You’ve labored, sweated and poured lotsa love into designing and building your website. And phewee…ain’t it just the prettiest thing for sore eyes! But just as in real life–so does it go for the online world–beauty will only get you so far. So you’ve got to put that site to work! And how do you do that? Get it out there…put it right in the bulls eye of the search engines! That’s the way you’re going to get traffic to your site. And just in case you don’t know, traffic (specifically targeted traffic) is the life blood of any internet business.
By the close of 2005 the big kahuna…the absolute capo di tutti frutti of search was Google which commanded a whopping 46-47 percent of all searches conducted online. The runner up was Yahoo with about 25 % and followed distantly by MSN who conducted about 11.4 % of all searches. AOL boasted a paltry 6.9 % which still came to a not insubstantial 350 million searches. Searches through Google were a mind-sweltering 2.4 billion! Contrastingly MSN is the king of superfast indexing whilst Google is the snail in the site-indexing race. Yahoo once again falls in the middle of the two. So bear in mind, if your site is new and you’re optimizing for Google don’t forget about the other Big Two search engines (Yahoo and MSN) which can send some rather decent traffic your way in the meanwhile.
There are two types of optimization techniques that will determine your website’s standing with the search engines. They are: On-Page Search Optimization and Off-Page Search Optimization. This article will give you pointers on On-Page Optimization.
On-Page Optimization of Your Site
Keywords
The first thing you must learn to do is to treat each webpage on your site as (if not quite independent) an autonomous entity. In essence this means a different title for each page and targeting different keywords for a particular page. Let’s say for example your site is about vitamins and has a number of different pages for the various vitamins. Your home page (index page) would target general keywords such as vitamin, health supplement, dietary supplement, food vitamin etc. But a page with content about vitamin C should not target such generalized terms. It should target keywords (phrases) specifically related to vitamin c such as: vitamin c, c vitamin, ascorbic acid, benefit of vitamin c and so on. The title of each particular page should begin with your most valued (most searched for) keyword. Once again using vitamin C as an example, your webpage title should begin with Vitamin C and not something like ‘All the facts about vitamin c’. If you actually design and construct your website from scratch you can even go a step further. Name your webpage files starting with the targeted keyword. Once again, taking your vitamin site as an example, for pages relevant to vitamin C, name them accordingly. So say one of the pages is about the benefits of vitamin C, name that page with a searched for keyword or phrase pertaining to the benefits of vitamin C; e.g., vitamincbenefits.htm. So how do you know which keywords are regularly searched for? Don’t worry at the end of this article you’ll be supplied with a list of great and free keyword search tools.
Nobody gets to see the name of your file other than you (the webmaster) and the various search engine robots. So it doesn’t matter how awkward they look or sound because unlike people a search engine robot is not concerned with the aesthetics of a thing.
Keyword Density Versus Content.
While making your webpage as attractive as possible to the search engines bear in mind you’re doing this to get traffic…human traffic. So the content (copy) on your pages should read attractively to your human visitors while also appealing to the search engine robots. In this respect keyword optimization is a fine balancing act and if push ever comes to shove you’d be better off weighing this balance in favor of your human visitors. After all what’s the point of having a ton of traffic passing through your site and hardly any of it performing your most desired action (visitors buying something, signing up etc) all because of that lousy copy you wrote with the search engine robots foremost in mind!
Over-Optimization
There are also other very important factors to consider when optimizing for keywords. How many keywords (phrases) should you consider for a given page and how many times should that/those words appear on that page. Okay, the first thing that you have to understand is that there is such a thing as a website being Over-Optimized! You may believe that the greater the optimization the better but the reality is more complicated. You see the search engine algorithms take into account the keyword density of a particular page, and by doing in-depth analyses of the topmost websites for a given keyword (for Google, speculation puts the ideal keyword density at between 1.5 - 1.8 % while MSN runs up to 3.0 %, with consistent ole Yahoo somewhere in the middle) they will know that something just isn’t right if your website boasts a keyword density of 10%. This is know as spamming the search engines and sends up an immediate red flag alert.
So what’s the penalty? Your site won’t get the ranking it perhaps deserves if it’s new, and if it is an established site it will most likely be taken down a notch or two. Another factor to consider if your site is new, is that Google routinely sequesters new sites (a process called sandboxing) until the site can establish value and credibility. This is all part of the on-going battle between search engines (trying to deliver valuable and worthwhile information to search queries) and the spam websites that offer no substantial value whatsoever, but are keyword dense one-page websites with the sole goal of making money online in some manner or other.
Your Free Keyword Tools: 1. www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/2. www.pixelfast.com/overture/Ba Kiwanuka
http://www.internetbusinessmart.com
Off Page Optimization
To rank well with search engines you first need to understand what the goal of search engines is?
What Is The Primary Goal Of A Search Engine?
The main aim of the various search engines is to keep their visitors. And how do they do that? By providing visitors (people conducting searches) with the most relevant content with respect to a given search phrase, term or word(s). You see, search is actually a business…very big business involving vast sums of cash. The competition is seriously fierce (and is bound to get even more so). So in a nutshell, however much search engine algorithms change, their primary goal remains the same: to deliver accurate, quality content for a given search term, as quickly as possible. Once you understand this you can see why ranking well with the search engines requires good content on your website.
Having said that though…
Links To Your Site Are The Most Effective Way To Get Good Search Engine Rankings!
Link popularity is the single-most effective factor for improving your search engine rankings. At its most basic, a link to your site is viewed as a vote of confidence. In other words, various sites link to yours because they find that your site has something of value (usually content) to offer them. And as far as search engines are concerned links are the most easily recognizable factor in determining a website’s popularity. An entire SEO sub-culture has since developed to take advantage of this fact, finding new ways (some scrupulous…some not) to cultivate rapid-growth link campaigns. On their part the search engines have not been idle, and have developed increasingly sophisticated algorithms to address the burgeoning number of ways which webmasters have developed to “artificially” inflate the link popularity of their websites.
Before discussing the various ways you can go about amassing links you should first understand how the search engines qualify links, because as far as they are concerned:
Not All Links Are Created Equal!
The quality of a link is determined by various factors:
* The importance of the website linking to yours: the more important the website (high page rank) the greater the value of the link
* The relevance of the linking website’s content to that of your website: links from a website with a complimentary theme (say your site is about dog breeding…linking site is about dog training–this is an example of a naturally complimentary link) are of greater value than links from totally unrelated websites
* The number of other outbound links on the linking page of the website linking to you
* Links from different IP addresses have more impact than links that originate from the same IP address
Obtaining high quality links should be the goal of every webmaster. If you’re developing a new site, as far as Google is concerned, that site has to undergo a period of assessment (known in SEO circles as being sandboxed) during which time your site will have no page rank or placement in the Google organic listing. Having inward bound links from websites with high page rank (five and above) will give your site more credibility hence shorten the length of time in which it is sandboxed, as well as influencing your eventual page rank score once your site is “paroled”.
How To Get Links
Actively pursuing links is far more effective than sitting around hoping that people will fall in love with your site and automatically link to it. Luckily there’re multiple ways you can develop inbound links even on a miniscule budget.
* Submit your site’s URL to directories. Some require money…some don’t. www.strongestlinks.com has a very comprehensive listing of directories (free and other wise) and they very considerately list the submission fee (if any) next to each listing.
* Reciprocal Link Exchange–this involves two websites exchanging links and is probably the most popular and cheapest way to get links. The drawback is that it is very time consuming and tedious (contacting individual webmasters) unless you register with specialized link-exchange directories.
* Buying links. This can be a very quick way to amass links but it can also be very expensive. For example it is not unusual for webmasters to pay several hundred dollars every month to have a text link on the homepage of a website with Google page rank 6 or higher.
One-way links are the most desirable type of link to have. They are considered of greater value than reciprocal links as far as search engines are concerned. So how do you get one-way links? You can submit your website to directories, buy links on web pages or through 3-way linking schemes. 3-way linking schemes basically follow this principle: Site A links to Site B which links to Site C that links back to Site A. The allure of one way links is that your site has less outbound links (having a ton of outbound links depreciates your site’s page rank) and hence is more attractive to the search engines.
Anchor Text –The anchor text of your link is a very…very important factor to consider when you’re optimizing your site. Let’s say you’re optimizing for the keyword (phrase) online business, you should make sure that “online business” features some place in your link text. In fact even when dealing with internal links don’t use such phrases like “click here for more” as the anchor text pointing to another page of your site, but try and place a relevant keyword there instead. Those internal links also play a role in your overall link score.
Ba Kiwanuka http://www.internetbusinessmart.com
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Keyword Tags: algorithm, Directories, Google, keyword, linking, MSN, page rank, robots, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, Yahoo
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