As part of my ongoing quest to improve my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results for the term ‘Seattle Web Designer’, I will be posting a different SEO topic every 2 or 3 weeks with monthly updates on my page rankings. View original post here.
For the second topic in the series, I will focus on the simple step of registering your websites with the 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing.
1st thing to clear up, registering your site does not mean you will automatically get high SEO results, nor does failure to register mean you won’t get good SEO results through a combination of other factors. Rather it is 1 piece of a larger effort to improve your organic SEO.
Registering your sites is simple and all 3 do it in a similar way.
To register with Google, create a Google webmaster account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. If you already have a gmail address or Google ID, you should be set. From there you will be able to sign in to the Google Webmaster admin panel and right there in the middle of the page is the button ‘add a site’…click it.
Enter the URL you are registering, click Continue and then select your registration option from the 4 options given. For this example, I’ll select the ‘add a meta tag to your site’s home page’ link.
Copy the meta tag given in to the <head> of your html page and then click the ‘verify’ button. Google will then take a couple of minutes to validate the meta tag existence and you are all set. From there you should check out all of the other items available to you in the Webmaster Tools, there is some good stuff in there.
Do this for both the www and non-www links to your site.
The process for Yahoo and Bing is quite similar. Here is the link to register with Bing. And here is the link for Yahoo. Of course, you will need to have both a Windows Live ID and Yahoo ID just like you needed a Google ID.
Gregg