There is perhaps no more level playing field in business than the Internet.
It is this fact that has created millionaires from paupers. The amount of money
that can be made depends of course on your industry and your products and/or
services but to be sure, if it can be sold at all, it can be sold online.
While there are many methods out there for building a profitable website,
from banner ads to email campaigns, by far the most cost effective over time has
proven repeatedly to be search engine positioning. That major advantage search
engine positioning has over other methods of producing revenue online is that
once high rankings are attained and provided that the tactics used were ethical
and that continued efforts are made to keep them, they can essentially hold and
provide targeted traffic indefinitely. Your site will rise and your site may
sometimes fall in the rankings but a solid and complete optimization of your
site will insure that through algorithm changes you may fluctuate but you will
not disappear.
I have been ranking websites highly on the Internet for quite a few years now
and there are some essential rules that, if followed, will insure that over time
your website does well and holds solid and profitable positions on the major
search engines.
Here are the 10 steps to higher search engine positioning:
Step One - Choosing Keywords
You first must choose your keywords. This is perhaps the most important step of
the process as incorrectly targeting phrases can result in traffic that is not
interested in your product. There are three tools that I use virtually every day
to help pick the most appropriate keywords:
- Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool
- WordTracker
- A Brain
The last in the list is the most important. Look through the potential
keyword phrases and think, "Who would be searching using that phrase?" If the
answer is, "a student looking for information" then chances are it won't result
in a sale. If the answer is "Someone who is looking specifically for a product I
offer," then obviously this is a prime candidate as a targeted keyword phrase.
Step Two - Site Content
Even before I optimize websites I like to get a good deal of new content down in
order to insure that I know exactly where I'm going and exactly what I need to
do to get there. Creating some of the new content before starting the
optimization process can be doubly helpful in that it can reveal potential
additions to your website that you may not have considered (a forum or blog for
example). If you already have a site, perhaps simply sit on your back deck, sip
on a coffee and imagine what you would do if your whole site was lost and you
had to start again (other than launch into a very colorful discussion with your
hosting company).
Step Three - Site Structure
A solid site structure is very important. Creating a site that is easily
spidered by the search engines yet attractive to visitors can be a daunting and
yet entirely rewarding endeavor. To adequately structure your website you must
"think like a spider" which is not as difficult as it may sound. A search engine
spider reads your web page like you would read a book. It starts at the top
left, reads across, and then moves down.
Priority must be given then, to what you place near the top of your page.
Step Four - Optimization
Once you have your keyword targets, your content created and your site structure
established you must now move on to the most obvious step, the optimization of
your content.
As noted above, a spider places importance on what it reads highest on the
page and so beginning with a sentence that includes your targeted phrase only
makes sense. That said, stuffing in keywords in hopes that it will add weight to
your page generally doesn't work. The term "keyword density" refers to the
percentage of your content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There are
optimum densities according to many reputable SEO's though exactly what they are
is debata ble. Estimates seem to range anywhere from 4 or 5% to 10 to 12% (quite
a gap isn't it).
Personally, when it comes to keyword density I prescribe to one rule: put
your keywords in the content as much as you can while keeping it comfortably
readable to a human visitor.
Some do it first, I do it last, regardless of when you do it you must choose
your heading. At the beginning of your content you have the opportunity to use
the <h1> tag to specify the heading of your content. This tag is given extra
weight and is also an indicator to the search engine of where your actual
content starts. Make sure to use your keywords in the heading but don't shy away
from also adding additional words (though not too many).
Step Five - Internal Linking
To insure that your website gets fully indexed you have to make sure that the
spiders have an easy path through your website. Text links make the best choice
as the anchor text (the actual words used to link to a specific page) add
relevancy to that page for the words used to link to it. For example, if I ran a
website on acne and had a treatments page I could link to it with an image, with
text reading "Click for more information on how to treat this skin condition" or
simply "Acne Treatments". When a search engine spider hits an image it has no
idea what the image is and, while it will follow the link, it will not give any
weight to the page it hits. If you use text that does not contain the keywords
you are targeting you are essentially supplying the engine with the same lack of
relevancy as with an image, but if you use the phrase "Acne Treatments" to link
to your acne treatments page you are attaching relevancy to that page for those
keywords.
There are two main ways to insure that your site gets well spidered AND that
the relevancy is added. The first is to place text links on the bottom of your
homepage to your main internal pages (not EVERY page, that just looks odd). The
second is to create a sitemap to all your internal pages and link to it from
your homepage. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages but that's a whole
article unto itself.
Step Six - Human Testing
So now you have your site, it's optimized and you have your navigation in place.
The next step is to put it past someone who has never seen your site (and
preferably who won't know how much work you've put in and tell you it's great
even if it's not).
Ask them to find specific information and see how long it takes. Ask someone
else to just surf your site and watch which links they click and ask them why
they chose those ones.
Most importantly, find out how the content reads to them. You've spent hours
working through the content at this point and are probably not the least biased
on its readers. Find out how it reads to someone who has no invested interest in
the site and correct any issues they may bring up.
Step Seven - Submissions
I take a different philosophy than most when it cones to search engine
submissions. I submit to directories (both general and topic-specific) and to a
few topical search engines but for the most part I've found submitting to
Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other major engines has proven to be a bit of a
waste of time. The major search engines are spidering search engines, which
means they will follow links to wherever they go. Simply having sites that are
spidered by the major search engines linking to you will get your site found.
When I have spent time submitting my sites I have found they get picked up in
about a week. When I have simply skipped this step and sought out reputable
directories and other sites to get links from I have found that at least the
homepage of the site gets indexed in as little as two days.
Neither will hurt your rankings but simply to make the best use of your time,
seek our directories and other websites to get links from and leave the spiders
to find you on their own.
Step Eight - Link Building
All of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links
pointing to them. How many is enough depends on your industry and targeted
phrases. Running a search on Google the reads "link:www.yourcompetition.com"
will reveal approximately how many links a competitor has.
The first place to seek links is with general and topic-specific directories.
After that you may want to move into reciprocal link building. Reciprocal link
building is the exchange of links between two websites. Some webmasters will
simply link to any website that links back to them. I highly recommend being
more particular than that.
Find websites that you believe your site visitors would genuinely be
interested in and you've probably found a good link partner. You want to find
links from sites that are related to yours.
There are obviously many more methods to building links than directories and
reciprocal link building. Again though, this is a whole article (or more) in
itself.
Step Nine - Monitoring
Whether you use WebPosition Gold or just run searches manually by hand you will
have to monitor the major search engines for your targeted phrases. Also, you
will need to review your stats to see where your traffic is coming from and what
search terms are being used to find you.
If a month passes and you don't see any changes then more work needs to be
done. I'm certainly not stating that you should take a month off, a solid search
engine positioning strategy involves constantly adding content, building links,
and insuring that your visitors are getting the information they want to have
and finding it as easily as possible.
Step Ten - Reward Yourself
So you've done it. It's taken many many hours of work but you're rankings are
doing well. What you've created is a solid position that will stand the tests of
time provided that you continually revisit the above noted steps and insure that
your website is always one step ahead of your competition (who have noticed you
climbing and succeeding as you would notice others climbing up around your
ranking).
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