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Search Engine Optimization Tips

A competent search engine optimization and submission strategy is essential if you want to draw the maximum number of visitors possible to your site.

You don't necessarily need to hire a company to do this you can quiet easily do it yourself, but be prepared to put the time in to do it properly.

Last Updated - 15th September 2005

Submit Your Link to Search Engines. Use services of Free Search Engine Submiters or better still Manually Submit yourself. Remember to enter the complete site details or the relevant Keywords. E.g.. If you are trying to submit your Money4Net Link to the search engines you need to enter the following as the Description of the site - "Money 4 Net is the Leading Paid To Promote Internet Marketing Portal On the Net. We Provide a Platform for Webmasters to Advertise their Products and Services and Help Our Affiliates Earn a Substantial Amount of Money for Promoting M4N & Selling Our eBooks& Ad Space" And the Following as the Keywords for the site - Paid to Promote, Internet Marketing, Affiliates, Money, Commissions, Make Money Online.

Nowadays, being on the first page for your most popular keyword phrase is like Getting Your Dreams answered. In Other words get high Ranks on Search Engines is a High Ranking Job.

And, that's where the power of advertising is going. It's all about Search and High Ranks. And Ranking is only going to become more important over the next few years.

If you can get on first page, Nothing like it. In order to get those high ranks (which is the goal after all), you have to do a Lot of Things other than just Creating Your Website and Hoping for the Search Engines to come to You. You Need to make them come to you and beg for more and more

Spy On Your Competitors - Who are your competitors? Do you know? If you don't, you may want to go online and do a search for your product or service. Who is on the first two pages? That is your target. Those are the companies that you want to compete with. Because right now, they are getting your customers. Take a look at their website. Notice the copy. Analyze their business. Are they successful? What are they not doing right? Look for the holes.

You're going to meet the needs of their customers (that they are not fulfilling) so they become YOUR customers.

Research your Keyword Phrases - Remember, Keyword Phrase research is critically important. It can also be a little tricky. Do you know what keywords or keyword phrases your customers search for when they look for you? Are you sure? See what your competitors are using. You can do this by right clicking on their home page, selecting "View Source" and then checking their keyword meta tag. Next, go on to Overture.com (Owned by Yahoo), click on "Visit the Advertiser" section, and use their Keyword Selector Tool.

Write Good Copy - Now it's time to start writing. Or rewriting. And if you can't write, you can hire a website copywriter to do it for you. The bottom line is to write about benefits, not features. Don't tell them how great your company is. They will discover that for themselves when you overwhelm them with your service and deliver the perfect product that meets their every need. Make the copy to the point and snappy. Make it sure it has impact, and asks the potential customer for their business.

Integrate Your Keyword Phrases - After you figure out which keyword phrases you want to use on your site, you need to integrate them into the copy of your site. Think Home Page and Services page as the most important pages to use them on. Essentially, you want to them to make up 5% of the total words on the page. It's not that hard actually. Just don't use them all over the place like some stupid copywriters do - you could get de-listed from the search engines. Definitely use them in your headlines and sub headlines. That will get you extra points, so to speak.

Check your Links, Build if necessary - Do you have any inbound links pointing to your site? If not, no amount of awesome copy is going to get your site high rankings. Links are very important. And even more so for Google. Go to linkpopularity.com and see what you have. Also check your competitors. If they have more than you, you need to get some high quality links. You can either do that yourself or hire someone to do it for you. It can be time consuming and expensive. But you gotta do it. It makes you look important to the search engines. A good way to do it is to make sure you are listed on directories, including DMOZ and industry related sites. Go to incominglinks.com to see which ones you should be listed on. Then write articles and submit them to article submission sites. That could potentially give you hundreds of links for free.

Use Go Rank's Analytical Tools - GoRank.com is a fantastic free resource for SEO. They have a Keyword Density Analyzer, Link Popularity Analyzer, Top 10 Keyword Analyzer, Research, News and lots of other great stuff. It's a great tool. It will help you in your SEO copy efforts.

Submit to the Search Engines - After you've ensured that your website copy and all the other important SEO considerations have been completed, it's time to submit to the Search Engines. Do it manually. Go to the search engine and do it yourself. Definitely don't pay someone to do it for you. You may have to resubmit a few times, but eventually, your site will get noticed.

Tweak the Copy as necessary, Add New Content - After your site has been up for a while, go back and take a second look. Ask friends and customers what they think of it. Can anything be improved? You'll be surprised what you may hear. If something isn't working, fix it. Make it sound better. The other thing that you should also be doing is adding content regularly. Build free resources into your website. This will make your customers and potential customers happy, and it will make you appear to be more important in the eyes of the search engines. Adding articles to your site is a great way to give your customers new, free content. Write about things that they would find interesting.

Partner with a Great SEO Firm - You may want to also consider partnering with a great Search Engine Optimization firm. There are probably a hundred very good ones out there. There are also 1000 bad ones. For the good ones, check-out TopSEOs.com and MarketingSherpa.com . They both list reputable firms. Whoever you go with, make sure they have a list of client success stories complete with stats to back it up.

Increase your site's link popularity by increasing your internal and incoming links.

Internal links - Cross link all your sites and important pages within each site. This will maximize the PageRank of all your pages within each web site.

Incoming links that you control - Create several small web sites related to your main site. Each site should only consist of a few pages. Then cross link them all together using the most important keywords. Don't forget to include links back to the main site.

Incoming links that you don't control:

Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors' domain name.

For example:
link:www.yourcompetitor.com
Exchange links with sites listed in the same category as yours in the major web directories, such as the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory.

Find sites that accept site submissions . Visit your favorite search engine and search for:
"add url" "your keywords"
Also try searching for the actual submission page using its page name.

For example:
addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, etc.
Include a TITLE tag as the first META tag, directly after the HEAD tag.

For example:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Mike's Marketing Software Tools Reviews</TITLE>
...
Try to avoid stop words in your TITLE tag . Stop words (a, an, and, but, he, her, his, i, in, it, of, on, or, she, the, etc.) are common words and characters ignored by some search engines to enhance the speed and relevancy of their search results.

Include a META DESCRIPTION tag , directly after the TITLE tag. Include the most important keyword phrase for the web page as close to the beginning of the description as possible.

For example:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Search Engine Optimization</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Tips and Treats is a site dedicated to bringing the best Tips / Helpful Pointers on a variety of Topics. Get Free Authentic Information / Tips on Travel, Finance, Health, Food, Beauty, Money, Dating, Marketing, Online Opportunities, We Give you Free Authentic Information at your Finger Tips">
...
If you use a META REFRESH tag, make sure it is set to refresh after 30 seconds.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="30; URL=http://www.search-engine-optimization.com">
Some search engines consider pages that refreshes under 30 seconds as spam. we recommend using a JavaScript redirect tag, if you require a quicker page refresh.

Advertisement

For example:

Step 1 - Paste this code into the HEAD section of your HTML document. Change the 3000 to whatever number you like. 1000 represents 1 (one) second.
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"></SCRIPT>
Step 2 - Insert the onLoad event handler into your BODY tag, so that the JavaScript code is executed when the page loads.
<BODY onLoad="redirect()">
Remove all other meta tags (author, date, etc.), unless you're sure they are absolutely necessary.

Include a site map with links to all your pages. This will help search engines find and index all your pages.

Limit the number of links on a web page to 50 .
If you have more than 50 links, limit your links to your most important pages.
Include text on the page as some search engines, such as AltaVista, have been known to kick out links only pages.

Use one or more header tags in your main page body and include your most important keyword phrase/s .

Use large header tags, such as <H1> and <H2>.
Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to alter the appearance of the header tags to fit the look and feel of your site. For more information read this CSS tutorial.

Check the first couple of lines of the first paragraph to see if it's appropriate to be used as a description of your page. Many search engines utilize the first couple of sentences of the body text as the search results description, instead of the contents of the META DESCRIPTION tag.

Try to achieve a minimum word count of 300 and a maximum of 750 words on each page.

Register a domain name with the exact keyword phrase you wish to target, using hyphens to separate the keywords.

For example, if the keyword phrase is "search engine rankings," then register:
search-engine-rankings.com
If the domain you want is unavailable, either try a different extension, such as .NET, .INFO, or .US, or add a keyword to the end (preferential) or beginning of the domain.

Name directories after your keyword phrases, using hyphens or underscores to separate the keywords.

For example, if an important keyword phrases is, "search engine rankings," name your directory:
www.yoursite.com/search-engine-rankings/ or...
www.yoursite.com/search_engine_rankings/
Name web pages after your most important keyword phrase. Separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores.

For example, if the keyword phrase is "search engine rankings," then name the page:
search-engine-rankings.html or...
search_engine_rankings.html
Name your graphic files after keyword phrases. Again, separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores.

For example:
<IMG SRC="search-engines-rankings.gif">
Include an ALT (alternative text) attribute in image tags. Include the most important keyword phrases.

For example:
<IMG SRC="search-engines-rankings.gif" ALT="search engine rankings.">
If you use an image map, include HTML links, as some search engines do not follow image map links. Plus image maps do not offer search engines any link text to index. So, try to avoid the use of image maps as they do not help with your search engine optimization efforts.

Use the longer or plural version of a keyword , where possible. Word stemming is a concept used by some search engines to return search results that include keywords that extend beyond what you searched for.

For example, a search with the keyword "engine" might return results for, "engines," "engineers," and "engineering." If someone searches for the longer version of a word and your page only uses the short version, then your page will be excluded from the list of possible results.

Sprinkle a few uncommon keywords and synonyms in your main body text . Less popular keywords have less competition in the search engines. So your web page has a greater chance of being listed amongst the top results.

Do not repeat keywords or keyword phrases over and over again on a web page, as this would be considered as spam by search engines.

Keep your pages as close to the root domain as possible . Do not set up more than 3 directory levels.

For example:
www.yoursite.com/index.html (1st level - excellent)
www.yoursite.com/html/index.html (2nd level - Good)
www.yoursite.com/html/marketing/index.html (3rd level - OK)
www.yoursite.com/html/marketing/search/index.html (Too many levels down - search engines will find it difficult to find and index pages this far down)
If you have a persistent (on most or all of your pages) navigation bar at the side of each page, your table is almost certainly set up in such a way that it pushes your page's body text down the HTML document. Search engines give prominence to keywords nearer the beginning of a HTML document. So, design your HTML table so that the navigation bar is placed after your main body text.

Move Javascript code to a separate file, or the end of the HTML document after your closing BODY or HTML tag. Yes, this technique actually works!

Follow these instructions to move the JavaScript code to a separate file and link to the file from the HTML document. Then place the following code in between the HEAD section:
<HEAD>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" SRC="file-name.js"></SCRIPT>
</HEAD>
This procedure also reduces your file size, and therefore your download time. In addition, it allows you to reuse the code on other pages by simply link to the JavaScript file. Both of these techniques will move your important body text nearer to the top of the HTML document.

Although not always practical, you may like to try naming your cascading style sheet tags after keywords.

For example:
.search {
color: #ff0000;
}
Use Robots.txt files instead of Robots meta tags , as some search engine robots do not recognize the tag. Visit The Web Robots Pages for more information.

Do not use font size one (1) text as the default text size . Many search engines consider tiny text to be spam. It's OK to use some font size one text.

Do not participate in link farms or link exchange programs . Search engines consider link farms and link exchange programs as spam, as they have only one purpose - to artificially inflate a site's link popularity, by exchanging links with other participants.

Do not confuse link farms and link exchange programs with reciprocal linking . Reciprocal linking is the exchange of links with individual sites, and is certainly an accepted technique for improving your site's link popularity.

Measure Your Success! - Finally, measure your success (or progress). Get a software program that will provide you with some web metrics as it pertains to your site. WebTrends and Statcounter are great ones. There are quite a few others as well. As you can see, Search Engine Optimized copy is only part of the overall SEO story. There is a lot to it, so make sure you cover every area. After all, you want to get your web site to the very top!

Disclaimer: The Search Engine Optimization Tips / Information presented and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Tips And Treats . com and/or its partners.

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