21. Publishing your website and checking for visibility in SERPs

You have spent time optimizing your site, creating a great layout and you have chosen the right name and host as well as being confident that your shopping cart and payment gateway is the right one

Now it is time to publish your site to the web for all to see and admire and vote on by making purchases from you. You will want to regularly find out where your sites pages rank on Google.

I use Front Page so publishing my web pages could not be simpler. Once I have finished the web layout all I have to do is select the file menu command and then select publish. I am prompted for my user name and password to allow me access to my hosts server where all my files (web pages) will be stored. I will then be given the option to replace the whole site or changed pages only and away I go.

It is that simple.

Other systems use what is called ftp (file transfer protocol) and this needs the installation and use of a 3rd party program of which there are many available and your host will have a recommendation to make.

The system and program you choose will determine exactly what has to be done. Your host will provide the necessary connection password information.

21.1 SUBMITTING YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE

The old way and still in use I can never remember where to find the url submission page on Google so every time I go to the Google search and type Google add url and then click on the SERP returned.

Submission is simplicity itself since all you do is type in your url address and press submit. Let me give you a very simple but valuable tip here:

DO NOT TYPE YOUR URL RATHER GO TO YOUR HOME PAGE ON THE WEB AND COPY AND PASTE THE ADDRESS THAT BRINGS YOUR PAGE UP.

This might just save you waiting weeks to eventually find out you typed your own url incorrectly and it is very easily done. In fact whenever you need to use your own url for important purposes do the same thing copy and paste from the actual web page.

The better way ask a friend to provide a link from an already indexed page by Google so that when Google visits your friends page the direct link will be picked up. Google prefers this method.

The best way and was only introduced in May 2005 use Google own sitemap submission system. Unfortunately you need to create a xml file which is beyond most of us so get your self a program like Rapid Site Maps (http://www.rapid-sitemaps.com) to do it for you

21.2 THE TOP 30 PAGES ON GOOGLE

You will recall what I said numerous pages back. If you do not appear in the first 30 SERPs when you search for your keyword on any search engine then the chances of your getting high volumes of traffic from the search engines is close to zero. In fact you really need to strive hard to get into the first 10 slots.

This table below puts into perspective the experience of a particular search engine called 7search. Now this is not a major search engine and it may be a bit biased because it does encourage its customers to pay more for top SERP slots but it is information that will stagger you.

What if it is true?

I personally have problems believing these figures and suggest you take them with a pinch of salt but just be conscious of your own behavior when you do searches on the web. How deep do you tend to go?

If you have a small site and only a few pages it is easy to manually keep tags on your performance. On Google the following command entered into the query box will allow you to see whether your page is listed or not.

Lets say your site is called www.xxx.com then type the following

Site:xxx.com inurl:xxx.com

Google will then search its database for any web pages based upon the website described in the command and provide you with a list of all indexed pages.

If there is no return then no pages have been indexed. Bear in mind it can take ages to get indexed and then it is highly unlikely that all pages will be indexed initially.

As far as Google is concerned it states that there is no need to submit more than the home page and from this page assuming the internal link structure is sound it will find the other pages.

21.3 LOTS OF SITES AND LOTS OF PAGES

If you fall into this category then you need software assistance to help you find ranked or non-ranked pages in all the important search engines. The industry standard is Web Position Gold use of this is against Googles terms of use so be warned.

Web position does a great deal more than monitor your position on many different search engines including all the major ones. It will submit your site to many search engines and also criticize your web page design from the viewpoint of a search engine. It will also help you create web pages however it is generally recommended (certainly by me) by users that this aspect should not be used in view of spamming potential of this kind of approach to web page creation.

I only use it and then very occasionally for monitoring my position of my many pages and sites on the different search engines. Below is a screen shot of one of the reports. In addition it is possible to export results to Excel for manipulation and further work.

The instruction you give to the software allows you to type in multiple keywords, AND multiple websites AND multiple search engines. This software will do in a few minutes what it would take you hours and hours to do and is invaluable for serious Seoers.

Notice it reports any change in position since software was last run.

The software should only be used when really necessary.