Getting your website noticed

Getting a website noticed is trick and a half that if you could bottle you could sell for millions. There are plenty of people who will take your money and promise the moon, but moving up the rankings and getting noticed by those who can make a difference requires a certain magic. This week, changingminds.org got noticed by one Guy Kawasaki and his estimable alltop.com, a cool collection of top sites and blogs. Will it change my world? Not immediately, but one thing leads to another and you never know.

The real secret of success in most areas is hard work. Of course there's also luck, but that's proportional to work. A quote I've heard more than once, and which makes a lot of sense, is 'the harder I work, the luckier I get.' I've been beavering away on changingminds for a number of years now, writing at least one page every day, and luck does smile more. It's an interesting journey and I've had some great conversations with readers around the world.

So, back to topic: how do you get your website noticed? The first answer is to add value. Content is king and I do try to live that message. Fortunately, I love learning and sharing, and this is a great vehicle. If you're not into writing, then perhaps you can get your content elsewhere, as Kawasaki does in his blog integration site.

Getting your website up Google's rankings gets things noticed and my approach is just to be a good citizen, as in My Adsense Secrets. There are various deceptive mechanisms, but I reckon I'm not as smart as the Googlians who seek to give higher rankings to real content sites.

The best recommendations come from other people, for example from people who use stumbleupon, del.icio.us and other review and site-sharing systems. The web has massively amplified the power of networking, both in the international reach and the sheer speed of connection and propagation. Sites like facebook and linkedin are designed to connect people and facilitate trust-building. Pouring your ideas down these connections can be very significant. Though don't forget the value element: if you are not delivering it, at best your communications won't go far, and at worst you will get panned around the world.

Your comments

I've got to agree that being useful is a much better time investment than trying to game a system that's designed and maintained by very, very smart people. I'm confident in my skills, not stupid.

-- Sara

1. Start with unique content on the front end of a page.
2. You have limits with how many words you can have in your meta-tags so be careful and use keywords or phrases with low competition have high hit to sale ratio.
3. Submissions first to get the engines to start ranking you under your keywords then submissions to as many engines on the correct submission date will really help link popularity. Link popularity is how you out rank a competitor.
4. Build the HTML site map and the XML site map separate from your site -- they overcome the limitations of your source code being a virtual index for your site. They can help clients land on the page they ate looking for and build link popularity faster.... That's in a nutshell, a small, nutshell on how to achieve solid profitable rankings.

-- tievon

Dave replies:
Wise advice. Many thanks, Tievon.

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