External SEO
SEO outside of the box
Once you've established the structural basics for SEO on your website it's time to consider some external factors that will improve the performance of your website in the search engines.
As well as creating a good structural foundation, it is also necessary for the search engines to know that your website exists. Historically, this was done organically through links to your site, where the search engines would follow links from other sites to yours. The more links you receive, the more important the search engines will determine your site to be. The more 'targeted' those links, the more credibility your site gains with the search engines for its area of expertise. The more credibility the source of the link had, the more it transferred to you. This is the basics of Google's 'Page Rank' algorithm.
However, as the internet has grown, so it's become more difficult for the search engines to keep pace with the rate of expansion and they need a helping hand indexing new pages. This can be done in a number of ways, detailed below.
Submitting your website URL for inclusion in the search engine index
Most search engines now have a site submission page, like Google's, that allows you to register your new website directly. There are normally no guarantees that using these services will result in your website being included in the search engine index, and there's no time limit to how long this process might take. My personal belief is that it's still better for your website to be 'discovered' through an external link.
Creating a map of your site (sitemap)
Submitting your website URL to the search engines as described above is still reliant on the search engine crawlers visiting the site and working out what pages are there (you can normally only submit the domain name or homepage URL, not deeper pages). To address this issue, most search engines allow you to create a map of the site, or sitemap, using the Sitemaps protocol. This is a special page on your site that is designed to be read exclusively by crawlers to gain a quick understanding of the site's structure.
As well as listing all the pages on your site, you can also include more detailed information such aswhen the page was last modified, the expected frequency of changes on the page and the relative priority of the pages compared with other pages on your site.
With this information, the search engine crawlers are able to index your site more efficiently, ensuring those pages that are most likely to have changed, or that have changed, and those of the highest priority, are crawled first.
External linking
Another way to get recognized by the search engines, as mentioned previously, is to make sure that other sites are linking to yours. The most obvious and beneficial way to achieve this is by including content on your website that others find interesting. For example, at the time of writing, Google recognizes 530,000 links to www.google.com, making it amongst the most linked to sites on the internet (Microsoft.com has 'just' 78,000).
To check if your website is included in Google's index, search for your domain name prefixed with the 'site:' control, e.g. search Google for site:www.google.com.
As well as accumulating natural links, you can also submit your website to directories, but care should be taken to ensure that you're only submitting to reputable, spam-free directories. You'll get extra credit for appearing in directories that are highly relevant to your content material, too; but you may be penalised if your site appears in directories known to engage in SEO malpractice.
DMOZ.org is always a good place to start and is well regarded by most search engines. Local business directories (if you're offering a product or service) are also worth considering.
What's next?
In the next article I'll look at how you can encourage people (not just the search engines) to visit your website, and the rules of visitor engagement.