a bonus to a product you sell. Then take that audio and submit it to iTunes as a podcast. Add the article and audio to your blog and ping all the social marketing sites. The possibilities are truly endless. Just keep in mind… nothing happens until you make a decision to move forward with your ideas and goals.
