The 10 Steps To Achieving Search Engine Optimization

By: Alan Richardson

If you’ve been doing business on the internet for any period of time, you know the two fundamental ways to drive traffic to your website. The expensive way and the free way. This article addresses the latter.

So, what’s the most popular ‘free’ way to generate qualified visitors to your online business? It’s Search Engine Optimization, SEO for short.

Indeed, a site built and optimized to meet search engine requirements, will not only save you a ton of money in advertising costs, but will deliver the kind of timely and qualified traffic that turns prospects into customers.

However, contrary to popular a misconception, a well-executed SEO plan and marketing campaign, the key to obtaining high search engine rankings, involves more than merely writing Meta tags and using automated submission software.

Now there are 100’s of search engines on the internet, but all use one of two methods that exist for ranking your website. Directories use human editors to manually review your site and decide whether to include it in their directory. Open Directory and Yahoo are the best-known directory search engines.

The other search engines use ‘crawlers’, an automated process that reads through the pages and links of your website. Using complex algorithms and related information, web pages are cataloged and ranked for search results recall. Google is the most prominent crawler-based search engine.

The strategies below are designed to optimize these crawler-based search engines.

1.    Define your market and your intent.

Before crafting that dazzling knock-em-dead award-winning website, it’s vital you determine exactly what you want that site to do for you. Define your specific goals. Typically, you build your website with the intent of;

• Making sales
• Assembling a customer mailing list for future sales
• Supporting the needs of existing customers
• Building awareness of your business brand
• Educating consumers about your product or service, or
• A combination of the above.

Your choice determines your content and marketing focus. For example, if your intent is to make an immediate sale of your product or service to new customers, your content must make a strong emotional appeal to your visitors. Benefits, proof and a call to action are important components needed to compel your prospect to buy now.

On the other hand, a site designed to support existing clients provides unemotional, no-nonsense, information needed to keep that client satisfied, updated and informed.

2.    Get inside the heads of your prospect or customer.

If they can’t find you, they won’t come. And the way prospects find you through the search engines is through the terms they use to search out your particular product or service. And if you’re not using those words on your site, they’ll be directed elsewhere.

Therefore, it’s important you think like your prospective customers, not in business jargon-ese. To attract swarms of visitors to your web business, you must think like someone who doesn’t know your website exists, but wants to find out what you offer.

To assist you in this effort, several helpful web tools exist to identify the terminology your target audience uses to find your particular product or service. Tools such as ‘Good Keywords’ (free) and WordTracker (http:/www.wordtracker.com) perform like an online thesaurus to suggest the words and phrases compatible with your business related terminology. This list of comparable terms and phrases contains statistics on their search usage and assists you in choosing the best keywords to use for marketing your web pages.

3.    Content is king

It’s perhaps the best-known truism on the internet. Search engines love content – and the best content gets the best rankings. The key however is making sure those search engines can find it.

Here’s how it works. Search engines read the text on your web pages and index the text that contains the keywords you’ve chosen in step 2 above. They’ll typically search for these keywords in the body text of your pages.  Many also search for these keywords in your page title and Meta tags, which are components of your site hidden behind the visible part of your page. After a link by link search, this information is stored in the search engine database for later retrieval when searches are conducted.

If you don’t include your keywords and phrases on your pages, the engines won’t find anything to store on their database.

So, where should these keywords appear within your text? Well any text you include at the top of your page and in your headlines get identified as your most important points for the search engines.

By placing keywords at the beginning of paragraphs and in your headings, and emphasizing a portion of these words in bold font, you are signaling the search engines to utilize these words for establishing your page’s theme.

But don’t go overboard. Remember, you’re writing copy first and foremost to appeal to your customers. Use your keyword phrases where you can fit them in, but not at the expense of good copy.

Copy stuffed with keywords and phrases are not only frowned upon by your readers, but by the search engines as well.

4.    Pay attention to the invisible tag

The most important tag on your webpage is one you can’t see. It’s called the ‘Title’ tag and it appears in the title bar across the top of your browser. It is also the text that appears when you set a bookmark on the page.

Title tags represent the theme of your page. Thus, if you give your home page the title “home page”, that’s what the search engine will look for. Name it ‘Golf Club Rentals’ and your theme becomes much clearer (providing of course your running a golf club rental business)

5.    Optimize each page

The other invisible component of your web page, the Meta tag, was once a very prominent area for search engine optimization. You’ve seen them if you’ve done a Google search. They’re the short introduction you see following the search term. However, over time, they have been so abused by web builders, stuffing them with keywords often unrelated to the content.

Because of such abuse many search engines, including Google, appear to ignore them. Others, however, still consider them important. As such, using the description and keyword meta tags are still worth your effort. Take your title’s keyword or phrase and place in the meta tag description and keywords section.

Ranking criteria and weight varies from search engine to search engine. However, most calculate your rank based on a combination of the following elements:

• Prominence of the keyword searched in the viewable text
  
• Frequency of the keyword searched in the viewable text.
  
• Website Popularity, i.e. the number and the quality of inbound links to your site.
  
• "Weight" of the keywords, i.e. bold, highlighted, underlined, etc.
  
• Keyword Placement. Placement in the top 1/3^rd of the page and at the beginning of paragraphs is best.
  
• Proximity of words in a keyword phrase to each other. For example, a search for keyword phrase ‘article directory software’ will produce better results if the words are adjacent to each other, rather than each word in the phrase used, but separated by other words.
  
• Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the < TITLE> tag(s)
  
• Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the < META NAME="DESCRIPTION”> tag
  
• Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the < META NAME="KEYWORD”> tag. Note, keep the number of repeated keywords to 3 or less.
• Keywords in < H1> or other headline tags. This is the visible headline.
  
• Keywords in the < A HREF="http://yourcompany.com/page.htm">< /A> link tags. This should accurately describe the theme of the page it links to.
• Keywords in ALT image tags. Include a single word or phrase to each.
  
• Keywords in < !-- > comment tags
  
• Keywords contained in the hideen form tag, e.g.“< INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="HIDDEN" VALUE="include list of keywords here">”.
  
• Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g., http://www.keyword.com/keyword.htm
  
• Grammatical correctness and natural-sounding word patterns.
  
• Absence of formatting, repetition, and word arrangement that could be considered spam.

Every engine employs thresholds for each of the above variables. This protects the engines from spammers who clutter up search results. And it’s also why simply repeating keywords or changing keywords to match the background color of your site (hiding them from view) will not work.

6.    Create links to all pages

As we’ve stated, search engines find your pages by following the links.

Thus, it is important that every page on your website have at minimum one, and preferably more, links from other pages on your site. If not, that page becomes an ‘orphan’. A number of engines, including Google, do not include orphan pages on their database.

And don’t forget to use your keywords as part of these links. Utilize the same keywords in the title of the page in all links to that page.

7.    Think cash, not flash

The ‘bells and whistles’ on your website may impress your audience… however, they don’t necessarily result in increased business. When your site employs Flash, frames, image maps and Java buttons, chances are the search engines are unable to read your page.

In addition, ASP, PHP, Cold Fusion and other databases generate URL’s with illegal characters, stopping the search engines in their tracks. The result is your site becomes invisible. If JavaScript is a requirement for your website, place the script in a separate file and off the page.

8.    Create a site map

A simple site map using text links assists both human visitors and search engine spiders in navigating your website. Use a layout of HTML links with keyword descriptions. Link your map to every page on your site. This allows the engines to find and spider your entire website.

9.    Keep your copy tight

Pages linking off your home page are best optimized for search engines if they contain between 300 - 550 words. To often, web businesses use sparse text in their internal pages, thus closing a potential open door into their site. Consistency is important in assuring the search engines find and index every page and potential entry into your website.

At the same time, make sure your copy gets to the point. Place your most important copy, including your keywords, as close to your home page root as possible.

10.          Test and measure constantly

First, let me say, when it comes to the search engines, patience is a requirement as you wait for all your hard work to pay off. It’s not atypical for full propagation of your website in the search engines to take 3 months or more. However, when the results do come in, be prepared to take action.

And to take the proper action, it’s important you have the tools in place to measure results, based on the goals for your web business.

For example, if your site’s intent is producing sales or generating leads, install a tracking package to discover the search words used to find your site, the specific engines delivering the traffic and which search word and engine combination is producing the most sales or leads for you.

Of course, every 12 months or so, expect the search engines to change their algorithms to stay ahead of the webmasters attempting to master their formula. Then re-measure and reassess.

However, keep in mind, while the algorithms are consistently changing, the basic tenets of search engine optimization do not. That is;

• Content is king.
• Link all your pages
• Get links from others.
• Make sure the search engines can read your site.
• Measure, test, modify, and repeat.

Keep these main points in mind, and the search engines will love you.

Copyright 2005 Alan Richardson

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About The Author Alan Richardson is a well-known internet consultant and publisher with http://www.optimalwebservices.com - a Web resource firm in North Easton, Massachusetts, offering free advice and information for web-based small businesses and entrepreneurs. To read other articles by Alan, click http://www.optimalwebservices.com/articles.html To signup for the free 'Optimal Web Services for Small Business' ezine, click http://www.optimalwebservices.com/subscribe.html