WebMastersLoom

Getting your website up and running is hard enough. After spending hours getting the HTML code just right and trying to make sure that you provide a great user experience, the last thing you want to do is change everything around in order to get your site ranked higher on the search engines. Follow these tips from the beginning and you’ll see the benefits.

1) Not changing the title tag from page to page. A lot of people realize the importance of the title tag. But few sites change the title tag from page to page. If you have a large site with a lot of different pages targeting different keywords, then change the title tag to reflect the keywords of the particular page. Keeping the title tag the same throughout the site may optimize the site as a whole, but you are limiting the amount of search terms that you can use. The shorter the title the better, you don’t want to get caught stuffing the title tag with too many terms. Just change it from page to page.

2) Not using a H1 tag. Use a H1 tag. Really. No, it’s no 1996, but search engine bots love the H1 tag. They view it as “hey, this is so important, it’s in the H1 tag.” Everybody got carried away with putting neat graphics and flash on their site and have neglected this tag. In fact a lot of sites use a graphical banner where their H1 should be. While these certainly look good, search engine bots can’t read graphics, they are just bots. Use the H1 tag and use your keywords in it. It will help the visiting Search Engine bot determine what your site or page is about.

3) Using “Home” as a link text. Everyone uses “home” as the text to link back to their index page. However, this might not be the best choice. After all, it is a link. We all know how important links are in search engine rankings. When you use the word “home”, the search engine bot will chalk up another point to “home” for your site. Why not use a keyword as this text? If your site is about hubcaps…why not use “hubcaps” for the link text? This will help you in that it a)adds a link within your site using “hubcaps” and b) help the search engine bot figure out a little better what your site has to offer.

There are millions of web sites trying to get listed in the top 20 spots of the major search engines. That amounts to an awful lot of competition and even after spending hours and hours on Search Engine Optimization techniques you may still not be able to achieve a high ranking for your competitive keywords!

However, if it proves too difficult for you to get high rankings directly, there are still ways that you can get to the top…….indirectly!

So, just how do you do this?

Firstly, look up the top 20 web sites on the major search engines under the keywords and phrases people would find your web site. If you could either advertise on those sites, or get a link from those sites to yours then that would be nearly as good as having a top listing yourself.

The most expensive way to do this would be to buy ad space on those web sites. However, if you don’t want to spend any money to do this, you could use the ten strategies below.

These strategies may not of course apply to every web site but I’m sure there’ll be at least two or three that you can make use of straight away….

1. Participate on their discussion boards. You could post questions, answer other peoples questions, and join in on conversations. Just include your signature file and link to your website at the end of your messages.

2. Ask the web site owner if they would like a free ebook to giveaway to their visitors. You could have them link to your web site or include your ad in the free ebook.

3. Submit content to their web site. You could write articles for their web site and include your resource box and link at the end of the article. If they publish it, you’ll indirectly be at the top of the search engines.

4. Write an excellent article review of their web site, products or services. Then publish the review on your web site. E-mail the web site owner and tell him or her about it. They may link to your web site so their visitors read it.

5. Ask the owner of the web site if they would want to trade advertising. If you don’t get as much traffic as they do, you could throw in some extra incentives.

6. Propose a cross promotion deal with the web site. You both could promote each others products or services together in one package deal. This means a mention and link back to your web site.

7. Give the web site a testimonial for their product or service. Include a little text link for your web site with the testimonial. You never know; it could end up on their ad copy.

8. Post your advertisement on their free classified ad section on their web site. You want to be sure you have an attractive headline so they will read your ad.

9. Sign their guest book. You could leave a short compliment about their web site on their guest book. Just include your signature file and link at the end of your message.

10. Tweak your own website so that your pages are search engine friendly. There are steps that you can take that don’t take long to implement but can dramatically improve the traffic you get from the likes of Google and Yahoo! Louis Allport has a great video guide which shows the quickest and easiest way to do this. It can be found at: http://69.44.170.93/google-friendly-ebook-software.htm

Chris Towland 2005

Please feel free to publish this article and resource box in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication or website. A copy would be appreciated at chris@webinvaders.com

When optimizing your web site most webmasters don’t consider using the robot.txt file. This is a very important file for your site. It let the spiders and crawlers know what they can and can not index. This is helpful in keeping them out of folders that you do not want index like the admin or stats folder.

Here is a list of variables that you can include in a robot.txt file and there meaning:

1. User-agent: In this field you can specify a specific robot to describe access policy for or a “*” for all robots more explained in example.
2. Disallow: In the field you specify the files and folders not to include in the crawl.
3. The # is to represent comments

Here are some examples of a robot.txt file

User-agent:  *
Disallow:

The above would let all spiders index all content.

Here another

User-agent:  *
Disallow:  /cgi-bin/

The above would block all spiders from indexing the cgi-bin directory.

User-agent:  googlebot
Disallow:  

User-agent:  *
Disallow:  /admin.php
Disallow:  /cgi-bin/
Disallow:  /admin/
Disallow:  /stats/

In the above example googlebot can index everything while all other spiders can not index admin.php, cgi-bin, admin, and stats directory. Notice that you can block single files like admin.php.

Unfortunately, not many Search Engine Optimization companies know what this involves. You may see a “one size fits all” package, link popularity development in the form of submitting to link farms, or even the dreaded “Submit Your Site to 1000’s of Search Engines” scam. While the basic premise of each of these ideas is true, the execution of them is extremely important.

First of all, your web site needs human attention. A real person should thoroughly analyze your site before any work is done. Get them on the phone and ask them questions. There should be a clear process that the Search Engine Optimization company uses and tailors to each client. The SEO company should also have a clear idea of what your goals are for your web site.

The first step in any work that is done should be keyword research. Like any kind of advertising, you need to know where your target market goes and how they find businesses like yours. The keywords chosen should apply to the theme of the web site. High rankings for these keywords should also be obtainable given your budget. If you are a computer repair shop with one or two locations in a city and can not service computers outside your area, then targeting a term such as “computer repair” is overkill. The cost for obtaining high rankings for a term such as that will be far greater than what you will make from the exposure, as much of your web site traffic will not be targeted enough.

Once keywords have been chosen for the web site, the content should be updated to reflect them. This may include subtle changes to the meta tags, page titles and text headings; or it could involve adding additional sections to the site, rewriting content and reorganizing the web site’s structure. It all depends on the specific requirements of the site and market.

Once the on-page content optimization is complete, link popularity development needs to be done. A link development campaign should be done to acquire quality incoming links to the web site. This phase of search engine optimization should take place as soon as possible and can be continued as needed. Reciprocal linking is fine as long as some caution is used. There are many sketchy services out there that use huge networks of gambling and pharmacy sites with no unique content. Always make sure that each incoming link can be interpreted by the search engines as a ‘vote’ by that site for yours. It is worthless and possibly dangerous if the site links out to link farms and Free-For-All sites (FFA’s). Writing articles with a link to your web site, getting people to post on forums and message boards, and advertising or getting links to drive targeted traffic to your site are great methods to use in improving your link popularity.

For the most part, you get what you pay for with Search Engine Optimization. A quick fix will rarely works, and if it seems too good to be true it probably is. Talk to the search engine optimization company about your concerns and make sure they understand your goals. Read their site and make sure they seem legitimate. Ask for results they’ve obtained for previous clients. Methods that not effective and have a chance to get a site banned include hiding text or links, participating in link farms, keyword stuffing, repeat search engine submissions, and copying web sites to multiple domains.

Proper SEO does not involve tricks. Web sites that have well written and well focused content, have been advertised in one way or another (including link popularity development), and overall are a good informational resource will get traffic from the search engines. Search engines are constantly updating ways to weed out the spamming and illegal SEO methods, so think long term with any search engine optimization campaign.

Sometimes a search engine optimization company will miss that glaring question posed by potential clients and assume the benefits of search engine optimization are obvious to everyone. While shelling out a couple thousand on an SEO campaign is common sense to some, others may find it hard to part with the cash unless they know it is an investment in their business that is sure to bring a good return.

Search engines account for a huge portion of traffic to web sites. Data varies depending on what sources you read, but the bottom line is that search engines are used millions of times each day by consumers searching for goods and services. And having your business displayed at the top of search results is essential if you want to do any business from the major search engines. Nine in every ten users will find what they’re looking for in the top 10 results and won’t go to page 2.

It’s obvious that people can make a lot of money from online sales, but how you advertise your products has a large bearing on what kind of profit you make. If you buy advertising space on Google AdWords or other services that charge per click, you may only shell out 10 cents for every visitor to your site - But what if it takes 100 clicks to make one sale? If your products only sell for $10 a piece, then there is no profit being made. Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns will also never stop costing you money. Search Engine Optimization, on the other hand, can be very affordable over months and years.

Many SEO and Internet Marketing companies will say that ongoing maintenance is needed to reach and keep top search engine rankings. While this is true, be careful how the company says they do it. There is an affordable way and then there’s a way to pad the pockets of the “experts.” For more on this issue, read my other article entitled “What Constitutes a Complete and Effective SEO Campaign?” In short, the affordable way will involve an intense content optimization followed by work to raise link popularity. This link popularity development should be the bulk of any ongoing maintenance. A couple times a year keyword research should be done again and the content should be looked at. Search trends can sometimes fluctuate so you want to make sure your content is still aimed at the right audience.

What is affordable and what isn’t varies greatly from company to company, industry to industry. In the bed and breakfast industry, $30 per month may be enough to keep a top 5 ranking on Google if the market is not very competitive. A web site competing for a top spot in a database administration field may be looking at several hundred a week if not more. The bottom line is, if you pick the right Search Engine Optimization company, your return on investment from an SEO campaign can be over 1000%.

While there are other ways to advertise a web site (No, search engine optimization is not the be-all and end-all of online advertising) very few can match the wide targeted audience and affordability that search engines provide.

KEI - Keyword Effectiveness Index. The value of a keyword or keyword phrase that helps a web site reach the #1 position in search engines by comparing how often the keyword or keyword phrase is used and comparing it to how many web sites are using that keyword or keyword phrase to market their site.

In part one of this article I discussed how you can thoroughly research and pick the right keywords for your web site. You can read part one of this web design SEO advice here. (http://www.theinternetpresence.com/business-article-26.htm) Part two of this article will show you how to take your list of keywords created from part one and narrow it down to the most effective keywords to use. Let’s start with the KEI rating of the keywords.

You can find many free KEI tools on the internet. I personally use one that was part of a $500 software package, but you can find many tools on the internet for free. My advice for this is to try a few of them out and stick with the tools that show generally the same results and toss the ones that don’t. Even with the software package I bought I still use wordtracker and overture to compare my results.

List your keywords in the first column of a table. (I use Microsoft Excel, but you can use anything that works.) In the second, third or more columns list the number of times that keyword was used per day or month. (I use one column for wordtracker, one column for overture, and one column for my software package.) Be suspicious of the keywords that don’t show the same results on all three and consider tossing them out. For example if one column says it searched 300 times per day, but the other two do not even show it being searched at all I would toss that keyword out. In the next column type in the KEI rating of that keyword. And in the next column, if you have a tool that allows it, enter how often the competition uses that keyword in a ‘competition’ column. Enter in the numbers for this data for all of the keywords listed in your table. Now we can start to narrow down the list.

Look at your keyword KEI ratings and compare them to each other. Toss out the keywords that have a low KEI rating. Next look over the list of keywords again and think to yourself, “Will someone that types that in want to visit my site?”. If not, toss out the keywords. Ask yourself, “Will someone who types in that keyword be likely to be profitable for me?”. If not, toss out those keywords as well. Look at how often your competition uses a keyword in your ‘competition’ column. If it has a good KEI rating and over 17,000,000 web sites are using it then it will be hard to get to #1. Consider tossing these keywords out also.

For example I concentrated on the search term, (web development contractor) which had a great KEI rating and was hardly used by competition. I tweaked my site for this keyword and now if you type in web development contractor into MSN you’ll find out that I hold the number one position. And have held it for over a month now. In addition if you type in (business presence on the web), or (Internet Presence) you’ll see me floating around the top 5 along with some other search terms. (Perhaps I should rename this article How I reached #1 in MSN) The search term (web design) had a good KEI rating, but the competition was over 17,000,000 web sites using that search term. Perhaps I’ll feel lucky and try for that one next.

I keep narrowing down my list until I have five of the best keywords to use for my web site. I take those 5 keywords and type them into the top 3 search engines and list the top 10 sites that show up with each keyword. So you will have a list of 50 sites per each search engine you used. To get a good general ranking in all of the search engines, I combine the 3 lists of 50 sites into one big list of 150 web sites for comparison. Alphabetize the list. Did you notice something? Some sites are listed three or more times! Toss out the sites that only show up once and this will narrow down your list of 150 considerably. Take the top five web sites that show up with the keyword you want and list them in another page. It is now time to pick apart there sites and discover why they are there!

Research the five sites using your keyword and compare them to each other. You have to research the site’s page that landed on the search engine for these factors:

• Is the keyword in the tag? If so, where is it placed, and how often.
• Is the keyword in the description tag? If so, where is it placed, and how often.
• Is the keyword in the keywords tag? If so, where is it placed, and how often.
• Is the keyword in the content of the site? If so, where is it placed, and how often.
• Is the keyword in the headings (H1-H6) of the page? If so, where is it placed, and how often.
• Is the keyword in the links of the page? If so, where is it placed, and how often.
• Is the keyword in the alt image attributes? If so, where is it placed, and how often.
  (alt image attributes are the words that pop up when you move a cursor over a picture)

If you want I can do this analysis for you. Just send me up to 3 keyword phrases and 2 web sites for comparison and for $25 you’ll get a much more detailed report on both sites. This will save you a lot of time! Keyword research usually runs about $240 to $360 if you have me do it.

Examine the five sites next to each other and concentrate on building your site on things that they have in common and do one number better than them. Ignore building your site in the areas that are not consistent between the five. You then should be getting good results when your site is indexed next. There are other ways to help increase the ranking of your web site like linking. Linking plays a very important role with Google, but there are a number of rules for linking to make it effective. That is a whole new article in itself.

This may seem to be a lot of work, but is well worth it. Some companies charge $1000 to $1500 per month for doing this service and what I typed into these two articles is 75% of what they do. I have my system tweaked now so that it takes me roughly 8 hours to do the keyword research and 2 or 3 days to optimize my site for it. You can do this too!

Be looking for more articles soon!

Copyright © Michael Rock
Web development contractor (Web Design and Hosting)
Internet Presence
www.TheInternetPresence.com

Introduction

This article assumes you already know what a ‘meta-tag keyword’ is and know a little about their importance to search engines. In this article I will attempt to explain the art of choosing the most appropriate and best performing keywords for your web pages.

As you should already know keywords contained within your websites’ meta tags are extremely important in allowing search engines to determine the content of your web pages. In order to make sure that these keywords are bringing your site up within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and driving visitors to your site, the most important factors in determining your keywords are:

• Relevance.
• Choosing keywords that people actually search for.
• Choosing keywords without too much competition.

Relevance

All your keywords should ALWAYS be relevant to the content within the page they describe. Adding keywords to your site just because they are commonly searched for words is not recommended. Not only will it frustrate visitors who are looking for other information, but it may well get your site black-listed from search engine rankings.

Highly relevant keywords will attract visitors who are actually interested in the products and services your website offers. At the end of the day, it is better to attract fewer visitors who actually have an interest in your website than it is to attract more visitors who leave immediately.

Choosing Keywords people search for

Although your keywords should all be relevant, sometimes it is best not to be too specific.

For example, I once discovered a new fossil (honest!), it was new to science so I named it, wrote a paper on it and had it published. I didn’t ever build a web page dedicated to it, but if I had the most used keyword and most relevant word would have been the fossils name (Trypanites fosteryeomani). You might therefore think that it would be sensible to use this as one of my most important keywords… However, that would (at least to start with) have been wrong. No one else has ever heard of this fossil, so it is very unlikely that anyone would ever type its name into a search engine. And sure enough, a quick check shows that during Dec 2004 there wasn’t a single search for this term within a particular, popular search engine.

I would therefore need to be more generic with my choice of keywords. The fossil itself was a trace fossil of a worm from the Jurassic, so keywords/phrases such as ‘fossil’, ‘trace fossil’ or ‘worm trace fossil’ may be more successful.

There are several tools available that allow you to check the number of times a particular word or phrase has been searched for. It is important to choose keywords that are regularly searched for and these tools can help in this decision. It is also worth including common mis-spellings of your most relevant keywords as your competitors may not have thought of this when choosing their keywords.

Choosing keywords without too much competition

The section above may lead you to believe that choosing very generic keywords is your best bet as they are often searched for. However, if you get too generic in your choice of keywords then you will be competing with many more websites for the top spots in the SERPS. If we go back to our fossil example we can see what I mean. A quick search in Google brings up the following numbers of results:

• Trypanites fosteryeomani – 1 result (something I once wrote in a forum!)
• Jurassic Worm Trace Fossil – 4,320 results
• Trace Fossil – 407,000 results
• Fossil – 9,120,000 results

As you would expect, the more generic we get, the more results we get. It can be seen then that choosing the best keywords is a matter of balancing the number of times the keywords are searched for against the number of other sites competing for rankings with those keywords. The best keywords will be those that are searched for often but have few competing sites (assuming the keywords are relevant to your content).

I find that it is best to have a balance between the generic and specific keywords relating to your web page and using key-phrases is a useful way of achieving this. In this way the entire key-phrase can be specific to your particular page, but the individual words within it are fairly generic.

e.g. Affordable Website Design Wales (4 generic keywords to create a specific key-phrase)

To Summarise, choosing keywords is an essential part of producing a successful website. Your keywords need to be highly relevant to the content of your page and specific enough to reduce competition. They also need to contain some generic keywords that are often searched for. As always, the single most important factor is relevancy and good content to go with the keywords.

Introduction

The Google Sandbox is a metaphorical term to explain why most new websites have very poor rankings in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Very few people know for sure if the ’sandbox’ actually exists, but it seems to be a filter added to the Google algorithms sometime around March 2004.

What is the function of the Google Sandbox?

The generally accepted principle behind the Google Sandbox is that it enables Google to filter out ‘Flash-in-the-Pan’ websites from those that offer good quality, up-to-date content. It is within Googles interest to ensure that the results it displays to its users within the SERPS lead to highly relevant, up-to-date, useful websites Relevancy is key to the search engines success so it will take all steps it can to ensure the relevancy of its search results. Filtering out new websites and monitoring them may allow them to provide more accurate results within the real SERPS.

Indentifying the Sandbox?

How do you know if your website in in the sandbox? Most new websites under newly registered domains will get relegated to the sandbox once Google knows about the site. Google will find the site by following an Inbound Link (IBL) from another site that the Googlebot crawls. You will then see the website in the normal Google SERPS if you search for the actual domain name, but the website is unlikely to be listed for any of its keywords. Google also won’t show signs of any other websites linking to your website, nor will it display pages related to yours. In addition Google won’t list any pages other than your Home (index) page.

If you track your websites visitor stats whilst it is in the Google Sandbox, you will see that the Googlebot comes crawling fairly regularly and that it does crawl, and therefore catalogue, all of your pages. Google does know that your pages exist and knows what they contain, but doesn’t list them in the main SERPS. In other words, because your website is new, it is under probation in the ’sandbox’.

How Long Will My website Stay in the Google Sandbox?

It is difficult to say how long a website will stay in the Google sandbox as this seems to depend on the types of keywords it will be completing for in the real SERPS It can be up to 6-8 months and the only way to get out of the sandbox is to wait.

The Google Sandbox isn’t all bad news. If your site contains good quality relevant material it will find its way out of the sandbox and will get the rankings it deserves in the Google SERPS. I even have some theories that may mean that your time in the sandbox can be used wisely to actually improve your final rankings.

You also shouldn’t forget that Google isn’t the only search engine out there. MSN is widely used and with the might of Microsoft behind it is likely to become a bigger player in the search engine world in the new future. At the time of writing, MSN or other search engines such as Yahoo! and Alta Vista don’t have a ’sandbox’ filter and your new websites will be listed in the quickly and should start driving traffic to your site.

Most effective search engine marketing strategies consider a few key aspects of search engine optimization.

1. The target market: It’s important to make certain that your key words target the market you wish to visit your site. Having an extremely high ranking on a certain key word that brings tons of visitors to your site, with very few sales (low conversion rate) is not effective search engine marketing. Make certain that you target your visitors.

For example, if you are selling antique brass buttons, that is a very specific item for a specific market. You could try to use the key word ‘buttons’ but you will get a much wider variation in the quality of your visitors. Someone searching on ‘button’ could be looking for nearly anything related to a button. Whereas, if you target your key phrase ‘antique brass buttons’ you may get fewer visitors, but they will be extremely targeted. Effective search engine marketing is all about targeting your market.

2. Keyword Effectiveness Index: Definition (courtesy of WebCEO) - The Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) compares the Daily World Searches with the number of competing Web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are good enough so you can use them while optimizing your site.

Keywords with the highest KEI combine attractive popularity and less competition. It means there are all chances you will get a high ranking, if you use these keywords for optimizations.

Basically, the KEI is based on the number of daily world searches and the number of competing sites. The higher the KEI of a key word/phrase, the better it’s use on your web site.

For example, the phrase ‘web design’ has over 35,000 daily world searches and over 17 million competing sites (stats courtesy of WebCEO). While ‘web design’ is clearly a great search term based on the number of people typing it into a search engine, the fact that there are already over 17 million competing sites using that key phrase make it a poor choice. It’s possible that some of those 17 million competing sites will dump ‘web design’ as a key phrase, which will increase the KEI in the future. That’s why effective search engine marketing involves monitoring and changing your site’s content and key phrases as necessary, to get your website ranking position as high as it can be!

3. Meta tags & web site content: Once you’ve chosen your key words/phrases, it’s time to add those to your site. The first place to add your key word is the title of your page. Many web sites choose to make the title of their page the name of their business, and that’s a poor search engine marketing strategy. The first meta tag that the spiders ’see’ is the title. It should contain your key word and omit any ’stop’ words, such as ‘and, or, the’ etc. These words are typically omitted from search engine results and should also be omitted from your meta tags.

Other meta tags you must consider are: classification, description and key word. *Google relies heavily on it’s own algorythm, which takes into account back links and the validity of the back links, as well, and optimization for that engine must take those links into consideration for effective search engine marketing.

There are other design ‘rules of thumb’ that should be considered, such as:

• Java script
• Alt tags
• Image names
• File and folder names
• Text descriptions

There are many more items to consider, but this should get you started thinking about search engine optimization for your business.

Contact Cimmeron Studios for more information about increasing your website ranking position and effective search engine marketing.

The first task most netizens do when they log on to the internet is to visit their favorite search engine to find information on various topics. Over the past few years the search engine has evolved to do more than list available websites on an entered subject. The modern day search engine has tools to help the user accomplish a vast array of everyday task.

Search engine is a common term to describe a tool used to find relevant webpages on an entered subject. But, there are actually two types of search engines, the indexers like Google and Alta Vista that actually search the internet based on keywords, and the directories like Yahoo and Exactseek which provides a list of sites based on predefined categories. These two types of search engines provide the bulk of searches requested by users.

These engines help the user find everything from small sites like RecoveryPets.Com, who specialize in the global recovery of lost pets, located at http://www.recoverypets.com, or larger sites like WebMD who provide medical information for patients and doctors, and their website is http://www.webmd.com. But, these are just the basic services that these engines provide, and the everyday web surfer relies on the more advance features to successfully navigate the web.

Directories such as Yahoo that offer services for every age group of surfer, from chat groups to their find people services aimed at helping the surfer locate people they have not been in contact with for awhile. They also provide discussion groups to relate ideas with others that may share the surfers interest, and mail free mail services so that everyone on the internet can have a email address.

Indexers like Google provides their uses with a vast array of tools also, and the most used of these is their groups section that enable others to share ideas on different subjects and topics. The newest of these services offered by this indexer is Froogle, which is an online merchant center that allows users to find various products listed within their service, and finally is their images that allow you to enter a search term and view only the images of the term entered.

These search engines are user friendly so that the most novice of internet users can successfully navigate the web, and the most savvy internet surfers can use their advance features to accomplish the task they set out to do. Even though these are the most known search engines, there are thousands of smaller engines that are user specific on everything from family to travel planning, it is up to you to support these engines so that they can continue bring us the services we use.

Although this is just a small listing of the services provided by search engines, and every engine is different, we suggest that a wide variety of engines be visited to find out the services they provide. As is evident the modern day search engine has evolved greatly from just a site listing service, and with time they will be able to bring searchers more services that aid the everyday netizen in the quest to navigate the internet more efficiently.