Promoting your website

Choosing the right key words to promote your business can help you get your website noticed in the search engines. I do key word research quite often, especially to look for niches where there is a lot of demand but not too much competition. I’ve found that WordTracker is by far the best tool for keyword research. (I also am affiliated with them so if you buy through my links, I’ll be most grateful for your support! Click on the WordTracker picture to the right.)

There’s lots on offer in there: as well as key word research tools (obviously!), they have articles and various other resources. I find it’s a very useful resource, and I’ve been using it for years, but you don’t have to take my word for it. The good news is that you don’t have to decide to buy straight away. They’re currently offering a seven-day trial of the full version, so you can go in and test drive the whole thing. Try before you buy!

(Please note: they do ask you for your credit card details at the time of signing up for the free trial. So if you do go for the freebie and subsequently decide not to buy – don’t forget to cancel your subscription!)

By the way, you can also make money by selling WordTracker as an affiliate.

Firefox users might also like to know that WordTracker offers a natty little plugin that enables you to do your research in a sidebar whilst you’re working on your article. (Thanks to Adi Gaskell for that tip.)

What is PageRank?

I was going to write a little about PageRank including a definition, but there’s an excellent page on Wikipedia with everything you could ever want to know, and more! So, if you want to learn about Google PageRank, head over there.

Is PageRank important?

Hmmm. This is a hotly debated question. Some say that it bears no relation to SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), ie where your site is listed in a search engine. Others say that it does affect SERPs because PR is included in Google’s algorithm. Most people agree that PR isn’t worth fretting about. It’s better to spend your time adding useful content.

One of the best places to go for insider information about what Google is doing is Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO.

Meanwhile, if you want to find out your site’s PR without installing the Google toolbar, here’s a nice little free tool: Free PR checker tool

Updating your sitemap is all very well, but in these days of instant gratification most of us would rather have a way of letting the world know our latest news the moment it goes live. How do you do that? By pinging.

“Pinging” is a word in general computing use for the sending of a brief burst of information to find out if another computer is live on the network and can “hear” you – if it can, it sends an echo. (Think submarines and sonar, and you’ve got the general idea.) For blogs, it means a little bit more than that: it’s a brief burst of information, but this time it tells various search engines that you’ve just made a new blog posting. They then send their bots to check your site and update their listings with your new posting.

WordPress has a facility in the Writing settings to enable you to ping in this way. You’ll need to check your Privacy settings first to ensure that the facility’s enabled. It may not be a bad thing to disable it while you’re getting the site ready – no point in pinging with posts from a half-baked site. We turned it on today; with a dozen posts we thought there was enough content to justify it.

By default WordPress includes a link to its own Ping-o-Matic facility, which automatically pings several (currently 23) leading search engines including Google Blog Search, My Yahoo, Feed Burner and Technorati.

If you’d rather decide for yourself which blog search engines you’re going to ping, then that’s easy enough. Just go to the Writing page under Settings and add the URLs of all the specific search engines you’re interested in.

After that, all you have to do is hit the “Publish” button – the ping goes out at the same time. What could be easier?