The exclusive information this article contains is,
- Methodology to Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
- Understanding Search Engines
- Decide Which Search Engines Are Important
- Learn the Search Engine Ranking Criteria
- Keywords Are Critical
- Brainstorming, Surveying, and Reviewing Promotional Material
When people conduct Internet searches, they rarely go beyond the first couple pages of results. If you want to be noticed, you need to appear in the top 10 or 15 search results—ideally, you want to appear on the top half of the front page of search results. But before you submit to the search engines, you have to be sure your site has been designed to be search engine friendly. In this article, we cover:
- • The methodology to make your site search engine friendly
- • The key elements of Web site design to accommodate search engines
- • The all-important content
- • The importance of keywords in all aspects of your Web site
- • The elements that are in the search engine algorithms or formulas that are outside your Web site
- • The importance of link popularity and link relevancy to your search engine placement.
Methodology to Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
To make your site search engine friendly, you have to:
- • Decide which search engines are critical for your success.
- • Learn as much as you can about their ranking criteria and the weighting given to each criterion in their algorithm. It is also important to know which databases they are using.Then you must:
- • Determine the keywords that your target market is using in the search engines to find what you have to offer,
- • Assign those keywords to specific pages throughout your site, and then
- • Populate the pages with the assigned keywords in the appropriate places given the ranking criteria for your targeted search engines.
The remainder of this article walks you step-by-step through this process.
Understanding Search Engines
Search engines use programs or intelligent agents, called bots, to actually search the Internet for pages that they index using specific parameters as they read the content. The agent reads the information on every page of your site and then follows the links. For example, Google’s spiders continually crawl the Web looking for sites to index and, of course, index sites upon their submission. Google is obviously very important in the search engine community, so be sure your site is easily accessible to its spider. A detailed discussion on submissions to search engines and directories can be found in the next articles. Registering with search engines is fairly simple. In most cases, you simply have to submit your URL or Internet address on their submission form. Even if your URL is not registered with search engines, a number of the major search engines will eventually find you, as their bots are continually roaming the Internet looking for new sites to index. Your odds of being indexed increase significantly if you have a well-developed links strategy. There are millions of sites out there, so I suggest that you be proactive and register your site to ensure a speedier listing. Once you are registered, some of the bots will periodically visit your site looking for changes and updates.
A common problem faced by Internet marketers is how to influence search engines to index their site appropriately and how to ensure that their site appears when people use relevant search criteria. Many of the interesting and creative sites on the Internet are impossible to find because they are not indexed with the major search engines. The majority (85 percent) of Internet users employ search engines or directories to find what they are looking for on the Web. They do this by typing in a keyword or phrase that represents what they are looking for. Usually people use a two- or three-keyword phrase. The following sections explore how to make your Web site more search engine friendly.
Many search engines and directories either partner with or license the use of the search technology of another search engine or directory. If you submit your site to a search engine that uses Google’s index, then the design of your site influences how you’re indexed in all search engines that rely on Google for their search results. For example, Google’s results can be found on AOL, Netscape, HotBot, Lycos, and more. Google’s paid advertising results appear on many other sites as well.
In a similar fashion, you often find other search engine and directory data intermixed or included in some form with the data of another search engine or directory. To take this example further, some search engines are built on the premise of pooling the search results of many search providers and presenting the results to the end user—they do not maintain their own index, but rather manipulate the results of many other search engines in hopes of providing a better search experience. This type of search tool is called a meta-search engine. Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com) is an example of a meta-search engine.
When designing your site, you must always keep the search engines in mind. Something as simple as a DHTML drop-down menu on your site or a Flash intro can cause problems with the search engines and the indexing of your site if implemented incorrectly. You want to do everything you can to ensure that your site is designed to meet the needs of your target audience while remaining completely search engine friendly. Search engines can produce a significant amount of traffic to your site if you can manage to be placed in the top search results.
Decide Which Search Engines Are Important
To start this process, you want to decide which search engines you are going to be concerned about when taking steps necessary to rank high in their search results. For this section we are talking about organic listings rather than payper-click or sponsored listings.
Organic listings are the search results that are displayed to the left of the page and below the sponsored listings. Organic listings are free listings and are gained by how your site is ranked based on a unique formula, or algorithm, for each search engine. Pay-per-click or sponsored listings, on the other hand, are listings that are paid for and gained through a bidding process. Sponsored listings are always displayed at the top of the results and down the right-hand side of the page. Ranking high in the pay-to-play search engines is discussed more in the next articles.
You want to select a number of the most popular search engines for your concentration. You also want to be indexed in topic-specific search engines for your industry. You can find the most popular search engines by doing your research online through sites. You can keep up with what’s happening in the search engines by joining one of the many discussion lists on the topic. As it stands at the time of this writing, the major players in the search engine industry are:
- • Google (http://www.google.com)
- • Yahoo! (http://www.search.yahoo.com)
- • MSN Search (http://search.msn.com)
- • AOL (http://www.aol.com)
- • Ask (http://www.ask.com).
Learn the Search Engine Ranking Criteria
Each search engine has its own unique ranking criteria and its own unique algorithm, or formula, giving different weighting to each of the criteria in its formula. For the search engines that you have decided to focus on, you have to learn as much as you can about their ranking criteria and relative weighting.The site with the highest score appears at the top of the results and the rest appear in descending order of their score.
How The Search Engines Rank Sites
Keyword Phrase Placement Points
+
Link Popularity/Link Relevancy Points
+
Miscellaneous Points
=
Total Score
(Formula for how the search engines rank Web sites)
The search engines are all fighting for market share. The more market share a search engine has, the more valuable the company is. To gain market share,a search engine has to provide better results than its competition. It is for this reason that the search engines are changing and improving their formulas on an ongoing basis. You have to keep up with changes in these formulas, tweak your site accordingly, and resubmit when necessary. The search engines use different databases for their search results. They
have different algorithms or formulas for their ranking. They have different weighting for the various elements within their formula. They change their formulas over time and they change their ranking over time. Sound complicated?
Things have changed quite a bit from the early days. Elements that used to have significant weighting may now have very little weight. You have to remember that it is the highest total score you are looking for, so even if an element has reduced weighting, if the element has any points at all you want to incorporate that element to maximize your total score. Sometimes the top sites are within a small number of points of each other.
It is not as daunting as it might sound, because the major search engines tend to look at similar information but weight the relevancy for particular items differently in their algorithms. That having been said, here are the most important areas on a Web page that you must address when performing organic search engine optimization:
- • Title tags (page titles)
- • Keyword meta-tags
- • Description meta-tags
- • Alt tags
- • Hypertext links (e.g., anchor text)
- • Domain names and file names
- • Body text (beginning, middle, and end of page copy)
- • Headers
- • Between the “NOFRAMES” tag of framed Web sites.
Page titles and text-based page content are the most important of the noted placement areas. Keyword meta-tags are not as critical as they once were, but are still applicable for some engines. Remember—it is the absolute highest score you are looking for; if there are any points available, you want to design your site to take advantage of them.
Because Google is the favorite search engine for the time being, let’s take a closer look at how it ranks pages. Google uses its internal index for its primary search listings. Google has many other features as well, some of which include:
- An images search
- Usenet news database
- A news search feature
- Froogle (a shopping search tool)
- A local search
- A blog search
- A video search
- A product search
- A directory search
- A catalog search
- Advertising services through the Google AdWords programs.
The ranking formula for Google’s main search function looks for the keywords in the visible body text, header tags, title tags, hypertext links, and Alt tags. Google gives a very heavy weighting to the link popularity, with extra points for quality of links and relevancy of text around the links. Google also has miscellaneous points available for such things as:
- Age of domain/site—The longer your domain name has been registered, the more likely you are serious about being online for the long term.
- File size—Try not to exceed 100k. A recent study found that the body section of your site ranks best between 50 and 70k in size. More than 100k in size might not be cached unless it is considered exceptional content.
- Freshness of content—Google is always looking for sites that are updated on a regular basis. The more frequent you update your site, the more frequent Google’s spiders will visit your site.
- Links from directories—Google awards points if directories such as Yahoo!, Looksmart, DMOZ, and About provide a link to your site.
Most of the search engines are giving heavy weighting to link popularity— that is, the number of links to your site from other sites on the Internet. The search engines are getting very sophisticated in the weighting of link popularity, with the search engines giving extra points for link relevancy—that is, how high the site with the link to your site would rank for the same keyword. Other points are awarded based on the keywords in the text around the link pointing to your Web site. For strategies on generating significant links to your site, see in the next articles.
Keywords Are Critical
Keywords are the terms and phrases that your target market uses when searching the major search engines and directories for the products and services you sell. Your keywords are used in everything you do and are the key determining factor in how you rank in the search results among many of the major search engines.
A critical step in natural search engine optimization is to select the right keywords for your business, products, or services (including descriptive words), and your target market. Understand whom you are targeting and build your search engine optimization efforts around your audience.
You need to choose keyword phrases that are going to bring sustainable targeted traffic consisting of potential customers—not just anything and everything. What you may think is the perfect keyword phrase may not be used at all by your target market in their search queries, which is why it is so critical to research and validate your keywords.
Ideally, each page of your Web site is going to focus on a different set of keywords that are specific to the content at hand. If you were to focus on the same set of keywords on every page, then you would hit only one small portion of your market potential because you are only going to hit those same keywords over and over again—it is self-defeating.
First, you want to gather a master list of all possible keyword phrases. To make the data easier to manage, you can create different keyword list profiles that represent individual topics as opposed to trying to cover all topics in a giant master list. For example, if you have two product lines, you can create a keyword list for each. Naturally, some keywords are shared across the lists, but it is important to understand that the people looking for one topic (for instance, “jobs”) are not necessarily the same people looking for another topic (let’s say, “trucks”), and as such they are going to use different keyword combinations in their searches.
How do you create your master keyword list? Here are four solid techniques for generating a list of potential keyword phrases:
- 1. Brainstorm, survey, and review promotional material.
- 2. Review competing and industry-leading Web sites.
- 3. Assess your Web site traffic logs.
- 4. Use keyword suggestion and evaluation tools.
Be sure to record the keywords you gather in a text document in your wordprocessing program or in a spreadsheet. Including them in a spreadsheet or
database makes them much easier to sort when it comes time to prioritize the
keywords and weed out the junk.
As you work your way through the list of techniques, you want to cycle back to some of the techniques because you will come across search terms that can expand the scope of your original efforts and open the door to new, more targeted phrases that you might have missed the first time around.
Brainstorming, Surveying, and Reviewing Promotional Material
At this stage, the idea is to gather all the keyword phrases you can, within reason. Sit down with a pen and paper and jot down all keywords that come to mind. Bring other members of your team in on this process to fuel ideas. There is nothing scientific or technical to be concerned with here—the sky’s the limit, but try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Try to think as your target market would if they were to do a search for information on a topic contained within your site. Do not just think about what
Brainstorming, Surveying, and Reviewing Promotional Material
At this stage, the idea is to gather all the keyword phrases you can, within reason. Sit down with a pen and paper and jot down all keywords that come to mind. Bring other members of your team in on this process to fuel ideas. There is nothing scientific or technical to be concerned with here—the sky’s the limit, but try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Try to think as your target market would if they were to do a search for information on a topic contained within your site. Do not just think about what
people would do to find your site, but what they would do if they didn’t know your business existed and were looking for the types of products and services you sell.
Here are several questions to help you with your brainstorming process:
- 1. What business are you in (for instance, automobile parts or construction)?
- 2. What is the focus of your Web site (is it a resource, a guide, a store)? What would people search for if they were looking for a Web site like yours?
- 3. If your customer were to take a guess at your Web address, what would it be? Remember, they do not know who you are, but they know what kind of products or services they are looking for.
- 4. What products and services do you sell? What are some of the descriptive words or benefits of your products and services that might be familiar to your target market? For example, if your site offers information on resort spas, then one descriptive keyword you might choose could be massage.Also, include words that describe the benefits of these services or the service in more detail, such as massage therapy and full-body massage.
Your current corporate materials, brochures, and other marketing collateral can be a valuable source of keyword phrases. Begin by indiscriminately highlighting any words that people might search for if they are looking for products or services your company has to offer.
To assist you in developing your keyword list, consider asking your customers
To assist you in developing your keyword list, consider asking your customers
for their input. Ask what keywords they might use to find a site like yours.
You can always turn to a thesaurus for additional ideas if you get stumped.
No comments:
Post a Comment