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How To Be Successful With Search Engine
Optimization In Seven Easy Steps!
by Jay Neuman
. Print Friendly Version
This article is an excerpt from: The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online
Search Engine Optimization is the most important thing you can do to bring
traffic to your website. In the “Search Before the Purchase” report of 2005,
DoubleClick and ComScore Networks found that roughly half of all online buyers
perform a related search before they make their purchase. If your website does
not show up in their search results, then you have missed the opportunity to
reach that customer. But how do you make sure your website gets listed? It
does not have to be a mystery. This article shows how to do it.
Search engines have programs called spiders that scour the Internet looking for
web pages to list in their search results. Search Engine Optimization is web-
speak for organizing content on your website so the spiders will find your web
pages and list them in the top search results. Professionals in the field usually
just call it SEO for short.
The secret to successful SEO is found in following these seven easy steps.
Step 1:
Make It Easy for Spiders to Find Your Site
The first step in getting listed by search engines is to make sure they find your
website to list it. Luckily, search engines help with this. They will allow you to
submit your website to them to be spidered. The easiest way to be found by a
search engine is to submit your site to them. Identify the search engines you
want to be listed on, go to their websites and find out their submission
requirements.
Submitting your website to search engines will get you listed. But, it can
sometimes take a long time. In addition to submitting your web pages to search
engines, it is also important to optimize your website so it is easy for search
engines to find it. There are really two things that search engines do that affect
them finding your site. First, you must have URLs that are easy for spiders to
read. This is discussed in the next section. Second, you should try to get your
website linked to from other popular websites. Since spiders find websites by
following links, they will find your site as they are crawling other sites.
Step 2:
Make It Easy for Spiders to “Crawl” Your Site
Once a spider finds your home page, it will follow the links on the page to other
pages on your site. Then it will evaluate each of those pages. This is called
crawling. An easy way to make sure the spiders crawl the pages you want listed
is to create a site map page linked to the home page. If this page contains links
to all the pages you want crawled, then each page is only two links away from
the home page.
In addition to having a site map of links that spiders can follow, it is also
important to have URLs that spiders can read. Many websites dynamically
generate URLs for some of their web pages that rely on information pulled from
a database. This is a very good idea for efficient website design, but it throws
up a roadblock for spiders trying to crawl your website. Spiders are designed to
read words and phrases. They often will completely ignore parameters that
appear in dynamically generated web pages. For large, dynamically generated
websites, this can be a complex issue. However, if you follow two simple rules,
you will be ahead of the game:
Step 3:
Optimize Keywords
People find what they are looking for on the Internet by entering keywords into
a search engine. The search engine finds your web page by matching those
keywords to words and phrases on your site. The next step to getting your web
pages listed is to learn what keywords people are most likely to use to find your
site. Then make sure those words and phrases are strategically placed in places
the search engines look. Optimizing keywords on your web pages is the heart of
search engine optimization.
There are three critical things you must do with your keywords, once you have
decided what they are:
1. Keyword Density
Keywords should appear more than once on your web page to get a high
ranking by the search engines. However, if they appear too often on the page,
the search engine will see it as a way to trick the search engine and will push the
page into a lower ranking. Search engines look at the amount of times the
keyword appears on your page as a percentage of total words on the page. This
is called keyword density.
2. Meta Tags
Each web page can contain a title, keywords and a page description. These are
placed in hidden locations on the web page called Meta Tags. They do not show
up on the page, but the search engine can see them. The Title, Description and
Keywords meta tags give web developers a way to categorize their own web
pages. So, this is the first place search engines look to determine what words
are most relevant to the page. The keywords that are most relevant to the web
page should appear in these meta tags.
Many people try to trick search engines by loading their meta tags with
keywords that are not directly related to the content of the page. As with
keyword density, putting too much into your meta tags will push your search
results listing down. Your search engine ranking may also be reduced by having
words in your meta tags that do not also appear in the body of the page.
The Title and sometimes the first few words in the Description will show up in the
search results listing. These two meta tags should be considered as advertising
copy. Care should be taken to provide wording that people will want to click on.
3. Position on Page
Third, search engines look for the location of words on the page to determine
how relevant they are to that page. The HTML code on your web page can
identify titles and subject headers. Keywords appearing in these are considered
important to the page. Also, keywords appearing closer to the top of the page
are considered more important than words appearing lower on the page.
By identifying which keywords you expect your target audience to be searching
for and then following these three guidelines, you will obtain high search result
rankings for your most important keywords.
Step 4:
Create Content Pages Optimized for Different Keywords
You may want your website to appear in the search results for many different
keywords. If you have an online store, you would probably want to appear for
all of your best selling products. If you offer a service to business clients, you
may want to appear in listings for all of the target industries you service. The
challenge is that you cannot optimize one web page to rank high for all of these
different keywords. The answer is to create content pages relevant to each of
these keywords. Then optimize these content pages to rank high for their
targeted keywords.
An online store could create buyer guides for each of their top product
categories. A business-to-business supplier could create custom pages tailored
to the needs of each target industry. Another common practice is to create an
area on your website for archived articles you have written. These pages will be
rich in keywords related to the topic at hand. If you further optimize these
pages for those keywords, search engines will direct traffic to them. Then,
design the layout of your article pages and other custom pages to draw people
from those pages into the main areas of your website.
Step 5:
Get Linked to from Other Sites
Getting other sites to place links to your site is another essential part of your
search engine strategy. Search engines look at the amount of times your
website is linked to from other sites when ranking your web page. In general,
the more links you have coming to your site the better it is for your ranking. If
your site is linked to from other high ranking sites, that will do even more for
your ranking.
When you are thinking about getting links from other sites, the basic rule is to
have content that users on other websites will find useful. Then, find those
websites where your content will make a contribution. Once you find those sites,
you will pursue getting both reciprocal links and one-way links.
1. Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links are links from websites that you also link to. This is a tit-for-tat
situation. When you have compiled your list of websites, look for websites that
have content you would like to link to from your website. Then place a link to
their website on your own site. After you have linked to them, then contact the
owner of the website directly and ask to have your link placed on their site. All
websites are in the same boat. They all need to be linked to in order to get
higher rankings. So most will be open to your request. There are also services
that specialize in helping you find reciprocal links.
2. One-Way Links
Reciprocal links are important. However, to get a high ranking, you must also
have one-way links. These are links from sites that you are not also linking to.
Search engines look for both types of link when determining their ranking. The
basic rule applies. Have web content that is worth being linked to. If you are
targeting your website to a niche audience, then create content that is especially
useful to that niche. Other sites serving the same niche will want to link to your
site. It helps them serve their customers. This process can take time, though.
As your site obtains higher search ranking, more sites will find you and want to
link to your content. But, of course, you need to get those links to get the
higher ranking. To get beyond this, you can look for websites that allow you to
submit content to them that will contain links back to your site.
A good way to get one-way links is to find websites that publish and archive
articles related to the content on your site. Once you find these, submit articles
to them. When they publish your article and store it in their archive, you will get
a link back to your site.
Also, look for websites that act as information clearinghouses, with links to other
sites. Find business directories that cater to your industry or niche issue. Then
submit your website to be listed by them. If you have created content that can
be offered as a free download, you can submit it to download sites. If you have
a blog on your website, submit it to be listed in blog directories.
It used to be a common technique to try and trick search engines by creating a
variety of websites, then having them all link to each other. This is called
crosslinking. As with most ways people have tried to trick search engines, this
one has been found out also. Crosslinking is not prohibited by search engines.
It is only natural for a family of websites to link to each other. However, too
much crosslinking will be noticed and hurt your ranking.
Step 6:
Create a Robots.txt File
The main reason for search engine optimization is, of course, to get search
engines to find and list your web pages. However, there are often pages that
you do not want them to find. You may have an area of your website for
customers, that you do not want the general public going to. You may have
pages that simply serve as redirect pages which record click stream information
on the way to other content pages. Some websites have pages that run
interactive software which do not work with automated robots. There are many
reasons why you may not want a particular page listed.
Well, the search engines do not want to go to these pages either. They would
like for you to tell them which pages they can skip. You can do this by creating
a small text file called the robots.txt file. This file sits at the root directory of
your website. It is the first thing search engines look for when they arrive at
your website. The robots.txt file contains instructions to search engines on
which pages to skip over.
Some search engines will not spider a website if a robots.txt file is not present.
You should create one even if there are no pages to exclude. Search engines
will see the blank file and proceed to spider all of your web pages.
Step 7:
Monitor and Improve
Getting your website to show up in search results does not need to be a
mystery. By following these seven steps, your web pages will appear in your
customers’ search results. It is an iterative process. Your first pass at it may
not yield the results you were hoping for. Keep at it. Think of these seven steps
as seven levers you keep adjusting until you find the right balance. When you
find that balance, your site will consistently appear in the first page of search
results for relevant keywords. Then, keep tracking your results. Things will
change over time. SEO is a process you should expect to repeat periodically. It
is a relatively small investment in time that will yield big results.
Each search engine has things it looks for when finding and ranking web pages.
Things like the format of your URLs or the optimal keyword density vary from
engine to engine. Research what the search engines you want to be listed on
are looking for. Optimize your site for those search engines. This changes over
time, so you must repeat this exercise periodically.
==========================
This article is an excerpt from The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online by Jay Neuman.
Since 1994, Jay Neuman has been helping businesses as varied as Fortune 500
companies, startup Dot-Coms and nonprofit organizations overcome their
Internet Marketing and Database Marketing challenges. Jay is currently Sole
Proprietor of the KnExT Consulting Group. - www.knextconsulting.com.
He can be reached at jay.neuman@knextconsulting.com
Optimization In Seven Easy Steps!
by Jay Neuman
. Print Friendly Version
This article is an excerpt from: The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online
Search Engine Optimization is the most important thing you can do to bring
traffic to your website. In the “Search Before the Purchase” report of 2005,
DoubleClick and ComScore Networks found that roughly half of all online buyers
perform a related search before they make their purchase. If your website does
not show up in their search results, then you have missed the opportunity to
reach that customer. But how do you make sure your website gets listed? It
does not have to be a mystery. This article shows how to do it.
Search engines have programs called spiders that scour the Internet looking for
web pages to list in their search results. Search Engine Optimization is web-
speak for organizing content on your website so the spiders will find your web
pages and list them in the top search results. Professionals in the field usually
just call it SEO for short.
The secret to successful SEO is found in following these seven easy steps.
Step 1:
Make It Easy for Spiders to Find Your Site
The first step in getting listed by search engines is to make sure they find your
website to list it. Luckily, search engines help with this. They will allow you to
submit your website to them to be spidered. The easiest way to be found by a
search engine is to submit your site to them. Identify the search engines you
want to be listed on, go to their websites and find out their submission
requirements.
Submitting your website to search engines will get you listed. But, it can
sometimes take a long time. In addition to submitting your web pages to search
engines, it is also important to optimize your website so it is easy for search
engines to find it. There are really two things that search engines do that affect
them finding your site. First, you must have URLs that are easy for spiders to
read. This is discussed in the next section. Second, you should try to get your
website linked to from other popular websites. Since spiders find websites by
following links, they will find your site as they are crawling other sites.
Step 2:
Make It Easy for Spiders to “Crawl” Your Site
Once a spider finds your home page, it will follow the links on the page to other
pages on your site. Then it will evaluate each of those pages. This is called
crawling. An easy way to make sure the spiders crawl the pages you want listed
is to create a site map page linked to the home page. If this page contains links
to all the pages you want crawled, then each page is only two links away from
the home page.
In addition to having a site map of links that spiders can follow, it is also
important to have URLs that spiders can read. Many websites dynamically
generate URLs for some of their web pages that rely on information pulled from
a database. This is a very good idea for efficient website design, but it throws
up a roadblock for spiders trying to crawl your website. Spiders are designed to
read words and phrases. They often will completely ignore parameters that
appear in dynamically generated web pages. For large, dynamically generated
websites, this can be a complex issue. However, if you follow two simple rules,
you will be ahead of the game:
 | A fixed path is easy to read. Dynamically generated URLs with | |
| parameters are hard for search engines to read. | ||
| English words are easy to read. Numbers and alphanumeric codes are | |
| hard for search engines to read. |
Step 3:
Optimize Keywords
People find what they are looking for on the Internet by entering keywords into
a search engine. The search engine finds your web page by matching those
keywords to words and phrases on your site. The next step to getting your web
pages listed is to learn what keywords people are most likely to use to find your
site. Then make sure those words and phrases are strategically placed in places
the search engines look. Optimizing keywords on your web pages is the heart of
search engine optimization.
There are three critical things you must do with your keywords, once you have
decided what they are:
1. Keyword Density
Keywords should appear more than once on your web page to get a high
ranking by the search engines. However, if they appear too often on the page,
the search engine will see it as a way to trick the search engine and will push the
page into a lower ranking. Search engines look at the amount of times the
keyword appears on your page as a percentage of total words on the page. This
is called keyword density.
2. Meta Tags
Each web page can contain a title, keywords and a page description. These are
placed in hidden locations on the web page called Meta Tags. They do not show
up on the page, but the search engine can see them. The Title, Description and
Keywords meta tags give web developers a way to categorize their own web
pages. So, this is the first place search engines look to determine what words
are most relevant to the page. The keywords that are most relevant to the web
page should appear in these meta tags.
Many people try to trick search engines by loading their meta tags with
keywords that are not directly related to the content of the page. As with
keyword density, putting too much into your meta tags will push your search
results listing down. Your search engine ranking may also be reduced by having
words in your meta tags that do not also appear in the body of the page.
The Title and sometimes the first few words in the Description will show up in the
search results listing. These two meta tags should be considered as advertising
copy. Care should be taken to provide wording that people will want to click on.
3. Position on Page
Third, search engines look for the location of words on the page to determine
how relevant they are to that page. The HTML code on your web page can
identify titles and subject headers. Keywords appearing in these are considered
important to the page. Also, keywords appearing closer to the top of the page
are considered more important than words appearing lower on the page.
By identifying which keywords you expect your target audience to be searching
for and then following these three guidelines, you will obtain high search result
rankings for your most important keywords.
Step 4:
Create Content Pages Optimized for Different Keywords
You may want your website to appear in the search results for many different
keywords. If you have an online store, you would probably want to appear for
all of your best selling products. If you offer a service to business clients, you
may want to appear in listings for all of the target industries you service. The
challenge is that you cannot optimize one web page to rank high for all of these
different keywords. The answer is to create content pages relevant to each of
these keywords. Then optimize these content pages to rank high for their
targeted keywords.
An online store could create buyer guides for each of their top product
categories. A business-to-business supplier could create custom pages tailored
to the needs of each target industry. Another common practice is to create an
area on your website for archived articles you have written. These pages will be
rich in keywords related to the topic at hand. If you further optimize these
pages for those keywords, search engines will direct traffic to them. Then,
design the layout of your article pages and other custom pages to draw people
from those pages into the main areas of your website.
Step 5:
Get Linked to from Other Sites
Getting other sites to place links to your site is another essential part of your
search engine strategy. Search engines look at the amount of times your
website is linked to from other sites when ranking your web page. In general,
the more links you have coming to your site the better it is for your ranking. If
your site is linked to from other high ranking sites, that will do even more for
your ranking.
When you are thinking about getting links from other sites, the basic rule is to
have content that users on other websites will find useful. Then, find those
websites where your content will make a contribution. Once you find those sites,
you will pursue getting both reciprocal links and one-way links.
1. Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links are links from websites that you also link to. This is a tit-for-tat
situation. When you have compiled your list of websites, look for websites that
have content you would like to link to from your website. Then place a link to
their website on your own site. After you have linked to them, then contact the
owner of the website directly and ask to have your link placed on their site. All
websites are in the same boat. They all need to be linked to in order to get
higher rankings. So most will be open to your request. There are also services
that specialize in helping you find reciprocal links.
2. One-Way Links
Reciprocal links are important. However, to get a high ranking, you must also
have one-way links. These are links from sites that you are not also linking to.
Search engines look for both types of link when determining their ranking. The
basic rule applies. Have web content that is worth being linked to. If you are
targeting your website to a niche audience, then create content that is especially
useful to that niche. Other sites serving the same niche will want to link to your
site. It helps them serve their customers. This process can take time, though.
As your site obtains higher search ranking, more sites will find you and want to
link to your content. But, of course, you need to get those links to get the
higher ranking. To get beyond this, you can look for websites that allow you to
submit content to them that will contain links back to your site.
A good way to get one-way links is to find websites that publish and archive
articles related to the content on your site. Once you find these, submit articles
to them. When they publish your article and store it in their archive, you will get
a link back to your site.
Also, look for websites that act as information clearinghouses, with links to other
sites. Find business directories that cater to your industry or niche issue. Then
submit your website to be listed by them. If you have created content that can
be offered as a free download, you can submit it to download sites. If you have
a blog on your website, submit it to be listed in blog directories.
It used to be a common technique to try and trick search engines by creating a
variety of websites, then having them all link to each other. This is called
crosslinking. As with most ways people have tried to trick search engines, this
one has been found out also. Crosslinking is not prohibited by search engines.
It is only natural for a family of websites to link to each other. However, too
much crosslinking will be noticed and hurt your ranking.
Step 6:
Create a Robots.txt File
The main reason for search engine optimization is, of course, to get search
engines to find and list your web pages. However, there are often pages that
you do not want them to find. You may have an area of your website for
customers, that you do not want the general public going to. You may have
pages that simply serve as redirect pages which record click stream information
on the way to other content pages. Some websites have pages that run
interactive software which do not work with automated robots. There are many
reasons why you may not want a particular page listed.
Well, the search engines do not want to go to these pages either. They would
like for you to tell them which pages they can skip. You can do this by creating
a small text file called the robots.txt file. This file sits at the root directory of
your website. It is the first thing search engines look for when they arrive at
your website. The robots.txt file contains instructions to search engines on
which pages to skip over.
Some search engines will not spider a website if a robots.txt file is not present.
You should create one even if there are no pages to exclude. Search engines
will see the blank file and proceed to spider all of your web pages.
Step 7:
Monitor and Improve
Getting your website to show up in search results does not need to be a
mystery. By following these seven steps, your web pages will appear in your
customers’ search results. It is an iterative process. Your first pass at it may
not yield the results you were hoping for. Keep at it. Think of these seven steps
as seven levers you keep adjusting until you find the right balance. When you
find that balance, your site will consistently appear in the first page of search
results for relevant keywords. Then, keep tracking your results. Things will
change over time. SEO is a process you should expect to repeat periodically. It
is a relatively small investment in time that will yield big results.
Each search engine has things it looks for when finding and ranking web pages.
Things like the format of your URLs or the optimal keyword density vary from
engine to engine. Research what the search engines you want to be listed on
are looking for. Optimize your site for those search engines. This changes over
time, so you must repeat this exercise periodically.
==========================
This article is an excerpt from The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online by Jay Neuman.
Since 1994, Jay Neuman has been helping businesses as varied as Fortune 500
companies, startup Dot-Coms and nonprofit organizations overcome their
Internet Marketing and Database Marketing challenges. Jay is currently Sole
Proprietor of the KnExT Consulting Group. - www.knextconsulting.com.
He can be reached at jay.neuman@knextconsulting.com
The Complete
Internet Marketer
Internet Marketer
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