Websites

I have one, so no issue there. But the other day I was contacted via my website by someone who said "would you like to get your website higher in the google search? contact us for a proposal"

Got me to thinking, so I did a google search for my website and it came up on page 3.

I'm assuming these people are wanting money to do something for my site to up it's page rank (or whatever). Aren't there things I could do on my own that would do that?

I submitted my site to google's URL doothingymabob (I'm a techy genius, I tell ya!). And also added the business to google places.

Are there other things that can be done that I haven't heard about??

Has anyone else here paid someone else to do that kind of thing?? If so, how did it work?

i think there is a way you can do it yourself. do more research. or if anythign do it yourself and pay google not someone else.

I built my website with Yahoo SiteBuilder. Their is a site management tool that allows me to submit my site to Yahoo, Google and MSN every 48 hours (which I do religiously.)

The tags that I use on my pages are "face painting Massachusetts" and similar things like that.

Without spending a dime extra than the $38 I pay Quarterly for my site, I'm number 4, 6, and 8 for the search "face painting Massachusetts" as a result of submitting my site regularly and having the right tags.

The site receives daily traffic and I work pretty steadily as a result.

Investigate if you have a similar tool with your site provider.

When you say the tag that you use is "face painting Mass".........what is that? Is a tag some kind of code??

Meta tags are the text at the top of every page of your website... they are html code and are hidden but look like this (I had to mess with the code so it would be visible):

html>
head>
title>Shannon Fennell Make-Up Artist and Face Painter
meta name="generator" content="Created Using Yahoo! ">
META name="verify-v1" content="3Y/mhkKqpPhGBRUy8isrkfz8r5tyIIre9434kOsoO/hhn+Eak=" />
meta name="author" content="Shannon Fennell">
meta name="keywords" content="shannon fennell shannon fennel shannon fenell shanon fennell shannan fennell shanon fenel make-up artist makeup artist make up artist face paint face-paint face-painter face painter face painting facepaint facepainter facepainting children's entertainer sfx birthday party birthday parties special effects make-up make up makeup wedding make-up belly painting pre natal art prenatal art gestational art pregnant belly painting bodypaint body painting bodypainting body art temporary tattoos theater theatrical make-up theatre make up costume design Grande Prairie Alberta Canada">
meta name="description" content="Shannon Fennell Make-Up Artist Face Painter Grande Prairie Alberta Canada">
/head>It identifies your search words to the search engines.

You can look at anyone's tags by right clicking in Explorer and selecting "view source" and you will see the html code.

Holy moly!

Guess I'll have to do some poking around and see if I can figure out where that is!!

I use Wesite Tonight with godaddy. So I'm sure that I'll find info @ godaddy for that.

The things that these companies would do are very simple to do yourself - once you know what you are doing. Much is FREE but can be time consuming.

It's all about a mixture of things ... some onsite (on your pages) and some offsite (on other places). If you like I can run through a list you can do yourself.

The main thing is to know exactly what your potential clients and customers would put into a Search Engine (SE) to find someone like you. These few words become the 'keywords' you optimise your site for. You can (and should have) several of these, and optimise each and every page.

Ideally your site url should have some keywords in it. If not, be certain that the Page Title of your Home Page does have. Then have the keywords in several places within your copy (text) in headlines, text, captions, links etc. You wanjt (need!) it several times on the page.

This is all very easy and a good start.

Do you want a dozen or so more ways to get you found and listed?

John Gordon
The Infotainer

That would be awesome John! Thank you so much!

I'm very interested in this. I need to find out more info(not quite getting it:-)

I'm not sure what this "page title" thing is.

I'm hoping it's not something that I deleted when I designed my website!!

in the page source it looks something like this
< head >< title >Your Page Title< /title >
(had to add some extra spaces so that it actually showed up and not had the site thinking it was actual code)
it tells the browser what title to put on the tab or top of the browser window.

Usually when you have go daddy they give you some credits to use on google ad. use it! You can control how much you want to spend a month and it really helps!

I did a face book add ('bout 10 days ago, times almost up) with the credits they gave......I'll soon be using the ones for Google. They gave me credits for some other website, but I cant remember for what site!! Anyhooooo, I'll be using them soon, now that I see how much traffic I can actually get off of them.

Blog!!

If you go on Blogger.com, googles blog site and just do a diary on your facepainting. Highlight everytime you say, for example, Facepainting, butterfly, tiger and so on, and link it to your site. Because it's a google blog, it'll put the 'spiders' out to your site and up the rating.

You can also use photos on your blog, for colour, you'll have to get a picture site to host them (open a free account) and then you have the code to use them when you blog all over the place.

Also, if you use other forums, you can just have your signature on the bottom of a post linking back to your site. Be aware, when you're on other forums that have nothing to do with facepainting, they can be a stickler for spam so don't keep posting about facepainting, unless it happens to be the topic.

OK, computer idiot question: How do you link a word(facepainting) to your site?