10 Basic Search Engine Preparation Tips

10 Basic Search Engine Preparation Tips
by James T. Faasse


While many people think it is enough to have web site to earn
hundreds or thousands of dollars within a few weeks, it is
much harder in reality to get people to your web site and then
it is another thing to get them to buy something from you.

But that's a different story. Let's concentrate on the first aspect:
Getting traffic and especially getting targeted traffic. You don't
want to have cat lovers on your site when you are selling dog
food, do you ?

How do you get targeted prospects ? First of all, you must know
your potential customers. Who are they ? What are they looking
for ? So the first thing , even before you have built your web
site, is to know which keywords your prospects would search for.

It is not as hard as you might think. But if you have a general
topic like I have myself with Internet Marketing, it might be a
much better idea to concentrate just on one aspect of Internet
Marketing.

My friend, you ask why ? Did you ever perform a search on
AltaVista for the term 'Internet Marketing'? Yes ? Then you will
certainly know that there about 6 million web sites competing for
the top position on 'Internet Marketing'.

It is very hard, if not impossible to reach a rank in the top 10 or
even the top 30 for such a general term. But if you concentrate
on, let me say autoresponders, then there are a lot less pages
that deal with that topic.


1.) Choosing your domain name

This means, when you order your domain name, be sure to include
your keywords in your domain name. To take the example just
mentioned above: If you're selling dog food, don't take a domain
like www.petshop.com .

Because then people could think that you are selling cat food,
bird food etc. , too. You want to target your potential customers,
so your domainname would be rather something like :
www.dogfood.com or similar.


So now you've designed your pages. What comes next ?

2.) Frames/no-frames

Web pages which use frames have one big disadvantage: Some
search engines are not able to index them correctly. They cannot
follow the links that are included on these pages and that means
that they won't be able to show the results of your pages.

If you want to be on the safe side, create your web pages without
using frames. There are some tricks to enable a correct indexing
but this would lead too far for this time.

3.) The title of your homepage

It almost goes without saying that your title should have your
keywords included as well. You should choose a title that includes
your four most important keywords. If you have a site where people can learn how to write ads, you could give your page a title that has the word ads in it plus some of your other keywords.

Example : 'Writing ads: How to write ads that sell your products
like crazy.' You have repeated your most important keyword 'ads' and you have used other keywords like 'writing', 'write' and 'sell'.

4.) Meta tag : description

Meta tags are additional pieces of information which are placed
within the HTML - code. Your description reflects the most
important part of your homepage since this is the description
that is shown when someone searches for your site on a search
engine.

You should clearly state the benefits of visiting your site. It
should be a like a little ad for your site. You should include your
keywords once again but not more than twice. I'll give you an
example of my own site and then it looks like this :

META content='Writing Headlines : No Success With Your Advertisements ? Discover The Little-Known Secrets Of Writing'Killer'-Headlines !' name=description


5.) Meta tag : keywords

The Meta tag keywords should be used to put in all your
keywords that are relevant for your site . It is crucial to put
your 4 most important keywords at the beginning. You can
include 15 further keywords and even more.

Example :
META content='headlines, advertisements, ads, copywriting,writing winning sales letters, prospects, online, web, internet,marketing, campaign, writer, marketer, promotion, copywriter,top-seller' name=keywords

6.) Meta tag : robots

You create a little robots.txt to let the search engine know
which links it should follow. If you want to exclude certain
directories, you can use special commands which forbid the
search engine spiders to follow a complete path.

This can be necessary e.g. to avoid that the search engines link
to your download page where you have the articles you want
to sell. An example can be found below :

# robots.txt for http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/
# file created: 16.08.01

User-agent: *
# Disallow: /cgi/ # exclude robots from specified tree
# Disallow: /scripts/

# file modified: 16.08.01

7.) Keyword density

Your main keyword should be mentioned within the first 8 words
of your body text and can be mentioned 3 times more. The other
keywords should not be forgotten, too. Try to use them at least
3 times in your text.

8.) Alt-tags for your images

Alt-tags are alternative descriptions for your pictures. If you
move your mouse-cursor over your pictures, you can see this
alternative text. This text is also shown if a picture is not
loaded correctly. Use your keywords to describe your pictures.

9.) No tricks like white text on white background !

Some people consider themselves to be very smart and they
want to outwit the search engines by putting a lot of their
keywords with a font in the background colour on their
pages to make it more relevant to the engines.

But times have changed : The search engines recognize these
tricks and as a result your pages are banned from their index.
Try just to do what is necessary but don't use tricks, it won't
do you no good.

10.) Link-Popularity

Many search engines like AltaVista have a new ranking
concept which includes link-popularity. This means, the
more pages have a link to your site, the better your site
gets ranked.

Some of them have also made special deals with pay-
per-click search engines. Those sites which rank on the top 3
will also get a high rank at 'normal' search engines.