SearchEnginePromotionwith’ctabuk’

GETTING ON GOOGLE (And other Search Engines)

By David Castle and various members of the David Castle Forum.

Well this makes a change for me, I normally write Historical Fiction books. But my buddies around the globe have all said. ‘Stop prattling on about history and guitars. Show people what you are really famous for!

Getting listed on Google

I said, guys forget it; there are dozens of books on the subject. They carried on with their persistence.

So here I am, back at the PC churning out another book.

OK – go into Google and search ‘ctabuk’ that’s me folks. One of the more famous usernames in the Search Engine Forums.

I moderate over at Web Pro World and I have a UK forum on the subject of Search Engines. Just search my name and you should find it. However, knowing my luck Google will have disowned me!

As I am writing this there is a credit crunch well and truly in place.

My wife Leslie and I are both Financial Services Authority regulated as mortgage brokers. But we never advertise, we let people find our websites via natural search.

It’s the same with my new novel; people around the globe occasionally go looking for ‘New Historical Fiction Books’. They will find me there.

Over eight hundred different search terms find our sites.

At our peak and before the credit crunch we were generating millions and millions of pounds in lending. Year in and year out. No advertising whatsoever, no ‘pay per click’ no ‘adsense’ just search engine listings.

Hey, this is more fun than writing history. No research needed!

All the ‘guide’s to getting listed’ books I have seen on Google get so bloody technical they bore the pants off people. I am not a ‘techie’ so it’s going to be pretty basic stuff.

A search engine is like a giant robotic brain. Google sits in California but has offices worldwide. All of these offices use different databases, in the UK at the last count we had around nine.

Each database can get different results, which is why we use local directories for linking. But more on that later.

Searches are triggered by ‘keywords’. So if you are researching the Monmouth Rebellion or someone say’s ‘Have you heard about the ‘Bloody Assize in 1685? then the odds are, whereever you search you will find my site.

‘The Site’
The biggest mistake that people make is thinking that all the best titles or URL’s (Uniform Resource Locators) are taken. Twaddle, others say use hyphens if the title is taken. So you get this website address

My-site-is-the-best-in-the-world.com – Oh, heck, that’s crazy.

Others tell you ‘It has to be a dot com’ – Jeepers, haven’t they heard of ‘sitemaps’?

I use a dot co.uk or an .org.uk wherever possible. But I am aiming at the UK market. Though it’s fair to say that on the historical novel thing my UK site is on page one world wide an all of the search engines. I never, ever assume that a title has been taken.

Let’s assume that you are a brand new business, and quite rightly you want a natural link on page one of Google. I mean, don’t we all? Well I have hundreds.

OK, you set up your website and you name it after your business – Fred Scuttle Bathsalts Manufactures – WRONG!

If you are selling a special product, then name the site title as your URL so if you sell bathsalts you need the term at the start of the site title followed by the dot co.uk or whatever.

You have to ‘Think Searcher’ – If someone is searching for a New Historical Fiction Book because they have read all the others, then they will search that term.

So, there are fifty websites all starting with ‘bathsalts’ some people would say ‘give up, they’ve been taken’.

WRONG!

Bathsaltsforyou probably hasn’t. Don’t make the mistake of using a number 4 so many make that daft mistake. It would be better to have Bathsaltsforyoufromme than a bathsalts4U.

These lazy phonetic spellings are rubbish for search engine marketing.

A ‘keyword’ is called ‘anchor text’ – Google has little spies that travel the Internet world looking for fresh information. They have an insatiable appetite, they search everything and anything. These ‘spies’ are called ‘googlebots’.