Sometimes we get so caught-up in the complicated aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and business in general, that we forget to do the simple things, and many times they can be really powerful.

I have dedicated much time and effort on this site, and on my personal blog, to explaining SEO, and giving easy-to-implement tips. These tips have helped many of my readers attain amazing Google rankings, very quickly. As an example of their power, When I launched this blog, neither “Renegade Marketing Strategies” or “Yvette Hampton” were ranked terms on Google (At least not YvetteHampton.com, there is some swimmer or runner who shows up). Within two weeks of launching this site, searching “Yvette Hampton”, or “Renegade Marketing Strategies” yielded this site, as the first, unpaid result on Google. That is an amazing feat! While Google search rankings change almost daily, You will still find us at the top of the Google results (within the first page), although we move around a little bit every day.

Those are just the simplest search terms, but all of my sites perform equally well for more obscure search terms as well.

The Tip

You can spend all the time in the world on SEO, and forget to do the simple things, like SUBMIT YOUR OWN SITE to the search engines.

If you have a blog, you can submit your site to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping. This is Google’s Blog Search engine. Once you have submitted your site, you can search for it at http://blogsearch.google.com.

You can submit your site to Yahoo! at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.

You can submit your site to Altavista at http://www.altavista.com/addurl/default.

You can submit your site to Microsoft’s Live.com at http://webmaster.live.com/.

You can submit your site to MSN at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.

To add your site to Ask.com, you have to have a valid sitemap. Search this site for the term “Sitemap”, or Google the term “Sitemap” for instructions on creating a sitemap. Detailed instructions are outside the scope of this post, but once you have your sitemap created, you can “Ping” Ask.com with the address, and Ask will begin to spider your site. You can get instructions from Ask.com at http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22, or you can do it yourself by changing the following address to include your site, then entering it in your address bar and pressing enter.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

While this is not a topic that I suspect I will be expanding on in the future, I wanted to include it here mainly to encourage creativity in web design, and to show some of the techniques I have used in the past (not saying anything about how effective they were). I originally had three posts on this topic, but the first was so site-specific, I decided not to include it here.

One Last Babelfish Post
May 12, 2006
O.k. this is my last Babelfish post, but this is a good one. Most of us have heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), yet it is a mystery to all but the most seasoned web pro. Companies charge thousands of dollars per year to keep other companies’ web pages at the top of the search lists. Web designers and marketing people pull their hair out trying to get their websites found on Google. We hear stories of Google removing whole sites from their database. What are we supposed to do?

There is an easy way to vastly improve your search engine standings and help your site to be found. Build a great website. I know it sounds silly, but it works. If you have a great website, it will translate to better search engine ratings.

So what makes a great website? First, you have to have a lot of relevant content. If you are building a dog grooming website, have pages for contact information, techniques for handling different breeds, tools of the trade, shampoo and flea dip recomendations, a secure online store, staff bios, pictures of past clients, tips for grooming at home and anything else that is pertinent. The more relevant content you have the better. Just make sure the content is relevant. Having a page dedicated to safecracking on your dog grooming site really won’t help anything.

This is where Babelfish comes in. Once you have your site set up and looking good, start translating it. Babelfish allows you to translate whole pages of your site into 12 different languages. That means that your relevant English content becomes relevant Spanish, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Portugese, Dutch, Russian, German, Chinese and Italian content. Take the time to capture the code and post the translated pages to your web server. This will multiply your content many times, and you don’t have to spend hours and dollars creating new content.

Enjoy, Garritt

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Babelfish
May 11, 2006

I recently began the monumental project of translating the Realty Response and Realty Response Connections websites into spanish. This task is complicated to begin with, but the fact that I do not speak Spanish only makes things worse. Luckily, we have a wonderfully dedicated agent on staff who speaks Spanish. Consuelo set out on the tedious process of translating the website, page by page. She was doing a great job, but it was very slow going. Then we discovered Babelfish.

Babelfish is an excellent web translation tool provided by the good people at Altavista. You can check out the very basic front end to Babelfish at http://babelfish.altavista.com. At first glance it is not very impressive, but as you use the tool, you find that it makes very tedious translations possible, whole pages at a time.

The basic user interface allows you to translate blocks of text from English into 12 other languages including Dutch, Greek, Portugese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish, . It also allows you to translate text in most of those languages back into english and to enter specialized characters for multiple languages via an onscreen keyboard. Just these capabilities make this free tool an incredible value, but there is more. By linking your website to Babelfish through a relatively simple html tag, you can allow visitors to view your site in any of those languages.

There are a few limitations to this amazing tool, but they can be pretty easily overcome. The first is that Babelfish can not translate button images. So if you use buttons on your site, they will remain unchanged. This is remedied by creating an all-text, or mostly-text page for translation. The second limitation lies with dynamic pages. Babelfish doesn’t like PHP or non UTF-8 encoding. That severly limits it’s usefulness for blogs. I have found that WordPress pages do not translate to languages that do not use the basic western character set. It will do Spanish and French on a WordPress blog, but if you want to translate your blog to Russian or Greek, good luck. Even with these limitations, Babelfish is a tool that every webdesigner should keep in his belt.

For businesses, Babelfish offers a relatively simple and inexpensive way to reach a wider audience, and even conduct web business overseas.