Crash Course In Search Engine Optimization

Author: Alyice Edrich

Are you tired of not being able to find your website when searching for your product or service online? Do you wish there was an easier way to get ranked high in the search engines?

It doesn’t have to be as difficult as many search engine optimization companies make it out to be. The key is to do it right from the start...

Start with your website.

Getting placed in the top page of the search engines does no good if you don't have strong enough web copy, or a user-friendly web design to keep them there!

The Internet is so vast, that people actually get information overload. That means you only have a few seconds to make a good impression... to pull them in.

So before you decide to optimize your website for the search engines, here are a few things you want to stay away from./

Gateway (or doorway) pages. They don’t have anything valuable to offer search engines.
Frames. They are not search engine friendly.
Flash websites. They can't be read or indexed by the search engines.
Slow loading pages. They force visitors to leave your website.
All graphic sites. There's not enough content to keep visitors on the page.
Poor navigation. It makes it difficult for visitors to find what they're looking for.
Poorly written web copy. It makes it hard to read, or stay on, the web page.
Broken links. Makes search engines want to stop crawling your website.
Improper link formatting. Avoid creating links using symbols or characters like these: "?," "%," and "&".

Use keywords to create web extensions.

Make sure the name you give your web page is your most important keyword.

If you wrote an article on the importance of domain names, for instance, your web page name would be "domainnames". That way, when someone typed the page name into the search engines, it would be easy to remember, like http://yourdomain.com/domainnames.html

While there is no proven fact that this technique helps with your search engine rankings, it does give your audience a little information, and incentive, to click on the link.

Write content that includes important keywords.

When considering topics to write about, or include in your website, think about words and phrases that would attract your target audience. Avoid writing on topics that have nothing to do with your business, product, or service.

When you have a better understanding of your target audience, and their needs, it makes it easier to write content that interests then; therefore, before you choose your keywords, or keyword phrases, ask yourself the following questions:

What words do you think best describe your product or service?
What do your employees think best describe your product or service?
What words do your customers use to locate you? You can find this out by simply asking your customers, conducting a poll or survey, or by using your stat counter.

Put yourself in your client or customer's shoes. What problem is he/she trying to solve? What keyword phrases might he/she search for when looking for your service or product to solve his/her problem? Not sure? Ask how he/she found you. Do a search yourself—as if you were the customer or client.
What keyword phrases do your competition use and how successful are they with those words?

Visit top ranking websites then right click anywhere on their website and click on "view source." This will allow you to read that company’s html coding. By reading the code, you will be able to see which keywords, or keyword phrases, were placed in their meta tags.

Don't copy their keyword phrases word for word, but see what they are using and then determine if any of those keywords, or phrases, can work on your own web page.
What words or phrases do the keyword suggestion tools suggest you use?

Don't just pick the top ranking keyword or keyword phrase. If it's too general, you won't get the hits you want or draw in the right target audience. Instead, look for the highest ranking "targeted" keyword or phrase.

The idea is to find your most important keywords or keyword phrases, and write your content around them. Or you could write your content, then once you've finished, go back and strategically insert your keyword phrase(s).

Avoid hiding words from the search engines.

You don’t want to fill each and every web page with useless, or hidden words, because this will count against you when a search engine crawls your website and ranks it for their search engine results page.

Instead, you want to use your keywords, or phrases, to add value to your content.

Keep important keywords at the top of the web page.

Use your keywords, or phrases, in your headline and in the first paragraph. Then sprinkle them throughout the rest of the content, making sure not to stuff the content with so many of these words that it becomes difficult to read.

By targeting your keywords, or phrases, you will have a smaller "unique visitor" base, but you will have a much better rate of return on your time, money, and investment!

Keep an eye on keyword density.

You need just the right amount of keywords to make the search engines realize that keyword phrase is important to your content. Too many and the search engines think you are cramming your site and will penalize you. Too little and the search engines think the word is not important enough.

Keep the keyword density (weight) under an 8% ratio in comparison to the rest of the text on that page. In other words, repeating important keywords can be very helpful, but you want to limit the use of those words to say… once per every 100 words.

Limit the number of words per page.

When possible, keep your web pages between 250 and 750 words.

Link to internal pages.

Make sure your internal pages are strategically linked with search engine optimized terms throughout your website.

If you wrote an article on writing a press releases, for instance. And in a later article you mention press releases as a vital part of marketing, link the phrase "press release" to your article on press releases. (This is also known as on-topic cross linking.)

Create a site map.

It is extremely important that you have all your web pages linked to each other in some format. The easiest way to do this is with a site map. This helps search engines crawl your website, and gives visitors another way to find content on your website.

Another thing to point out here is that without a proper map of your website, you will find it difficult to download your website from your host’s server should your computer crash and you lose the copy you were working on.

(Take a look at Apple's site map, by clicking here.)

Create sufficient meta tags.

In the meta tag section of your web page, you want to start with your title tags, then your description tags, and finally end with your keyword tags.

Title Tags:

Start off with the most important keyword phrase for that web page.
Make sure the content in your tag relates to the visible content on your web page.
Avoid using your company name, author's name, or site name in your title tag.
Keep your character count to 115 characters or 10 words or less.

Description Tags:

Give an accurate description of what your web page is about. Think of this as the elevator pitch. It may be just the wording needed to draw searchers into your website.
Use your highest ranking keyword phrase for that page somewhere in your description tag!
Keep your character count to 150 characters or less.

Keyword tags:

Many of the more popular search engines ignore the keyword tags these days (mostly because of spam abuse), but you never know when they might bring it back so continue. coding of your website with keywords.
When placing keywords, or keyword phrases, in your keyword meta tag, separate with commas.
Stay away from stop words that tend to use space and do nothing when someone is searching for information.

Stop words are the most common words in the English vocabulary, such as "a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, I, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, we, what, when, where, which, with, etc. "
Keep keyword relevant to the web page.

Don’t use keywords or phrases that have nothing to do with the content of your web page. If you put bogus keyword phrases in your tags, search engines may ban you from being placed on their servers.
If your keyword phrases often get misspelled and that misspelled word gets a lot of search engine traffic, use it in your keyword meta tag and the body of your text.

If you use that misspelling in your content, put an * next to that word and explain why you used it at the bottom of the page. Or make a game out of it. Put an * next to the word. Then link that word to a new page that says, "We see you found our misspelled word. Email us today with the page your found our word on and the word, and we'll enter you into a drawing for __________."
Use different keywords or phrases for each web page.

If you have a party site, for instance, you'll have a different set of keywords for a page on back to school parties than you would for a page on Halloween parties.

Get other websites to link to your website.

Creating link popularity can help your website move up the search engine results page, so take the time to build relationships with other website owners and get linked!

This is especially important when you first build your website as many search engines only crawl a site once every three to six months. Getting linked on another website, could help your new website get indexed faster; especially if you're being linked to from an "authoritative" website.

You can build link popularity by guest posting on other websites and blogs. Just write an article based on that site's target audience, then request a generous byline with an active, clickable link back to your website.

Once thing to keep in mind here is that while you can add those same articles to your own website, they should not make up the bulk of your website's content. That's because search engines are cracking down on similar, or same content, web pages; and you won't you’re your main site to be penalized just because another site is more popular than yours.

Submit your website to the search engines.

While search engines can find your site by crawling another website that has a link to your site, you can also get a jumpstart on the process by manually submitting your website to search engines.

Start with the major search engines, like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, and Ask Jeeves. You can avoid off-the wall or unknown search engines because they won't drive enough traffic to your website to constitute the use of your time or money. The major search engines are the most important to get listed in!

Then go to submit your website to directories like Dmoz.

Keep your site up-to-date.

Since keywords that work now don't always work months from now, it's important to stay on top of things; especially when it comes to your sales pages.

Optimizing your own website for the search engines is very time consuming. It's a lot of trial and error. And it's a lot of rewriting, rewording, and tweaking of your content and meta tags.

But in the end, when you finally see that your website has made it to the top ten in the search engines, like Google and Yahoo, you will be so very proud of yourself! So hang in there…

When all else fails, hire outside help.

If you find search engine optimization too daunting or time consuming, hire a search engine optimization consultant, but watch out for wolves in sheep's clothing.

Good SEO consultants do not solicit clients by sending unsolicited emails that make false claims or intimidate business owners into believing they are losing valuable business or their SEO efforts reek of failure… they're too busy for that.

Their seo business grows by word of mouth, networking, article submissions, and ad placements; not by:

bashing the website owner, web designer, or current SEO consultant in hopes of showing how much smarter they are;
claiming a 100% guarantee on top search engine placement;
stating their current number one search engine position is not good enough because the keyword used for high ranking is not the best choice or lousy;
claiming no commas in the keyword tag is preventing high rankings;
claiming to have visited site in search of a product to purchase, but just so happened to peek at the site's HTML coding and found blah blah blah;
claiming the keyword tags carry the most weight, not the content on the pages themselves;
promising to "spam" the search engines every 48 hours or month with your web site url;
or other scare tactics.

If you don't have the time or desire to optimize your website yourself, really research the company you plan to use.

Make sure that search engine optimization company knows its stuff.

Check out past and present clients.
Ask how satisfied those clients were in the beginning and how satisfied they are now.
Get Google's toolbar and check out the ranking of those companies and their clients, yourself.
Use Overture, or Word Tracker to see how high the keywords given you, or the ones you would use when searching for those companies rank in the search engine results pages.

To tell if your SEO efforts are working, look at your stats logs:

How many unique visitors do you have?
How many come from search engines?
How many come from other sites or direct clicks?
How many visitors turn into sales or subscribers?

It's one thing to have a lot of traffic and another to have "quality" traffic. You don't want looky-lous who never buy or use your service or product, you want qualified leads and search engine optimization can help you get those leads.