The Dos and Donts of Content Optimization
In a quite informative session at the Search Engine Strategies Conference, Heather Lloyd-Martin, director of search strategies for WebSourced Inc., and Jill Whalen, owner of HighRankings.com, dealt with one of the most fundamental, but perhaps most important aspect of the search engine industry: producing web copy that it is appealing to your target audience while at the same time being search engine friendly.
WebProNews' Chris Richardson was in attendance, and will be all week, funneling the most up-to-date information to us as the conference progresses.
Effectively writing optimized copy is no easy task, but Jill and Heather assured the audience that it gets easier with practice.
While the goal, as Bob Bly put it, is "creating copy that makes the argument so convincingly the customer can't help but want to buy the product being advertised," the argument many raise is that it’s easier said than done. After all, that’s what we all want to accomplish, right?
Though it’s fairly obvious, it still needs to be said that the first step to creating such compelling content is to delve into the mind of the audience and understand what these eyeballs are searching for.
Point of fact: good copy equals conversions. And by Jill’s estimation good optimized copy with the right balance of keyword content is 1/3 of SEO.
It’s tricky to know where to place and how to place your targeted keywords, so based on Jill and Heather’s presentation, we’ve put together this handy Dos and Don’ts list for effective content optimization.
DOs
DO create a page title that is intriguing and eye catching. This is the window to your shop. Compelling titles entice potential customers to choose your site over others. The higher number of clicks will pull weight the search engines as well, giving your site more relevance. Think of your webpage titles as headlines and, as a guideline, limit your title to 50-75 characters (with spaces).
DO limit your keyword usage to 2 or 3 keywords per page. Otherwise, you could get tagged for keyword spamming. Instead of the same keyword, think of variations. Be creative with keyword choices. Brainstorm all variations of the words by adding “-ing” “-ed,” and any other prefix or suffix combination. Also look for synonyms and include those in your copy (dining, eatery). Even multiple spellings and misspellings can help (web cam, webcam, behavior, behaviour).
DO include the main keyphrase you are targeting on every page, with exception to the index (although the index CAN include a keyword and company name with brief description).
DO emphasize (bold) text to boost keyword positioning with search engines.
Do use keyphrases in hyperlinks—think of it as a persuasion benefit, like pushing a user to take action.
DO a description tag. This is important regardless of search engine weight, although search engines can give credence to well-written ones. A good description is equivalent to a good sales pitch to the reader.
DO use the 80/20 rule when choosing which page to optimize. Optimize first the pages that cover the most important 20% of your products (i.e., top products, or best-selling items). Optimize the remaining 80% incrementally.
DO keep an eye on competitors and how they rank for the same keywords.
DO create supplemental content like FAQ pages, how-to pages, related product articles, manufacturer info pages, and blogs.
DO think like a reporter, asking the five W questions (who, what, when, where, why).
DO highlight your location. This is especially recommended if you are a location sensitive business.
DONTs
DON’T go over 250 words per page.
DON’T wait to implement copy changes for expected seasonal sales. Give yourself a 6-month window when optimizing seasonal content to give the engines time to adjust to your alterations.
DON’T insert keywords into copyrighted material. Look for creative ways to place keywords around these items.
DON’T forget your audience and what they are looking for. This can’t be stressed enough.
DON’T forget title tags.
DON’T rely on graphics. Text is much more important as spiders don’t read graphics, they read actual text. Image alt text is not that effective and be aware that WYSIWYGs can turn pages into graphics. Use flash in small doses as it is also not readable by engines. Other things not readable: comment tags and graphic headlines. PDFs, however, are indexable.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
The Dos and Donts of Content Optimization
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Friday, April 15, 2005
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.
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.
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Increase Your Page Rank Through SEO
Increase Your Page Rank Through SEO
by James T. Faasse
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must be considered a process and over time you can build your ranking and traffic.
Remember, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
This article provides 10 SEO tips that will build your search engine rank.
1. Title
The Title is (usually) the hyperlink provided in the search results so make sure it’s people friendly. Put the most important keyword first, followed by the 2nd…If you need to have your Company name there (branding), put it at the end.
2. Meta descriptions
Use the keywords once or twice in your Meta description. It can be the text that shows up in the description area of the search engine results.
3. H Tags (and proper use)
Have your keywords in an H1 tag at the top of your page embedded in a good description. Not only will it help your rankings but many times the search engines will actually display it in their results.
4. Keyword positioning (on the page)
Have your main keywords high up in the page (the higher the better). The most valuable real estate on a web page is top left corner – people (& engines) read left to right starting from the top.
5. Number and Quality of inbound links
Each link from another web site acts like a vote of confidence – A link implies that the site believes your site has value.
However, all links are not equal. You must get links from sites that have a similar theme to yours ONLY! Anything else may actually hurt your page rank.
6. Linking Text/Description
When building a link campaign, make sure to use keywords in the link. For example, a link with “click here” doesn’t help you with search engines. A link such as “Internet Marketing” is much more effective (if that’s your keyword).
Also, don’t forget to use keywords in your linking description as well.
For the most thorough ebook on developing a strong linking campaign read Jack Humphrey’s “Power Linking 2: Evolution!” (http://www.money-teacher.com/PL2.htm)
7. Content is “King”
Not only is quality content what people are looking for, but content is also what the search engines are looking for. Content is basically “food” for the search engines.
IMPORTANT: DO NOT try to “trick” search engines with useless content. Not only won’t this work, but it will bother potential customers. Also, while you want to mention your keyword, DO NOT “keyword stuff”. A too high word density will penalize you – make it natural.
8. File size
Keep file size as small as possible. It will make for faster loading pages, happier visitors and the search engines like them.
9. Bold & Italic
It’s good practice to highlight your keywords in your copy a few times, but don’t overdo it.
10. Alt tags in image links
Search engines can read text but they can’t see a pictures. Putting in Alt text for a graphic tells the search engine what it is about and also helps people who have their graphics turned off. Make sure to put your keywords in your Alt tags.
Here is an example: < IMG SRC=”graphic1.jpg ALT=”text/keywords go here” >
Once your site is optimized for the search engines, you can then start submitting your site. Practice these tips and over time you will see your search engine rank increase.
by James T. Faasse
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must be considered a process and over time you can build your ranking and traffic.
Remember, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
This article provides 10 SEO tips that will build your search engine rank.
1. Title
The Title is (usually) the hyperlink provided in the search results so make sure it’s people friendly. Put the most important keyword first, followed by the 2nd…If you need to have your Company name there (branding), put it at the end.
2. Meta descriptions
Use the keywords once or twice in your Meta description. It can be the text that shows up in the description area of the search engine results.
3. H Tags (and proper use)
Have your keywords in an H1 tag at the top of your page embedded in a good description. Not only will it help your rankings but many times the search engines will actually display it in their results.
4. Keyword positioning (on the page)
Have your main keywords high up in the page (the higher the better). The most valuable real estate on a web page is top left corner – people (& engines) read left to right starting from the top.
5. Number and Quality of inbound links
Each link from another web site acts like a vote of confidence – A link implies that the site believes your site has value.
However, all links are not equal. You must get links from sites that have a similar theme to yours ONLY! Anything else may actually hurt your page rank.
6. Linking Text/Description
When building a link campaign, make sure to use keywords in the link. For example, a link with “click here” doesn’t help you with search engines. A link such as “Internet Marketing” is much more effective (if that’s your keyword).
Also, don’t forget to use keywords in your linking description as well.
For the most thorough ebook on developing a strong linking campaign read Jack Humphrey’s “Power Linking 2: Evolution!” (http://www.money-teacher.com/PL2.htm)
7. Content is “King”
Not only is quality content what people are looking for, but content is also what the search engines are looking for. Content is basically “food” for the search engines.
IMPORTANT: DO NOT try to “trick” search engines with useless content. Not only won’t this work, but it will bother potential customers. Also, while you want to mention your keyword, DO NOT “keyword stuff”. A too high word density will penalize you – make it natural.
8. File size
Keep file size as small as possible. It will make for faster loading pages, happier visitors and the search engines like them.
9. Bold & Italic
It’s good practice to highlight your keywords in your copy a few times, but don’t overdo it.
10. Alt tags in image links
Search engines can read text but they can’t see a pictures. Putting in Alt text for a graphic tells the search engine what it is about and also helps people who have their graphics turned off. Make sure to put your keywords in your Alt tags.
Here is an example: < IMG SRC=”graphic1.jpg ALT=”text/keywords go here” >
Once your site is optimized for the search engines, you can then start submitting your site. Practice these tips and over time you will see your search engine rank increase.
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Sneaky (But Legal) Places To Insert Keywords For Higher Rankings
Sneaky (But Legal) Places To Insert Keywords For Higher Rankings
by James T. Faasse
The battle for high search engine rankings rages on! The engines themselves continually make changes which makes our jobs, as Web site owners, much more difficult. But, one thing has always remained the same... Keywords.
Search engines still read text. That text still has to be relevant to the site. Keywords are text and must be placed strategically throughout your site. Those keywords within the text are still the determining factor on how high you go up the search engine ladder.
While many engines now place no relevancy whatsoever on the keyword META tag itself, there are still plenty of places - legal ones - to insert keywords in order to boost your rankings.
Keep this list handy when writing copy for your site pages. It will help you get the biggest bang for your search engine buck.
1. In your URL.
Putting a keyword or keyphrase within your URL (domain name) counts for major points!
2. In your page link names.
Rather than using a link in your navigation bar like 'services', add a keyword to that page link. If you are a marketing consultant, you could put 'marketingservices' instead.
3. In links throughout the copy.
This uses the same principle as above. Instead of writing a paragraph about your testimonials and linking to a page named 'testimonials', create a link to a page named 'marketing successes' (or some other powerful keyphrase).
4. In the 'title' and 'description' tags.
The title and description tags are still widely read and used by engines. Be sure both are enticing and contain keywords because some engines use them interchangeably.
5. In the copy itself.
The 'optimal' copy length for search engine compatibility is between 250 - 350 words. Why? Because that gives you enough room to use the keyphrases repeatedly and still make sense! You should have about a 3% ratio of copy to keywords.
6. In ALT tags.
ALT tags are those little bits of copy that pop up when you hold your mouse over a graphic or picture. Search engines read those - because they consist of text. Use keywords in the descriptions you assign to the images on each page. WARNING: Be VERY sure that the description in the ALT tag goes with the image. Otherwise you could be banned for 'keyword stuffing.'
Last little trick ... get one or two heavyweight keywords or phrases in all 6 places above. It's hard to do, but the results are tremendous!
By taking advantage of these sneaky - but legal - places to insert keywords, you stand a better chance of getting one of those coveted 'Top 10' slots on the major engines. You also stand a darn good shot at increasing traffic to your site!
by James T. Faasse
The battle for high search engine rankings rages on! The engines themselves continually make changes which makes our jobs, as Web site owners, much more difficult. But, one thing has always remained the same... Keywords.
Search engines still read text. That text still has to be relevant to the site. Keywords are text and must be placed strategically throughout your site. Those keywords within the text are still the determining factor on how high you go up the search engine ladder.
While many engines now place no relevancy whatsoever on the keyword META tag itself, there are still plenty of places - legal ones - to insert keywords in order to boost your rankings.
Keep this list handy when writing copy for your site pages. It will help you get the biggest bang for your search engine buck.
1. In your URL.
Putting a keyword or keyphrase within your URL (domain name) counts for major points!
2. In your page link names.
Rather than using a link in your navigation bar like 'services', add a keyword to that page link. If you are a marketing consultant, you could put 'marketingservices' instead.
3. In links throughout the copy.
This uses the same principle as above. Instead of writing a paragraph about your testimonials and linking to a page named 'testimonials', create a link to a page named 'marketing successes' (or some other powerful keyphrase).
4. In the 'title' and 'description' tags.
The title and description tags are still widely read and used by engines. Be sure both are enticing and contain keywords because some engines use them interchangeably.
5. In the copy itself.
The 'optimal' copy length for search engine compatibility is between 250 - 350 words. Why? Because that gives you enough room to use the keyphrases repeatedly and still make sense! You should have about a 3% ratio of copy to keywords.
6. In ALT tags.
ALT tags are those little bits of copy that pop up when you hold your mouse over a graphic or picture. Search engines read those - because they consist of text. Use keywords in the descriptions you assign to the images on each page. WARNING: Be VERY sure that the description in the ALT tag goes with the image. Otherwise you could be banned for 'keyword stuffing.'
Last little trick ... get one or two heavyweight keywords or phrases in all 6 places above. It's hard to do, but the results are tremendous!
By taking advantage of these sneaky - but legal - places to insert keywords, you stand a better chance of getting one of those coveted 'Top 10' slots on the major engines. You also stand a darn good shot at increasing traffic to your site!
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
The 7 Points of Do-It-Yourself SEO
The 7 Points of Do-It-Yourself SEO
by James T. Faasse
Have you ever been intimidated at the convoluted, jargon-ridden information about Internet marketing for small businesses available on the Net? What exactly is search engine optimization anyway, and can I do it myself?
The answer is: Yes, you can! The basics of search engine optimisation are simple. It's all to do with the keyword content of your text copy, and can be summarised in seven points.
1. Register a good domain name which reflects what your site is about. Even if you are an established business, don't register www.FredJones.com if you make widgets. Rather, you want to register something like www.BestWidgets.com because that would inspire confidence in people looking for quality widgets who would not necessarily have heard of Fred Jones the widget-maker.
2. Name your page URLs based on reasons similar to the above, except now you can be more specific. Search engines like to know what your page is about. Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on one of the sales pages.
3. The text in the title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about. Put your important keywords in your title tags, using both the singular and plural versions (people will search for both) and make these tags different and specific for each page. For example, 'Widgets and After Sales Widget Services'. Whatever you do, don't call the home page 'Index', but treat it almost as a mini-description.
4. The other tags (at the top of the html page) between the two 'HEAD' tags are not as important as the title tag, but the description tag is still used by some search engines in displaying what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines don't use the description tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use part of it together with part of the main body text surrounding prominent keywords on your page. So you may as well treat the description tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as comprehensive as possible in the short space allowed. Make sure you have your popular keywords included within your description tag. The ALT tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is what is displayed if you allow your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it is not considered important for search engines. The COMMENT tag is never displayed on the body page, and is used by coders and designers as an instruction or reminder to themselves about what that section of html coding should be doing; in the past, some webmasters in their quest for website promotion and search engine ranking used to stuff keywords in the comments tags, but now it is generally acknowledged that the main search engines pay little or no attention to these.
5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its own preference as to how many times a keyword phrase appears on the page in order to signify the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other words, in order to help the search engine understand what the page is about). Around 5 to 8 per cent is a rough guide as to the optimal level. Don't overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as spam or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords in the headings tags H1 and H2. There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search engines bother with that, as it is perceived as less prominent on the page, therefore less relevant to what the page is about.
6. Don't forget good linking in your website marketing. Search engines will judge the importance of your web pages to some extent on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. Ask other webmasters with sites on similar themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a link back. These sites should not be in competition with yours, but should be similarly themed. You may occasionally be asked by other webmasters if they can link to your site. If this is so then have a look at their site; make sure that their site is relevant, that it has at least some Page Rank, and that it just 'feels' good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected popups. You don't want to be associated with a 'bad neighborhood'!
7. Make sure that important keywords are included in the anchor text within inbound links from other sites. This is crucial to search engines when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your pages. The inbound link from the other site should take the form of something like this (I'm using normal brackets instead of angle brackets so as not to use compromising html): (A HREF='http://www.Yourwebname.com')your important keywords included here(/A). You should definitely avoid something like (A HREF='http://www.Yourwebname.com')click here(/A), which tells search engines nothing except that your site is about 'click here'. Be careful!
by James T. Faasse
Have you ever been intimidated at the convoluted, jargon-ridden information about Internet marketing for small businesses available on the Net? What exactly is search engine optimization anyway, and can I do it myself?
The answer is: Yes, you can! The basics of search engine optimisation are simple. It's all to do with the keyword content of your text copy, and can be summarised in seven points.
1. Register a good domain name which reflects what your site is about. Even if you are an established business, don't register www.FredJones.com if you make widgets. Rather, you want to register something like www.BestWidgets.com because that would inspire confidence in people looking for quality widgets who would not necessarily have heard of Fred Jones the widget-maker.
2. Name your page URLs based on reasons similar to the above, except now you can be more specific. Search engines like to know what your page is about. Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on one of the sales pages.
3. The text in the title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about. Put your important keywords in your title tags, using both the singular and plural versions (people will search for both) and make these tags different and specific for each page. For example, 'Widgets and After Sales Widget Services'. Whatever you do, don't call the home page 'Index', but treat it almost as a mini-description.
4. The other tags (at the top of the html page) between the two 'HEAD' tags are not as important as the title tag, but the description tag is still used by some search engines in displaying what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines don't use the description tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use part of it together with part of the main body text surrounding prominent keywords on your page. So you may as well treat the description tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as comprehensive as possible in the short space allowed. Make sure you have your popular keywords included within your description tag. The ALT tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is what is displayed if you allow your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it is not considered important for search engines. The COMMENT tag is never displayed on the body page, and is used by coders and designers as an instruction or reminder to themselves about what that section of html coding should be doing; in the past, some webmasters in their quest for website promotion and search engine ranking used to stuff keywords in the comments tags, but now it is generally acknowledged that the main search engines pay little or no attention to these.
5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its own preference as to how many times a keyword phrase appears on the page in order to signify the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other words, in order to help the search engine understand what the page is about). Around 5 to 8 per cent is a rough guide as to the optimal level. Don't overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as spam or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords in the headings tags H1 and H2. There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search engines bother with that, as it is perceived as less prominent on the page, therefore less relevant to what the page is about.
6. Don't forget good linking in your website marketing. Search engines will judge the importance of your web pages to some extent on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. Ask other webmasters with sites on similar themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a link back. These sites should not be in competition with yours, but should be similarly themed. You may occasionally be asked by other webmasters if they can link to your site. If this is so then have a look at their site; make sure that their site is relevant, that it has at least some Page Rank, and that it just 'feels' good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected popups. You don't want to be associated with a 'bad neighborhood'!
7. Make sure that important keywords are included in the anchor text within inbound links from other sites. This is crucial to search engines when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your pages. The inbound link from the other site should take the form of something like this (I'm using normal brackets instead of angle brackets so as not to use compromising html): (A HREF='http://www.Yourwebname.com')your important keywords included here(/A). You should definitely avoid something like (A HREF='http://www.Yourwebname.com')click here(/A), which tells search engines nothing except that your site is about 'click here'. Be careful!
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
How to Design a Search Engine Friendly Web Site
How to Design a Search Engine Friendly Web Site
by James T. Faasse
Many web site designers don't design their sites for the search engines. This is a huge mistake because they miss out on attracting lots of free traffic. Your beautifully designed web site may have cost you thousands of dollars but it still needs to attract visitors to be profitable.
Here are 12 highly effective strategies for designing a search engine friendly web site:
1. Research highly targeted keywords - do this even before you begin designing otherwise you may have to go back and clean up some of your web site design. Use the keyword research tool, Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) to research the most popular keywords that pertain to the subject matter of your web site. Wordtracker will show how many people have searched for that particular keyword over several search engines within the last 60 days.
2. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword phrases that you can include within your web pages. After having completed the above research, you should have found the keywords that were searched on most frequently, but only produce a small number of competing web sites.
3. Write a paragraph of 250 - 500 words of text for the top of each web page. Weave your keywords within this text being careful not have them so close together that your copy reads strange for your visitors. Aim to please the search engines as well as your web site visitors.
4. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are the title and description meta tags. The keyword meta tag has lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it, however include it anyway as some search engines still use it. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a short sentence about the purpose of your site. In your description meta tag, write a sentence on the greatest benefit of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page.
5. Include Heading Tags - these can range form H1-H6 most designers will only use H1-H3. These tags separate each section of your web page with subheadings. The H1 tag contains the largest font and is the most significant. Within the descriptive text of these header tags you should include the keyword phrases placed in the same order as your keyword phrases that are within your keyword meta tags.
6. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has 2 purposes:
a) visitors can read the description if they can't see the image.
b) search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this could help your site's rankings.
7. Reduce image size - too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down the loading time of your web site. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72ppi. Slice large images into smaller pieces with your graphics editor.
8. Find incoming links (backward links) - web sites that link to yours raise your link popularity. Search for web sites that are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or more to do a link exchange. Write optimized articles and include them on your web site. This means your site has a greater chance of being indexed quickly as well as getting a boost in its rankings.
Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com) from all your internal pages to your home page. This will increase the number of links pointing to your home page.
9. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a clean design throughout your web site. This will reduce the time to implement a consistent text (or layout) style for your web site. It will also enable you to easily update your whole site should you wish to make any future changes.
10. Place any script code into external files - when using javascript (ie for swapping images on your navigation bar) it creates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing down the text that search, engines would spider first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line.
11. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page. A DOCTYPE ( 'document type declaration') informs the validator which version of HTML you're using for your web pages. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won't validate without them. i.e.
[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd']
DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.
12. Write clean html code - web site editors often write extra code. This can increase the loading time of your web pages. Check your html code by running it through a html validator (http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator).
Once you have implemented all the strategies above, submit your site to the search engines and get ready for lots of targeted traffic.
You now have built a profitable search engine friendly web site.
Resources
The Global Structure of an HTML Document http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.1
Page Validation and Loading Times http://stoco.net/cgi-bin/wc/wc.pl
Fix HTML code errors http://www.netmechanic.com
by James T. Faasse
Many web site designers don't design their sites for the search engines. This is a huge mistake because they miss out on attracting lots of free traffic. Your beautifully designed web site may have cost you thousands of dollars but it still needs to attract visitors to be profitable.
Here are 12 highly effective strategies for designing a search engine friendly web site:
1. Research highly targeted keywords - do this even before you begin designing otherwise you may have to go back and clean up some of your web site design. Use the keyword research tool, Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) to research the most popular keywords that pertain to the subject matter of your web site. Wordtracker will show how many people have searched for that particular keyword over several search engines within the last 60 days.
2. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword phrases that you can include within your web pages. After having completed the above research, you should have found the keywords that were searched on most frequently, but only produce a small number of competing web sites.
3. Write a paragraph of 250 - 500 words of text for the top of each web page. Weave your keywords within this text being careful not have them so close together that your copy reads strange for your visitors. Aim to please the search engines as well as your web site visitors.
4. Optimize meta tags - the most significant meta tags are the title and description meta tags. The keyword meta tag has lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it, however include it anyway as some search engines still use it. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags. The title meta tag should be a short sentence about the purpose of your site. In your description meta tag, write a sentence on the greatest benefit of your site. Your keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web page.
5. Include Heading Tags - these can range form H1-H6 most designers will only use H1-H3. These tags separate each section of your web page with subheadings. The H1 tag contains the largest font and is the most significant. Within the descriptive text of these header tags you should include the keyword phrases placed in the same order as your keyword phrases that are within your keyword meta tags.
6. Optimize images using the alt tag - write a short description for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has 2 purposes:
a) visitors can read the description if they can't see the image.
b) search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this could help your site's rankings.
7. Reduce image size - too many images or very large images on your web page will slow down the loading time of your web site. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72ppi. Slice large images into smaller pieces with your graphics editor.
8. Find incoming links (backward links) - web sites that link to yours raise your link popularity. Search for web sites that are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or more to do a link exchange. Write optimized articles and include them on your web site. This means your site has a greater chance of being indexed quickly as well as getting a boost in its rankings.
Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com) from all your internal pages to your home page. This will increase the number of links pointing to your home page.
9. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a clean design throughout your web site. This will reduce the time to implement a consistent text (or layout) style for your web site. It will also enable you to easily update your whole site should you wish to make any future changes.
10. Place any script code into external files - when using javascript (ie for swapping images on your navigation bar) it creates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing down the text that search, engines would spider first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line.
11. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page. A DOCTYPE ( 'document type declaration') informs the validator which version of HTML you're using for your web pages. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won't validate without them. i.e.
[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd']
DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.
12. Write clean html code - web site editors often write extra code. This can increase the loading time of your web pages. Check your html code by running it through a html validator (http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator).
Once you have implemented all the strategies above, submit your site to the search engines and get ready for lots of targeted traffic.
You now have built a profitable search engine friendly web site.
Resources
The Global Structure of an HTML Document http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.1
Page Validation and Loading Times http://stoco.net/cgi-bin/wc/wc.pl
Fix HTML code errors http://www.netmechanic.com
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Search Engine Optimization - Using Keywords in Links
Search Engine Optimization - Using Keywords in Links
by James Timothy Faasse
When your optimizing your website for search engines there are some link building strategies that you want to try and achieve to help be ranked higher up on search engines.
Link Building Tips
------------------
Tip 1
Use your main keywords in your 'visible' link tags. This is very important to do because it shows the search engines that you have more relevant information on those keywords.
Tip 2
Use those main keywords at the very start of your link tags Those closer to the keyword is to the front of the link tag the more the search engines will think it is of importance.
Tip 3
Try and use the keywords more than once. Dont abuse this tip by putting keywords one after the other. Try and put one keyword than some information, than another keyword. If you list to many keywords together chances are that you will become penalized by the search engines.
Tip 4
Incoporate plurals of your keywords throughout your linking structure. Some search engines (if not most) are making it so that keywords are automatically using plurals. This is a benefit to you, but not all search engines are doing this so try and add in multiple keywords in plural form and in regular form throughout your site.
Tip 5
Use your keywords in your 'visible' link tags, and use them in your page name. This helps increase your keyword ranking by having those extra keywords in the visible link area and in the page name area. Great way to get those keyword points.
Examples of Link Building Tips
------------------------------
Tip 1
Home for Webdesign
Note the homepage would be able webdesign. So why not incoporate a keyword in front of the link.
Tip 2
Webdesign Home
Including it at the front eliminates the need of 'for' and increases the relevancy of the keyword.
Tip 3
Webdesign - Click here to learn about our webdesign information. Search Engine Optimization
Learn about our webdesign Search engine optimization information.
Note: the first link I used the keyword webdesign. I than used the same keyword again in the second links description.
Tip 4
Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizing or SEO
Tip 5
Example Visible Link
by James Timothy Faasse
When your optimizing your website for search engines there are some link building strategies that you want to try and achieve to help be ranked higher up on search engines.
Link Building Tips
------------------
Tip 1
Use your main keywords in your 'visible' link tags. This is very important to do because it shows the search engines that you have more relevant information on those keywords.
Tip 2
Use those main keywords at the very start of your link tags Those closer to the keyword is to the front of the link tag the more the search engines will think it is of importance.
Tip 3
Try and use the keywords more than once. Dont abuse this tip by putting keywords one after the other. Try and put one keyword than some information, than another keyword. If you list to many keywords together chances are that you will become penalized by the search engines.
Tip 4
Incoporate plurals of your keywords throughout your linking structure. Some search engines (if not most) are making it so that keywords are automatically using plurals. This is a benefit to you, but not all search engines are doing this so try and add in multiple keywords in plural form and in regular form throughout your site.
Tip 5
Use your keywords in your 'visible' link tags, and use them in your page name. This helps increase your keyword ranking by having those extra keywords in the visible link area and in the page name area. Great way to get those keyword points.
Examples of Link Building Tips
------------------------------
Tip 1
Home for Webdesign
Note the homepage would be able webdesign. So why not incoporate a keyword in front of the link.
Tip 2
Webdesign Home
Including it at the front eliminates the need of 'for' and increases the relevancy of the keyword.
Tip 3
Webdesign - Click here to learn about our webdesign information. Search Engine Optimization
Learn about our webdesign Search engine optimization information.
Note: the first link I used the keyword webdesign. I than used the same keyword again in the second links description.
Tip 4
Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizing or SEO
Tip 5
Example Visible Link
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Choosing your Meta-Keywords
Choosing your Meta-Keywords
by James Timothy Faasse
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.
by James Timothy Faasse
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.
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Determining Keywords
Determining Keywords
by James Timothy Faasse
Determining keywords is a critical step in web design. If your website and meta tags do not contain related keywords, web surfers will be unable to find your website when they conduct searches.
The formula is a little tricky - you will need to locate terms that are popular and relevant to your site. These terms may or may not be terms that *you* feel are relevant terms. The optimal terms in a site should be terms that a potential customer would use when searching for a website with your content. In order to achieve success your website should be optimized with terms and phrases that are descriptive, related to your content, and which receive a significant amount of searches. The caveat, of course, is that you want to find terms and phrases where there is little competition, so you quickly achieve high ranking in the important search engines.
relevant + popular with searchers but not with competitors = success
Markets saturated with other sites competing for search terms make it difficult to find quality keywords. Sometimes it is better to optimize for a less popular term, one that is more targeted at your visitor, as it will likely have a higher conversion rate than a less specific popular term. The first step to determining keywords is brainstorming a list of logical terms and phrases that relate to your product or offerings. This should be done by a number of individuals; sometimes people have very different ideas for search terms and by identifying a variety of people and their search terms you may tap words that hadn't occurred to you. There are a number of free and low-cost tools available online and for download that will allow you to expand and research terms that have been brainstormed. The results typically vary with the tools but overall the tools will assist you in determining where to focus your keyword efforts. The tools will often assist with pay-per-click engines, creating expanded, related keywords or phrases that can be bid on.
In addition to examining log files to see what terms customers are using to find a website, visit competitors’ web sites and examine their meta tags for additional terms, use a thesaurus to find related terms, include misspellings of keywords in your meta tag keywords, and optimize for various forms of nouns and verbs, including tenses and plurals.
Keyword Tools
KeywordTumbler - KeywordTumbler takes existing keyword phrases and generates multiple variations, reordering the words. This allows you to build a large keyword list in seconds. http://www.keywordtumbler.com
TheDowser - Overture Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Sandbox, Keyword Harvester, Google AdWords report analyzer, Google AdWords optimization tool, log file analyzer, conversion tracking and optimization tool. http://www.thedowser.com
WordTracker - Wordtracker helps you choose the right internet marketing keywords that will help your search engine placement and ranking. Use Wordtracker for keyword research. Web marketing is all about search engine ranking, and that starts with the proper internet marketing keywords. Get a free keyword report and web site promotion information! http://www.wordtracker.com
Keyword Suggestion Tools - A handy little tool will show you the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often. Enter a search phrase below to see how often it's searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Keyword Ranking Tool - This utility can be used to check search engines for keyword ranking and track search engine ranking for your various keywords over time, which, as you probably know, is critical when doing search engine optimization. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Overture Keyword Tool - After entering a keyword or phrase, Overture provides a list of related phrases that have been searched on. The tool provides a count that indicates the number of times the phrase has been searched on. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Topword Tool - Topword Tool is a free online tool that analyzes a complete web page and counts keyword occurrences, as well as keyword phrases (number in brackets), equal to or above that set in the Minimum Occurrences setting. It supplies a list of keywords and keyword phrases which are most likely to achieve the highest rankings on a major search engine. The tool will also analyze your meta description/keyword and title tags and then, through color coding, inform you of words/phrases which should be included. The main use for this tool is checking your optimization and tweaking existing web sites to rank well. http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html
Google Suggestion - The Google Suggestion is a new online tool for webmasters. As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's 'Did you mean?' feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type 'bass', Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include 'bass fishing' or 'bass guitar'. Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like 'progr,' Google Suggest might offer you refinements like 'programming', 'programming languages', 'progesterone', or 'progressive'. You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse. The tool provides a number that indicates the number of searches a specific word or phrase has had. http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Keyword statistics give webmasters a way to tap into what is on the minds of Internet consumers. When you can match your marketing efforts to the various ways people locate their items of interest on the net, potential customers will be streamed to your site like ants to a picnic.
by James Timothy Faasse
Determining keywords is a critical step in web design. If your website and meta tags do not contain related keywords, web surfers will be unable to find your website when they conduct searches.
The formula is a little tricky - you will need to locate terms that are popular and relevant to your site. These terms may or may not be terms that *you* feel are relevant terms. The optimal terms in a site should be terms that a potential customer would use when searching for a website with your content. In order to achieve success your website should be optimized with terms and phrases that are descriptive, related to your content, and which receive a significant amount of searches. The caveat, of course, is that you want to find terms and phrases where there is little competition, so you quickly achieve high ranking in the important search engines.
relevant + popular with searchers but not with competitors = success
Markets saturated with other sites competing for search terms make it difficult to find quality keywords. Sometimes it is better to optimize for a less popular term, one that is more targeted at your visitor, as it will likely have a higher conversion rate than a less specific popular term. The first step to determining keywords is brainstorming a list of logical terms and phrases that relate to your product or offerings. This should be done by a number of individuals; sometimes people have very different ideas for search terms and by identifying a variety of people and their search terms you may tap words that hadn't occurred to you. There are a number of free and low-cost tools available online and for download that will allow you to expand and research terms that have been brainstormed. The results typically vary with the tools but overall the tools will assist you in determining where to focus your keyword efforts. The tools will often assist with pay-per-click engines, creating expanded, related keywords or phrases that can be bid on.
In addition to examining log files to see what terms customers are using to find a website, visit competitors’ web sites and examine their meta tags for additional terms, use a thesaurus to find related terms, include misspellings of keywords in your meta tag keywords, and optimize for various forms of nouns and verbs, including tenses and plurals.
Keyword Tools
KeywordTumbler - KeywordTumbler takes existing keyword phrases and generates multiple variations, reordering the words. This allows you to build a large keyword list in seconds. http://www.keywordtumbler.com
TheDowser - Overture Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Sandbox, Keyword Harvester, Google AdWords report analyzer, Google AdWords optimization tool, log file analyzer, conversion tracking and optimization tool. http://www.thedowser.com
WordTracker - Wordtracker helps you choose the right internet marketing keywords that will help your search engine placement and ranking. Use Wordtracker for keyword research. Web marketing is all about search engine ranking, and that starts with the proper internet marketing keywords. Get a free keyword report and web site promotion information! http://www.wordtracker.com
Keyword Suggestion Tools - A handy little tool will show you the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often. Enter a search phrase below to see how often it's searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Keyword Ranking Tool - This utility can be used to check search engines for keyword ranking and track search engine ranking for your various keywords over time, which, as you probably know, is critical when doing search engine optimization. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Overture Keyword Tool - After entering a keyword or phrase, Overture provides a list of related phrases that have been searched on. The tool provides a count that indicates the number of times the phrase has been searched on. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Topword Tool - Topword Tool is a free online tool that analyzes a complete web page and counts keyword occurrences, as well as keyword phrases (number in brackets), equal to or above that set in the Minimum Occurrences setting. It supplies a list of keywords and keyword phrases which are most likely to achieve the highest rankings on a major search engine. The tool will also analyze your meta description/keyword and title tags and then, through color coding, inform you of words/phrases which should be included. The main use for this tool is checking your optimization and tweaking existing web sites to rank well. http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html
Google Suggestion - The Google Suggestion is a new online tool for webmasters. As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's 'Did you mean?' feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type 'bass', Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include 'bass fishing' or 'bass guitar'. Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like 'progr,' Google Suggest might offer you refinements like 'programming', 'programming languages', 'progesterone', or 'progressive'. You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse. The tool provides a number that indicates the number of searches a specific word or phrase has had. http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Keyword statistics give webmasters a way to tap into what is on the minds of Internet consumers. When you can match your marketing efforts to the various ways people locate their items of interest on the net, potential customers will be streamed to your site like ants to a picnic.
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Finding Keywords Worth Gold That Are Easy To Optimize For…
Finding Keywords Worth Gold That Are Easy To Optimize For…
by James Timothy Faasse
Trying to get into the search engine optimization game? Well, here is a way to quickly find the most profitable keywords that are easy to optimize for. This is the hidden strategy that all successful businesses use to start.
The real aspect of building a website for search engines is to do your keyword research correctly. This can be the most time consuming, hectic, and frustrating aspect unless you know what you’re doing – that is why we want to teach you today.
Are you ready for this challenge? Not many people are. Find good keywords is the step that most give up and that is why most can never make a penny online. But, with the secrets we’re about to reveal, you should be able to sulk profits from search engines for years to come…
We’re going to help you learn how to choose the keyword that will help set-up the foundation of your online business.
Why are we looking for keywords?
These keywords are going to become the foundation of your site’s
CONTENT. These are the keywords that will determine how you optimize your website for search engines. They’re also the same keywords you can use to buy cheap traffic through pay-per-click.
How to start?
First, make a list of 5-10 keywords or keyphrases that are related to your
niche. For example, if your niche is computers, come up with a list like this:
1. Computers
2. Computer Parts
3. Computer Software
4. Cheap Computer
5. Building a Computer
Next, you’ll use a tool that will expand on these keywords for you. The
best tool to use is Wordtracker. It’s the most highly recommended
keyword searching tool on the web. This tool actually lets you type in one general keyword and it will come back with hundreds and even thousands of related phrases out of which many are great keywords to optimize for.
What kind of keywords should you look for?
Look for keywords that are about 2-3 words long – so you’re really looking for phrases. The next goal is to find the phrases that aren’t too competitive. Meaning, look for keywords that are getting a good amount of traffic but do not have a bunch of competition too.
Start off your search engine optimization with easier keywords and as you build up you can go after the harder keywords (that is the best way to attack SEO).
In essence, you’re looking for keywords with a high KEI – KEI is an index developed by a search engine optimizer and basically the higher it is, the easier it should be for you to rank for that keywords. Ideally, you want to find KEI’s that are higher than 40. Anything lower than 5 is probably too hard to start optimizing for.
KEI is a simple calculation that uses the number of times a keyword is searched with the number of competing websites.
Back to wordtracker – this tool automatically calculates all the KEIs for you and ranks them in order of highest to lowest so you know just where to start!
Why Avoid Short Keywords?
There are a few reasons why it’s pointless to try to optimize for one of two word keywords/keyphrases.
1. Extremely difficult – these are the keywords that everyone is going for and all the major companies are optimize for. It’s going to take a lot of work and money to get there.
2. Pointless – for example, what’s the use of optimizing for “computers” if all you do is sell computer hardware. You’re going to get a bunch of visitors that are waste, untargeted and won’t make you any money. You rather optimize for something like “computer memory hardware.” That will not only be easier to optimize for, but it will get you targeted traffic that buys!
3. The one-two phrase keywords require that you have massive, large websites or thousands upon thousands of incoming links (they other keyword phrases do not).
So, to finalize, if you want to optimize the right away and you want to do it fast with targeted visitors that actually buy – find keyword phrases that are at least 3 words long, not very competitive and start there.
Pretty soon, you’ll be ready to go for the harder keywords…
by James Timothy Faasse
Trying to get into the search engine optimization game? Well, here is a way to quickly find the most profitable keywords that are easy to optimize for. This is the hidden strategy that all successful businesses use to start.
The real aspect of building a website for search engines is to do your keyword research correctly. This can be the most time consuming, hectic, and frustrating aspect unless you know what you’re doing – that is why we want to teach you today.
Are you ready for this challenge? Not many people are. Find good keywords is the step that most give up and that is why most can never make a penny online. But, with the secrets we’re about to reveal, you should be able to sulk profits from search engines for years to come…
We’re going to help you learn how to choose the keyword that will help set-up the foundation of your online business.
Why are we looking for keywords?
These keywords are going to become the foundation of your site’s
CONTENT. These are the keywords that will determine how you optimize your website for search engines. They’re also the same keywords you can use to buy cheap traffic through pay-per-click.
How to start?
First, make a list of 5-10 keywords or keyphrases that are related to your
niche. For example, if your niche is computers, come up with a list like this:
1. Computers
2. Computer Parts
3. Computer Software
4. Cheap Computer
5. Building a Computer
Next, you’ll use a tool that will expand on these keywords for you. The
best tool to use is Wordtracker. It’s the most highly recommended
keyword searching tool on the web. This tool actually lets you type in one general keyword and it will come back with hundreds and even thousands of related phrases out of which many are great keywords to optimize for.
What kind of keywords should you look for?
Look for keywords that are about 2-3 words long – so you’re really looking for phrases. The next goal is to find the phrases that aren’t too competitive. Meaning, look for keywords that are getting a good amount of traffic but do not have a bunch of competition too.
Start off your search engine optimization with easier keywords and as you build up you can go after the harder keywords (that is the best way to attack SEO).
In essence, you’re looking for keywords with a high KEI – KEI is an index developed by a search engine optimizer and basically the higher it is, the easier it should be for you to rank for that keywords. Ideally, you want to find KEI’s that are higher than 40. Anything lower than 5 is probably too hard to start optimizing for.
KEI is a simple calculation that uses the number of times a keyword is searched with the number of competing websites.
Back to wordtracker – this tool automatically calculates all the KEIs for you and ranks them in order of highest to lowest so you know just where to start!
Why Avoid Short Keywords?
There are a few reasons why it’s pointless to try to optimize for one of two word keywords/keyphrases.
1. Extremely difficult – these are the keywords that everyone is going for and all the major companies are optimize for. It’s going to take a lot of work and money to get there.
2. Pointless – for example, what’s the use of optimizing for “computers” if all you do is sell computer hardware. You’re going to get a bunch of visitors that are waste, untargeted and won’t make you any money. You rather optimize for something like “computer memory hardware.” That will not only be easier to optimize for, but it will get you targeted traffic that buys!
3. The one-two phrase keywords require that you have massive, large websites or thousands upon thousands of incoming links (they other keyword phrases do not).
So, to finalize, if you want to optimize the right away and you want to do it fast with targeted visitors that actually buy – find keyword phrases that are at least 3 words long, not very competitive and start there.
Pretty soon, you’ll be ready to go for the harder keywords…
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Tons of Top 10 Rankings Guaranteed
Tons of Top 10 Rankings Guaranteed
by James Timothy Faasse
Okay I admit it. I was kidding. I can’t guarantee top 10 search engine rankings any more than the next guy.
But hold on. Before you click away in disgust I believe I’ve got the next best thing. That all but guarantees you'll get top 10 rankings. Lots of them. For next to nothing. So you might want to stick around and find out what this is all about.
You see to hear some tell it a top 10 ranking is a shoo in. A gimme. A piece of cake.
Must be since Google Adwords are crammed with all sorts of beckoning, come hither ads that suggest as much.
Now admittedly in any food chain even the bottom feeders play a role in the big scheme of things. But I don’t know. Such pitches may be hard for the typical traffic starved newbie to resist. I mean these ads suggest for a mere $49, $69 or $99 you’ll be rolling in top 10 rankings in no time.
The sad truth is you may indeed land some top 10 rankings. But they won’t be for keywords that produce much if any traffic. And if you don’t get any traffic what good are the top 10 rankings?
Still, let’s not be so hasty. While I’m not advocating anyone plunk down hard earned cash in the hopes of landing high search engine rankings for competitive keywords, hidden in the hype is a low cost strategy. In other words there’s a way to make this work. If you know how. And you will in about 60 seconds.
Here’s all you do.
Simply fire up Wordtracker. (A subscription is about $8 for a day.) Start looking for related keywords by doing a search for a broad, general, generic keyword in your niche. Then drill down and dig up all the related 'exact' keyword phrases that have 9 or fewer competing pages. All that’s left is to optimize a page on your site for each one and presto chango! A top 10 ranking!
See? A surefire formula for guaranteed top 10 rankings. Brain dead simple too.
Now I call such search terms “orphan keywords”. Orphans because the search volume is so low they are all but ignored by the fat cats intent on landing the big fish -- a.k.a. high rankings for terms that get hundreds of searches a day.
That fact makes these orphans super simple to rank in the top 10 for. Especially since many of the competing pages aren't even optimized the least little bit.
But hold on. Let’s not high five all around just yet. There’s a tradeoff. As I suggested lack of competition is a sure sign such terms aren’t searched for often. Maybe no more than a mere handful of times each day in Google.
Okay so how do we make lemonade out of those lemons?
The best way to make this tactic work is to find a ton of these terms. And don’t worry. Most niches are loaded with orphan keywords.
Then here’s your next step. Simply create content pages that each focus on two, or at most three, of these small fry.
Put up 100 such pages and you’ve probably got 250 of these 9 or fewer competing pages phrases covered.
To get to 100 pages all you do is create four pages a day - five days a week. If you miss a day make it up over the weekend. But by the end of five weeks you’ll have 100 pages hard at work for you. Now that’s not so hard now is it?
Even better these orphans come with a collective traffic jolt you wouldn’t expect.
I’m looking at one list of orphan keywords that shows 309 daily searches in Google. Another came in around 513. While the orphans for a third niche had over 1876 Google searches each day according to Wordtracker!
Given all that I casually suggested this micro traffic idea to a friend with an already successful web site. In other words he wasn’t hurting for traffic. Which made this a no lose proposition for him to test.
About four weeks later he excitedly reported his traffic had doubled! That’s right doubled. That got my attention. Should get yours too. Because this orphan keyword strategy is a surefire way to get top 10 rankings for a whole host of lesser keyword phrases. Giving you near exclusive access to the traffic that comes with them. While leaving the bruising battles for the hyper competitive terms to someone else.
Pretty clever, huh? Absolutely.
by James Timothy Faasse
Okay I admit it. I was kidding. I can’t guarantee top 10 search engine rankings any more than the next guy.
But hold on. Before you click away in disgust I believe I’ve got the next best thing. That all but guarantees you'll get top 10 rankings. Lots of them. For next to nothing. So you might want to stick around and find out what this is all about.
You see to hear some tell it a top 10 ranking is a shoo in. A gimme. A piece of cake.
Must be since Google Adwords are crammed with all sorts of beckoning, come hither ads that suggest as much.
Now admittedly in any food chain even the bottom feeders play a role in the big scheme of things. But I don’t know. Such pitches may be hard for the typical traffic starved newbie to resist. I mean these ads suggest for a mere $49, $69 or $99 you’ll be rolling in top 10 rankings in no time.
The sad truth is you may indeed land some top 10 rankings. But they won’t be for keywords that produce much if any traffic. And if you don’t get any traffic what good are the top 10 rankings?
Still, let’s not be so hasty. While I’m not advocating anyone plunk down hard earned cash in the hopes of landing high search engine rankings for competitive keywords, hidden in the hype is a low cost strategy. In other words there’s a way to make this work. If you know how. And you will in about 60 seconds.
Here’s all you do.
Simply fire up Wordtracker. (A subscription is about $8 for a day.) Start looking for related keywords by doing a search for a broad, general, generic keyword in your niche. Then drill down and dig up all the related 'exact' keyword phrases that have 9 or fewer competing pages. All that’s left is to optimize a page on your site for each one and presto chango! A top 10 ranking!
See? A surefire formula for guaranteed top 10 rankings. Brain dead simple too.
Now I call such search terms “orphan keywords”. Orphans because the search volume is so low they are all but ignored by the fat cats intent on landing the big fish -- a.k.a. high rankings for terms that get hundreds of searches a day.
That fact makes these orphans super simple to rank in the top 10 for. Especially since many of the competing pages aren't even optimized the least little bit.
But hold on. Let’s not high five all around just yet. There’s a tradeoff. As I suggested lack of competition is a sure sign such terms aren’t searched for often. Maybe no more than a mere handful of times each day in Google.
Okay so how do we make lemonade out of those lemons?
The best way to make this tactic work is to find a ton of these terms. And don’t worry. Most niches are loaded with orphan keywords.
Then here’s your next step. Simply create content pages that each focus on two, or at most three, of these small fry.
Put up 100 such pages and you’ve probably got 250 of these 9 or fewer competing pages phrases covered.
To get to 100 pages all you do is create four pages a day - five days a week. If you miss a day make it up over the weekend. But by the end of five weeks you’ll have 100 pages hard at work for you. Now that’s not so hard now is it?
Even better these orphans come with a collective traffic jolt you wouldn’t expect.
I’m looking at one list of orphan keywords that shows 309 daily searches in Google. Another came in around 513. While the orphans for a third niche had over 1876 Google searches each day according to Wordtracker!
Given all that I casually suggested this micro traffic idea to a friend with an already successful web site. In other words he wasn’t hurting for traffic. Which made this a no lose proposition for him to test.
About four weeks later he excitedly reported his traffic had doubled! That’s right doubled. That got my attention. Should get yours too. Because this orphan keyword strategy is a surefire way to get top 10 rankings for a whole host of lesser keyword phrases. Giving you near exclusive access to the traffic that comes with them. While leaving the bruising battles for the hyper competitive terms to someone else.
Pretty clever, huh? Absolutely.
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Drive Traffic To Your Site With Free Doorway Pages
Drive Traffic To Your Site With Free Doorway Pages
by James Timothy Faasse
Have you seen the ads for people charging you hundreds of dollars to make doorway pages for your site? If you have a little time, I'll show you how to make your own doorway pages absolutely FREE.
Basically a doorway page is a page that leads people, or is a doorway, to your actual site. Each of these pages have a different url so you can submit these multiple pages to the search engines. You can create doorway pages using your existing url, such as www.yourpage.com/doorway1.html or you can create multiple doorway pages using all of the free homepage service providers available on the internet. You can try different keyword combinations on each doorway page to increase your hits. So let's get started.
1. First you need to determine which keywords are going to generate the most traffic to your site. You want to pick one primary keyword or keyword phrase and 3-4 secondary keywords or keyword phrases. Here are some suggestions to help you find popular keywords or keyword phrases that accurately describe your website:
*Weekly Search Engine Keyword Statistics -
http://www.mall-net.com/se_report/ Get the top 100 weekly keywords and keyword phrases that people are searching for. They take samples from all different search engines 24 hours a day, with a million queries a week
*Word Spot
- http://www.wordspot.com/ Get a weekly top 200 keyword and keyword phrases report e-mailed to you every week for free. They sample random search engines every 5 min. during the day and evening.
*GoTo's Search Term Suggestion Page
- http://inventory.go2.com/inventory/Search_Suggestion.jhtml Enter your keyword and this tool will show you how many people have searched for your keyword and it lists other related keywords.
2. Now you need to create the meta tags for your page. You want to use your one primary keyword in your title tag, description tag and keyword tag. Then use your secondary keywords in your keyword tag. If you need help creating your meta tags, here are two meta tag generators that are easy to use:
*Web Head Central's Meta Tag Generator
- http://www.webheadcentral.com/metatagtool.html
*Site Owner
- http://www.siteowner.com
3. Now you are ready to create your doorway page. I created a sample doorway page from Web Position Gold. I made up a fictional company to illustrate for you how an actual doorway page would look. Feel free to copy and paste the html code to your own site. Just change the keywords, title, etc. to reflect your own page. Go to http://www.webheadcentral.com/doorway.html You can also use the free doorway page generator at http://www.siteowner.com.au/doorwaypage2.html Save all of your doorway pages in the same folder in your website directory. When the search engine spider indexes your site, it will index all of the pages in that folder.
4. Start submitting your doorway pages to the search engines. For a list of free and low cost search engine submission services, go to http://www.webheadcentral.com/submit.html
5. Finally, you'll want to check and see how your pages are ranking on the search engines. If you don't have the money to purchase search engine ranking software, here are 2 sites that will let you know how your site ranks:
*PurePromotion Search Engine Position Analyzer
- http://www.purepromotion.com/rankit.htm
*Site Owner
- http://www.siteowner.com/ Now go out and start generating traffic to your site!
by James Timothy Faasse
Have you seen the ads for people charging you hundreds of dollars to make doorway pages for your site? If you have a little time, I'll show you how to make your own doorway pages absolutely FREE.
Basically a doorway page is a page that leads people, or is a doorway, to your actual site. Each of these pages have a different url so you can submit these multiple pages to the search engines. You can create doorway pages using your existing url, such as www.yourpage.com/doorway1.html or you can create multiple doorway pages using all of the free homepage service providers available on the internet. You can try different keyword combinations on each doorway page to increase your hits. So let's get started.
1. First you need to determine which keywords are going to generate the most traffic to your site. You want to pick one primary keyword or keyword phrase and 3-4 secondary keywords or keyword phrases. Here are some suggestions to help you find popular keywords or keyword phrases that accurately describe your website:
*Weekly Search Engine Keyword Statistics -
http://www.mall-net.com/se_report/ Get the top 100 weekly keywords and keyword phrases that people are searching for. They take samples from all different search engines 24 hours a day, with a million queries a week
*Word Spot
- http://www.wordspot.com/ Get a weekly top 200 keyword and keyword phrases report e-mailed to you every week for free. They sample random search engines every 5 min. during the day and evening.
*GoTo's Search Term Suggestion Page
- http://inventory.go2.com/inventory/Search_Suggestion.jhtml Enter your keyword and this tool will show you how many people have searched for your keyword and it lists other related keywords.
2. Now you need to create the meta tags for your page. You want to use your one primary keyword in your title tag, description tag and keyword tag. Then use your secondary keywords in your keyword tag. If you need help creating your meta tags, here are two meta tag generators that are easy to use:
*Web Head Central's Meta Tag Generator
- http://www.webheadcentral.com/metatagtool.html
*Site Owner
- http://www.siteowner.com
3. Now you are ready to create your doorway page. I created a sample doorway page from Web Position Gold. I made up a fictional company to illustrate for you how an actual doorway page would look. Feel free to copy and paste the html code to your own site. Just change the keywords, title, etc. to reflect your own page. Go to http://www.webheadcentral.com/doorway.html You can also use the free doorway page generator at http://www.siteowner.com.au/doorwaypage2.html Save all of your doorway pages in the same folder in your website directory. When the search engine spider indexes your site, it will index all of the pages in that folder.
4. Start submitting your doorway pages to the search engines. For a list of free and low cost search engine submission services, go to http://www.webheadcentral.com/submit.html
5. Finally, you'll want to check and see how your pages are ranking on the search engines. If you don't have the money to purchase search engine ranking software, here are 2 sites that will let you know how your site ranks:
*PurePromotion Search Engine Position Analyzer
- http://www.purepromotion.com/rankit.htm
*Site Owner
- http://www.siteowner.com/ Now go out and start generating traffic to your site!
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google
1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google
by James Timothy Faasse
Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And it's not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns.
I take this example from Google because I've experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven't exploited yet. We are still talking about search engine traffic here.
What's that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but it's a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. It's not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.
The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance.
Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make 9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59.
Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted.
So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now.
Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at this link are valuable keywords with lower competition.
If you are using Wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com , a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic.
If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less.
They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.
If you have a good website which is crawled by Google's robot called 'Googlebot' often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic.
But be careful when adding pages, don't go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added.
Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards.
Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases.
Good luck and happy research and optimizing.
by James Timothy Faasse
Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And it's not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns.
I take this example from Google because I've experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven't exploited yet. We are still talking about search engine traffic here.
What's that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but it's a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. It's not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.
The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance.
Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make 9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59.
Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted.
So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now.
Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at this link are valuable keywords with lower competition.
If you are using Wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com , a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic.
If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less.
They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.
If you have a good website which is crawled by Google's robot called 'Googlebot' often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic.
But be careful when adding pages, don't go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added.
Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards.
Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases.
Good luck and happy research and optimizing.
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Friday, April 01, 2005
Reverse Searching for Meta Tags
Reverse Searching for Meta Tags
By James Timothy Faasse`
Stealth Keywords
By James Timothy Faasse`
Reverse Searching is one of the old tricks to increase your sites rankings. Reverse searching is searching on your target meta keywords and checking the sites are returned in the results. By visiting those sites and checking their meta keywords you can get a general ball park idea of what big meta keywords are pulling in site traffic.
This used to work fairly well, but as search engine algorithms become better and better at detecting spam, this option holds less and less value. Search engines now check to see if a meta keyword is present in a meta tag, and if it *is* also present on the web page. If the meta keyword is not present on the page, the meta keyword receives less value or relevancy.
Additionally, many search engines are so slow at actually including pages in their index, the chances that you are looking at the actually source code that generated the high placement, is very slim. However, if you keep those two things in mind, you can sure make some educated guesses about which words are being used in the meta tags. If you are into it, check the date of the listing on the search engine (many show the date that the page was spidered in the results). That can kinda give you a clue as to how old the page is in the search engine database, and how hold it is on the web.
Here is where we get into specifics for each search engine. While reverse searching can work well to build keywords for one search engine, it will fail miserably on others. While one search engine will give high relevancy to keyword occurrence in one position, another will discount it entirely. It pays to reverse search on as many search engines as possible and compare the same sites generated page.
Additionally, some people are now running stealth keywords and you wont be able to detect if you are viewing true keywords or bogus keywords. You may also stumble upon a page that was designed for another search engine from the ne where you found it listed. You can get around this somewhat if you are using a browser that allows you to set both the USER_AGENT and referring URL. By setting the USER_AGENT to one of the major search spiders, and the referring URL to null, you can sometimes trick web pages into thinking you are from one of the major search engines and fessing up the real set of keywords. (I'm amazed at how often this works).
Reverse Searching for Clues
You can use reverse searching to see what sites are linked to your top competition. Infoseek and Altavista, allow you to enter "link:site url" to see what sites are linked to a particular page or even domain. By searching for the links to your competition, you can get a rough estimate of how many sites are linked to them. If you find that one of your competitors has five hundred links to it, while another has just fifty, you can assume who is the most successful. Visit that top linked site and see just what it is they are doing to get those links. Are they promoting their site by running a newsletter, a mailing list, or other promotional scheme.
Stealth Keywords
Ok, I admit it, I have a love-hate relationship with Cloaking and Stealth. The following was written during a hate phase.
Stealth keywords are keywords that are generated by a CGI program when a search engine spider has been detected.
Simply put: don't use hidden stealth keywords generated by CGI programs to target specific spiders or crawlers. Most of the search engines that this once worked on have taken notice, and it not only wont work, it can cause you serious grief and might cause the death of your website.
Some of the search engines have shadow spiders now, that use a different IP address and use a different (generic mozilla) agent. The shadow spider compares what keyword (html header) information it gets from one viewing to what it gets from the standard spider. If they don't match, they know that you've target them and can bury you deep in the search results in a heart beat (been there, done that, wont be back again).
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Friday, March 18, 2005
Determining Keywords
It is obvious that choosing the right keywords can do much for your online business exposure optimizing your positioning and searchability with major search engines including Arameda. However, no one says that it is easy. Today we are happy to share with you the article written by James T. Faasse, who studied the keyword issue carefully and made up a small review of online software tools that can help you in finding the optimum keywords.
Determining Keywords
by James T. Faasse
Determining keywords is a critical step in web design. If your website and meta tags do not contain related keywords, web surfers will be unable to find your website when they conduct searches.
The formula is a little tricky - you will need to locate terms that are popular and relevant to your business. These terms may or may not be terms that *you* feel are relevant terms. The optimal terms in a site should be terms that a potential customer would use when searching for a website with your content. In order to achieve success your website should be optimized with terms and phrases that are descriptive, related to your content, and which receive a
significant amount of searches. The caveat, of course, is that you want to find terms and phrases where there is little competition, so you quickly achieve high ranking in the important search engines.
relevant + popular with searchers but not with competitors = success
Markets saturated with other sites competing for search terms make it difficult to find quality keywords. Sometimes it is better to optimize for a less popular term, one that is more targeted at your visitor, as it will likely have a higher conversion rate than a less specific popular term. The first step to determining keywords is brainstorming a list of logical terms and phrases that relate to your product or offerings. This should be done by a number of individuals; sometimes people have very different ideas for search terms and by identifying a variety of people and their search terms you may tap words that hadn't occurred to you. There are a number of free and low-cost tools available online and for download that will allow you to expand and research terms that have been brainstormed. The results typically vary with the tools but overall the tools will assist you in determining where to focus your keyword efforts. The tools will often assist with pay-per-click engines, creating expanded, related keywords or phrases that can be bid on.
In addition to examining log files to see what terms customers are using to find a website, visit competitors' web sites and examine their meta tags for additional terms, use a thesaurus to find related terms, include misspellings of keywords in your meta tag keywords, and optimize for various forms of nouns and verbs, including tenses and plurals.
Keyword Tools
KeywordTumbler - KeywordTumbler takes existing keyword phrases and generates multiple variations, reordering the words. This allows you to build a large keyword list in seconds.
http://www.keywordtumbler.com
TheDowser - Overture Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Sandbox, Keyword Harvester, Google AdWords report analyzer, Google AdWords optimization tool, log file analyzer, conversion tracking and optimization tool.
http://www.thedowser.com
WordTracker - Wordtracker helps you choose the right internet marketing keywords that will help your search engine placement and ranking. Use Wordtracker for keyword research. Web marketing is all about search engine ranking, and that starts with the proper internet marketing keywords. Get a free keyword report and web site promotion information!
http://www.wordtracker.com
Keyword Suggestion Tools - A handy little tool will show you the results of
your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases
are searched most often. Enter a search phrase below to see how often it's
searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Keyword Ranking Tool - This utility can be used to check search engines for
keyword ranking and track search engine ranking for your various keywords over
time, which, as you probably know, is critical when doing search engine optimization.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Overture Keyword Tool - After entering a keyword or phrase, Overture provides
a list of related phrases that have been searched on. The tool provides a count
that indicates the number of times the phrase has been searched on. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Topword Tool - Topword Tool is a free online tool that analyzes a complete
web page and counts keyword occurrences, as well as keyword phrases (number
in brackets), equal to or above that set in the Minimum Occurrences setting.
It supplies a list of keywords and keyword phrases which are most likely to
achieve the highest rankings on a major search engine. The tool will also analyze
your meta description/keyword and title tags and then, through color coding,
inform you of words/phrases which should be included. The main use for this
tool is checking your optimization and tweaking existing web sites to rank
well.
http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html
Google Suggestion - The Google Suggestion is a new online tool for webmasters.
As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing
and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's 'Did you mean?'
feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search,
except that it works in real time. For example, if you type 'bass', Google
Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include 'bass fishing' or 'bass
guitar'. Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like 'progr,' Google
Suggest might offer you refinements like 'programming', 'programming languages',
'progesterone', or 'progressive'. You can choose one by scrolling up or down
the list with the arrow keys or mouse. The tool provides a number that indicates
the number of searches a specific word or phrase has had.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Keyword statistics give webmasters a way to tap into what is on the minds
of Internet consumers.
When you can match your marketing efforts to the various
ways people locate their items of interest on the net, potential customers
will be streamed to your site like ants to a picnic.
Determining Keywords
by James T. Faasse
Determining keywords is a critical step in web design. If your website and meta tags do not contain related keywords, web surfers will be unable to find your website when they conduct searches.
The formula is a little tricky - you will need to locate terms that are popular and relevant to your business. These terms may or may not be terms that *you* feel are relevant terms. The optimal terms in a site should be terms that a potential customer would use when searching for a website with your content. In order to achieve success your website should be optimized with terms and phrases that are descriptive, related to your content, and which receive a
significant amount of searches. The caveat, of course, is that you want to find terms and phrases where there is little competition, so you quickly achieve high ranking in the important search engines.
relevant + popular with searchers but not with competitors = success
Markets saturated with other sites competing for search terms make it difficult to find quality keywords. Sometimes it is better to optimize for a less popular term, one that is more targeted at your visitor, as it will likely have a higher conversion rate than a less specific popular term. The first step to determining keywords is brainstorming a list of logical terms and phrases that relate to your product or offerings. This should be done by a number of individuals; sometimes people have very different ideas for search terms and by identifying a variety of people and their search terms you may tap words that hadn't occurred to you. There are a number of free and low-cost tools available online and for download that will allow you to expand and research terms that have been brainstormed. The results typically vary with the tools but overall the tools will assist you in determining where to focus your keyword efforts. The tools will often assist with pay-per-click engines, creating expanded, related keywords or phrases that can be bid on.
In addition to examining log files to see what terms customers are using to find a website, visit competitors' web sites and examine their meta tags for additional terms, use a thesaurus to find related terms, include misspellings of keywords in your meta tag keywords, and optimize for various forms of nouns and verbs, including tenses and plurals.
Keyword Tools
KeywordTumbler - KeywordTumbler takes existing keyword phrases and generates multiple variations, reordering the words. This allows you to build a large keyword list in seconds.
http://www.keywordtumbler.com
TheDowser - Overture Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Sandbox, Keyword Harvester, Google AdWords report analyzer, Google AdWords optimization tool, log file analyzer, conversion tracking and optimization tool.
http://www.thedowser.com
WordTracker - Wordtracker helps you choose the right internet marketing keywords that will help your search engine placement and ranking. Use Wordtracker for keyword research. Web marketing is all about search engine ranking, and that starts with the proper internet marketing keywords. Get a free keyword report and web site promotion information!
http://www.wordtracker.com
Keyword Suggestion Tools - A handy little tool will show you the results of
your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases
are searched most often. Enter a search phrase below to see how often it's
searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Keyword Ranking Tool - This utility can be used to check search engines for
keyword ranking and track search engine ranking for your various keywords over
time, which, as you probably know, is critical when doing search engine optimization.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
Overture Keyword Tool - After entering a keyword or phrase, Overture provides
a list of related phrases that have been searched on. The tool provides a count
that indicates the number of times the phrase has been searched on. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Topword Tool - Topword Tool is a free online tool that analyzes a complete
web page and counts keyword occurrences, as well as keyword phrases (number
in brackets), equal to or above that set in the Minimum Occurrences setting.
It supplies a list of keywords and keyword phrases which are most likely to
achieve the highest rankings on a major search engine. The tool will also analyze
your meta description/keyword and title tags and then, through color coding,
inform you of words/phrases which should be included. The main use for this
tool is checking your optimization and tweaking existing web sites to rank
well.
http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html
Google Suggestion - The Google Suggestion is a new online tool for webmasters.
As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing
and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's 'Did you mean?'
feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search,
except that it works in real time. For example, if you type 'bass', Google
Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include 'bass fishing' or 'bass
guitar'. Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like 'progr,' Google
Suggest might offer you refinements like 'programming', 'programming languages',
'progesterone', or 'progressive'. You can choose one by scrolling up or down
the list with the arrow keys or mouse. The tool provides a number that indicates
the number of searches a specific word or phrase has had.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Keyword statistics give webmasters a way to tap into what is on the minds
of Internet consumers.
When you can match your marketing efforts to the various
ways people locate their items of interest on the net, potential customers
will be streamed to your site like ants to a picnic.
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Hiring a Search Engine Marketer
Hiring a Search Engine Marketer
By James T. Faasse - March 15, 2005
Many website owners put the cart before the horse- anxious for search engine traffic and rankings, the first thing they do once their site is complete is buy a "submit to 1,000 search engines for $29" service. Unfortunately, what they receive is a tenfold increase in e-mail spam but no increase in search engine traffic.
Do-it-yourself SEO is a great way to go- if you've got the time to put in, anyone can effectively optimize a website. However, it makes sense to hire a professional when your time is better spent doing what you do best; running your business.
Where to start? Selecting an internet marketer can be a daunting task. There are a wide range of fee levels as well as different attitudes, strategies and experience levels.
A few pros and cons can help you in your search:
Con: Submit your site to 25,000 Engines
Any service that claims to submit your site to more than 4 or 5 engines is not submitting to search engines at all. Most likely, they are submitting to free-for-all pages or they are spamming directories. Currently, the only engines with significant traffic are Google and Yahoo and to a small extent Teoma (Ask Jeeves). You don't have to submit to any of these engines- they will find your site by crawling links to your site.
Pro: Directory Submission Service
There are professionals who will prepare and submit your listing request to the major directories as well as industry-specific portals. This is a valuable service-- a well-written description as well as a carefully chosen directory category can improve your chances of getting listed quickly and accurately.
Directory listings are valuable links that add to your link popularity and can send traffic in their own right. Many directories are still free but several have paid options that can speed your review. Directories such as Yahoo and Business.com are paid listings only. Directory submission specialists can let you know what options and fees are available.
Con: We Won't Change a Thing on Your Site
Companies that do their optimization "off-site" by building a mini-network of sites or pages on their own site that point to yours aren't really optimizing your site. They may send you traffic, but when you stop paying, the traffic goes away. You can do that yourself with PPC listings!
Other companies create software-generated "doorway" pages or "information" pages - these pages are often created with nonsense words sprinkled with keyword phrases and meant to appeal to the search engine algorithms. The key is that they are only for search engine spiders to see; not humans. They may work for a short while (if at all.) The problem is that these pages have no links pointing to them and aren't very important in the eyes of the search engines, therefore they are not very effective.
The most dangerous companies will tell you that you won't "see" any of their changes- they add hidden links, hidden text, and other tricky techniques designed to fool search engine spiders. Some create different pages that are shown to spiders than to people- this is referred to as cloaking. These techniques can and will eventually get your site penalized or banned.
Pro: We Can Optimize Your Site
A professional SEO is likely to work with you on keyword research, change your tags, your copy, possibly your links and other code on the page. They will optimize the page- making it friendly to users and search engines while making it relevant to the terms you have agreed upon.
They may recommend you remove splash pages, frames, flash navigation, javascript links, or other things that interfere with the user experience and hinder search engine spiders. While there are workarounds and techniques that can help with situations like these, they are not the optimal solution. Even if you choose to leave search-unfriendly elements on your page, your SEO should point them out to you and advise you of the best option.
Con: We Guarantee #1 Listings in the Editorial Results
No one can guarantee you a #1 listing in the search engines' algorithmically determined results for a specific term. The engines do not have special agreements with anyone that allows them to choose where your site will appear!
Read the fine print- often the guaranteed terms are "guinea pig" terms- words no one is searching or optimizing for that even a guinea pig could get you #1 rankings for! Remember that a guarantee doesn't mean they have to achieve the results- simply that they'll give you your money back if they don't.
Other companies guarantee rankings on PPC terms. That's easy enough, you just have to have a big enough wallet to be #1.
Pro: We Guarantee Improved Results
A good search engine marketing firm should be able to guarantee that they will improve the performance of your site in the search engines- you shouldn't be worse off than when they started. Really good companies should be able to improve your conversions, not just your traffic and rankings. Isn't that the ultimate goal?
Don't be surprised if, after a search engine marketer works on your site, your traffic figures decrease. Don't worry- traffic doesn't pay your bills; in fact it actually costs you bandwidth. The quality of the traffic you continue to receive should be improved- more sales or conversions in relation to the number of visitors.
The ideal situtation is achieved when you narrow your search visitors to people who are interested in your site and they are easily able to find the information they want. This is more likely to occur when you stop focusing on unqualified but high traffic keyword phrases and start focusing on terms that really relate to your site.
Go with Your Instincts
Don't let a search marketer change your pages for the worse- slapping keywords on the page here and there may improve your rankings but decrease sales. Optimization techniques should complement and improve your site and good SEO copywriting will improve the focus of the page without losing the marketing edge.
You should feel confident that the search marketing professional you hire knows what they are doing and is willing to explain what they will do to your site and why. There really aren't any "secrets" in search marketing anymore- you can spend a few hours reading at any of the major search engine forums to find out how things work. If a marketer isn't willing to tell you what they plan to do to your site to drive more traffic, you may have a mess to clean up later.
Ask for examples of the marketer's other work; it's the best way to see what they do and how. Don't just look at the ranking reports, take a look at the page and make sure it reads well and isn't using sneaky tactics. Above all, pick someone you trust!
By James T. Faasse - March 15, 2005
Many website owners put the cart before the horse- anxious for search engine traffic and rankings, the first thing they do once their site is complete is buy a "submit to 1,000 search engines for $29" service. Unfortunately, what they receive is a tenfold increase in e-mail spam but no increase in search engine traffic.
Do-it-yourself SEO is a great way to go- if you've got the time to put in, anyone can effectively optimize a website. However, it makes sense to hire a professional when your time is better spent doing what you do best; running your business.
Where to start? Selecting an internet marketer can be a daunting task. There are a wide range of fee levels as well as different attitudes, strategies and experience levels.
A few pros and cons can help you in your search:
Con: Submit your site to 25,000 Engines
Any service that claims to submit your site to more than 4 or 5 engines is not submitting to search engines at all. Most likely, they are submitting to free-for-all pages or they are spamming directories. Currently, the only engines with significant traffic are Google and Yahoo and to a small extent Teoma (Ask Jeeves). You don't have to submit to any of these engines- they will find your site by crawling links to your site.
Pro: Directory Submission Service
There are professionals who will prepare and submit your listing request to the major directories as well as industry-specific portals. This is a valuable service-- a well-written description as well as a carefully chosen directory category can improve your chances of getting listed quickly and accurately.
Directory listings are valuable links that add to your link popularity and can send traffic in their own right. Many directories are still free but several have paid options that can speed your review. Directories such as Yahoo and Business.com are paid listings only. Directory submission specialists can let you know what options and fees are available.
Con: We Won't Change a Thing on Your Site
Companies that do their optimization "off-site" by building a mini-network of sites or pages on their own site that point to yours aren't really optimizing your site. They may send you traffic, but when you stop paying, the traffic goes away. You can do that yourself with PPC listings!
Other companies create software-generated "doorway" pages or "information" pages - these pages are often created with nonsense words sprinkled with keyword phrases and meant to appeal to the search engine algorithms. The key is that they are only for search engine spiders to see; not humans. They may work for a short while (if at all.) The problem is that these pages have no links pointing to them and aren't very important in the eyes of the search engines, therefore they are not very effective.
The most dangerous companies will tell you that you won't "see" any of their changes- they add hidden links, hidden text, and other tricky techniques designed to fool search engine spiders. Some create different pages that are shown to spiders than to people- this is referred to as cloaking. These techniques can and will eventually get your site penalized or banned.
Pro: We Can Optimize Your Site
A professional SEO is likely to work with you on keyword research, change your tags, your copy, possibly your links and other code on the page. They will optimize the page- making it friendly to users and search engines while making it relevant to the terms you have agreed upon.
They may recommend you remove splash pages, frames, flash navigation, javascript links, or other things that interfere with the user experience and hinder search engine spiders. While there are workarounds and techniques that can help with situations like these, they are not the optimal solution. Even if you choose to leave search-unfriendly elements on your page, your SEO should point them out to you and advise you of the best option.
Con: We Guarantee #1 Listings in the Editorial Results
No one can guarantee you a #1 listing in the search engines' algorithmically determined results for a specific term. The engines do not have special agreements with anyone that allows them to choose where your site will appear!
Read the fine print- often the guaranteed terms are "guinea pig" terms- words no one is searching or optimizing for that even a guinea pig could get you #1 rankings for! Remember that a guarantee doesn't mean they have to achieve the results- simply that they'll give you your money back if they don't.
Other companies guarantee rankings on PPC terms. That's easy enough, you just have to have a big enough wallet to be #1.
Pro: We Guarantee Improved Results
A good search engine marketing firm should be able to guarantee that they will improve the performance of your site in the search engines- you shouldn't be worse off than when they started. Really good companies should be able to improve your conversions, not just your traffic and rankings. Isn't that the ultimate goal?
Don't be surprised if, after a search engine marketer works on your site, your traffic figures decrease. Don't worry- traffic doesn't pay your bills; in fact it actually costs you bandwidth. The quality of the traffic you continue to receive should be improved- more sales or conversions in relation to the number of visitors.
The ideal situtation is achieved when you narrow your search visitors to people who are interested in your site and they are easily able to find the information they want. This is more likely to occur when you stop focusing on unqualified but high traffic keyword phrases and start focusing on terms that really relate to your site.
Go with Your Instincts
Don't let a search marketer change your pages for the worse- slapping keywords on the page here and there may improve your rankings but decrease sales. Optimization techniques should complement and improve your site and good SEO copywriting will improve the focus of the page without losing the marketing edge.
You should feel confident that the search marketing professional you hire knows what they are doing and is willing to explain what they will do to your site and why. There really aren't any "secrets" in search marketing anymore- you can spend a few hours reading at any of the major search engine forums to find out how things work. If a marketer isn't willing to tell you what they plan to do to your site to drive more traffic, you may have a mess to clean up later.
Ask for examples of the marketer's other work; it's the best way to see what they do and how. Don't just look at the ranking reports, take a look at the page and make sure it reads well and isn't using sneaky tactics. Above all, pick someone you trust!
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
Monday, March 07, 2005
There Should Be More to your SEO Consultant Than Rankings
There Should Be More to your SEO Consultant Than Rankings
Potential clients are after a single goal: “Get me a top-ten ranking at Google.” Some will also mention MSN, and a few will rhyme off a list of search engines and want to rank well at the top 200 of them.
It is time to separate fact from fiction.
Yes, your SEO consultant can get you a top-ten placement at Google. But…
1. If the placement is for “dirty brown shoes”, it probably won't help your shoe store one bit, even if I get you the first place ranking. Few people are actually searching for that term.
2. Being number ten might not help much either, depending on the term. People searching for “Essential Nectar liquid vitamins”, will probably click on the first result they see, or at least on one of the “above-the-fold” results that do not require scrolling. On the other hand, someone searching for “liquid vitamins” might check through two pages of results to familiarize herself with the options available.
3. If your title tag reads like a cheap list of search terms, it will not be enticing. For instance, if it reads: “vitamins, liquid vitamins, multivitamins, multi-vitamins”, you might skip over it in favor of the next result that reads “Liquid vitamins from the Liquid Vitamin Supplements Store”.
4. If your description tag is a mess, people will more likely skip over your listing, even if it does rank number one, in favor of one that sounds like what they are looking for. Google and others use the description tag usually when the term searched for is found in it, so make sure to include your key search terms in a description tag that actually reads well.
I recently responded to a forum question, which went something like this: My site ranks number one for this term at this engine. The term is searched this many times per day, and the engine has this percentage marketshare. Can I expect this many visitors?
That's not an SEO challenge; that's a math problem: searches x marketshare = visitors
I responded with a few factors that override mathematics in the SEO game, including the site's title tag and description tag, as well as whether the term lends itself to scrolling. I also pointed out that it depends on the title tags and description tags of the competition, too.
Another factor that makes predicting traffic difficult is the abandonment factor - how many people click on none of the results because they get interrupted or confused, or abandon the search for a new one because they find themselves off-topic or searching too broadly.
It also depends on how many sponsored links there are and how they are marked. Often at Yahoo and Lycos, for example, there are so many ads that the average searcher might never scroll a screen or two to see the organic (natural) results.
And, of course, it also depends on the color of the walls in the room the searcher is clicking from, the weather outside and how well they slept last night. But there is little you can do about that.
What you can do is to work with your SEO consultant to choose the most effective search terms for your business and make sure he/she develops a title tag and description tag that sell to both humans and the search engines. Then make sure he is monitoring not just the rankings for your key search terms, but also the description used by each of the search engines.
A good ranking at Google and Yahoo is just one measure of your SEO consultant's success. A more complete evaluation is that he/she is your partner in building long-term, targeted traffic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Timothy Faasse` is an SEO consultant
Potential clients are after a single goal: “Get me a top-ten ranking at Google.” Some will also mention MSN, and a few will rhyme off a list of search engines and want to rank well at the top 200 of them.
It is time to separate fact from fiction.
Yes, your SEO consultant can get you a top-ten placement at Google. But…
1. If the placement is for “dirty brown shoes”, it probably won't help your shoe store one bit, even if I get you the first place ranking. Few people are actually searching for that term.
2. Being number ten might not help much either, depending on the term. People searching for “Essential Nectar liquid vitamins”, will probably click on the first result they see, or at least on one of the “above-the-fold” results that do not require scrolling. On the other hand, someone searching for “liquid vitamins” might check through two pages of results to familiarize herself with the options available.
3. If your title tag reads like a cheap list of search terms, it will not be enticing. For instance, if it reads: “vitamins, liquid vitamins, multivitamins, multi-vitamins”, you might skip over it in favor of the next result that reads “Liquid vitamins from the Liquid Vitamin Supplements Store”.
4. If your description tag is a mess, people will more likely skip over your listing, even if it does rank number one, in favor of one that sounds like what they are looking for. Google and others use the description tag usually when the term searched for is found in it, so make sure to include your key search terms in a description tag that actually reads well.
I recently responded to a forum question, which went something like this: My site ranks number one for this term at this engine. The term is searched this many times per day, and the engine has this percentage marketshare. Can I expect this many visitors?
That's not an SEO challenge; that's a math problem: searches x marketshare = visitors
I responded with a few factors that override mathematics in the SEO game, including the site's title tag and description tag, as well as whether the term lends itself to scrolling. I also pointed out that it depends on the title tags and description tags of the competition, too.
Another factor that makes predicting traffic difficult is the abandonment factor - how many people click on none of the results because they get interrupted or confused, or abandon the search for a new one because they find themselves off-topic or searching too broadly.
It also depends on how many sponsored links there are and how they are marked. Often at Yahoo and Lycos, for example, there are so many ads that the average searcher might never scroll a screen or two to see the organic (natural) results.
And, of course, it also depends on the color of the walls in the room the searcher is clicking from, the weather outside and how well they slept last night. But there is little you can do about that.
What you can do is to work with your SEO consultant to choose the most effective search terms for your business and make sure he/she develops a title tag and description tag that sell to both humans and the search engines. Then make sure he is monitoring not just the rankings for your key search terms, but also the description used by each of the search engines.
A good ranking at Google and Yahoo is just one measure of your SEO consultant's success. A more complete evaluation is that he/she is your partner in building long-term, targeted traffic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Timothy Faasse` is an SEO consultant
James T. Faasse` is an online Marketeer, successful in a number of online marketing campaigns launched and supported by his sales and marketing ingenuity. His SEO & e-Marketing expertise has helped every small business who has hired him for consultation thru www.inetready.com, increasing their traffic, sales revenue thru successful marketing strategies. You can contact him directly at 858-427-1619 for private consultation.
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