19 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from showing up on search engines Many webmasters have the problem that their Web site is not listed in search engines at all. There can be a variety of reasons that your Web site doesn't show up on search engines. Reason #1: You are using frames. Many search engines have problems with frames. They often only index the frameset page and not the individual frames that contain the actual content. Unfortunately, the frameset page usually doesn't have META tags, title and enough content (text) to obtain a listing on a search engine. The best solution to this problem would be to avoid frames. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen counts frames as one of the top ten mistakes in Web design: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html If you really must use frames, consider the following points: 1. Add a description of your Web site in the area so that search engines can index that text. There you should also add a link to the homepage. 2. When a search engine indexes a frame page outside of the frameset, the visitor can be left stranded and unable to link into your site. So your individual frame pages should always contain a link back into your site. 3. Add some JavaScript to force frame pages into the frameset. This prevents visitors from inadvertently accessing an orphaned Web page. You can use the following JavaScript snippet: --- if (top.location.href == self.location) { top.location.href = "URL of your frame file"; } ---- Webreference.com offers a very good introduction to frames: http://webreference.com/dev/frames/ Reason #2: You are using a lot of pictures on your Web site but very little text Search engines need text to index your Web site. They cannot know what's written on your GIF or JPEG images. If you use a lot of images on your Web site, you should also create some Web pages that have a lot of text. Some Web site promotion consultants will tell you to create so-called doorway pages. A doorway page is a Web page that contains plain text and a link to your main Web page. On that doorway page, you should describe the content of your Web site in many sentences that contain many keywords that are important for your Web site. However, some search engines only lists Web pages if at least one remote Web page is linking to it. In that case, a doorway page will not work. Don't use doorway pages for search engine spamming! Only use doorways that have something to do with the content of your Web pages. Note that many search engines already ignore doorway pages. For that reason, try to give your real Web site as much content (text) as possible. Fresh, continuously updated content is one of the best ways to ensure that your visitors will return again and again. Here are 3 tips for building and distributing your content: 1. Build one page of quality content per day. Write timely, topical articles with about 250-500 words. If you aren't sure what you can write about, look in your log files which search phrases have been used to come to your site. Or use Overture's keyword suggestion tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and find the core set of keywords for your topic area. Those are your subject starters. 2. Stay abreast of developments in your sector. If the big site "ABC" is coming out with product "XYZ" in autumn, then write about the product or the product sector in general and have it ready in June so that search engines can index it early. For example, all the Nintendo GameCube sites you can find in Google today - those have been submitted 3-4 months ago. 3. Syndicate your content (along with your name and Web site URL)! Other webmasters will gladly incorporate your articles into their Web sites. Just search for "syndicate your articles", "syndicate your content" and "submit your article" on Google. Reason #3: The submitted Web page is only a redirection. If the Web page you submit contains a redirection to another Web site, most search engines will skip your Web site completely. Do not submit a redirection Web page. Many webmasters tried to cheat search engines with redirection pages in the past. The search engines companies discovered that and they decided to totally skip Web pages with redirections. Submit a real Web page that contains the product description visible to the reader. Sometimes, you have old Web pages listed on search engines and you want them to redirect to the new Web site. There are several ways to do it: 1. You can implement a server side redirect on the old Web page, using the 301 Moved Permanently error message. This will redirect users to the new Web site, but also tells the search engines that this page has moved permanently. Some search engines will drop the page from their index, and some will eventually replace the old page with the new one without hurting your rankings. 2. You can use the META Refresh tag on the old Web page, for example <META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="5; URL=http://www.axandra.com"> tells the browser to load www.axandra.com 5 seconds after the current document has finished loading. However, some old Web browsers don't support that tag, and some search engines penalize pages that use a refresh of a few seconds or less (more about this in our search engine ranking report, see http://www.axandra.com/search-engine-studies/index.htm ). 3. Instead of the META Refresh tag, you can also use JavaScript to load a new document: <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> <!-- location.replace("http://www.your-new-site.com"); --> </SCRIPT> Most search engine robots ignore JavaScript so this method of redirection is unlikely to be penalized. 4. You can also delete the old Web page and create a custom 404 error page. This ensures that visitors will be redirected to the new site if they click on a broken link or enter an incorrect URL. The 404 error page should contain a link to your home page and to the primary sections of your Web site. To move to a new Web site and to keep your old search engine rankings, I recommend using one of the methods 1 or 3. Reason #4: You have submitted your Web site too often. If you submit your Web site more often than once a month, most search engines will consider that spamming and they will skip your site. Spamming does not work with search engines. Most likely, it will backfire to you. More and more search engines are able to detect spam attempts and penalize or ban your page from their listings. Sites that spam search engines degrade the value of search engine listings. As the problem grows, these sites may face the same backlash that spam mail generates. The content of most Web pages ought to be enough for search engines to determine relevancy without webmasters having to resort to repeating keywords for no reason other than to try and "beat" other Web pages. The stakes will simply keep rising, and users will also begin to hate sites that undertake these measures. Submit your Web site to search engines and wait for 4 weeks. Then search for the URL of your site. If the search engine cannot find your site, submit your URL again. How you can check if your Web site has been indexed: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/checkurl.html How often you should resubmit your Web pages? http://www.promoteclick.com/articles/ar22.htm Reason #5: You overuse keywords on your Web site. Many search engines fear to be spammed if you overuse keywords on your Web site. Do not repeat your keywords too often in your meta tags or in the body of your Web pages. Nobody knows the magic number for the search engines but a paragraph such as the one below is not a good idea: "Ebooks are great. I love ebooks. I've read hundreds of ebooks. You can learn much from ebooks. On my Web site you can find tons of free ebooks. When you subscribe to my newsletter on ebooks, you get two additional free ebooks." Some years ago, you may have obtained a top ranking for the keyword "ebooks", but today the search engines will quickly ignore such nonsense and probably write it off as "spamming". It could even cause the engine spider to skip your Web site completely. Unfortunately, search engines do not indicate on their help pages the maximum allowed number of repetitions. Some webmasters suspect this to be three, some say six. There's no way of knowing until you are penalised. Further webmaster discussion about keywords: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum.cgi?ran=956&forum=8&show=60 Reason #6: Text in the background color of the web "Color can kill your ranking!" Some Web designers, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, try to make their Web pages as keyword-rich as possible. They try to spam search engines by repeating keywords in the same color as the background color to make the text invisible to browsers and search engine spiders. However, almost all search engines already know that trick. They will penalize or even blacklist your Web page if they determine that your page is trying to unfairly misrepresent its actual content. This tactic is commonly referred to as "spamming the search engines" or "spamdexing". Unfortunately, the problem is that the search engines may end up penalizing Web sites which did not intend to use the hidden text trick. For example, suppose you have a Web page with a black background and a table in that page with a white background. Now suppose that you've added some black text in that table. This text will be visible to your human visitors, so in fact, the text isn't hidden. However, the search engines can interpret this to be hidden text because they overlook the table background color. I recommend going through all your Web pages and make sure that you haven't inadvertently made any such mistake. And, by the way, search engines also catch on using a slightly different color than the background color to hide words, so don't use that trick. Reason #7: Your Web pages are created dynamically. Databases and dynamically generated Web pages are great tools to manage the contents of big Web sites. Imagine you'd have to manage the Web site contents of the New York Times without databases... Unfortunately, dynamically generated Web pages can be a nightmare for search engine spiders because the pages don't actually exist until they are requested. A search engine spider is not going to be able to select all necessary variables on the submit page. The exceptions are the spider programs from Google and Inktomi. They are able to index Web pages that are dynamically generated, even those that use question marks and query strings. On the other side, AltaVista isn't able to index dynamically generated Web pages, and here's why: http://help.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_wellindexed If you create dynamic Web pages with the help of Active Server Pages (ASP), ColdFusion, CGI, Perl or the Apache Server, then the following Web page offers good avice: http://spider-food.net/dynamic-page-optimization-b.html Reason #8: You have moved your site to a new server. Every time you move a Web site to a Web hosting company, or when you change the domain name, the IP/DNS address of your domain name changes. While people see URLs (www.yourdomain.com), search engines often only see IP addresses. This means that you need to re-submit your Web site to all search engines and directories when you move your Web site to a new Web hosting company or when you change your domain name. In time, search engines will realize that your IP/DNS address has changed and will remove the old IP address from their index. It's important that you re-submit only when the move is completely finished. A good way to know when the IP address change has been updated is to upload a slightly different version of the index page to the new server. When you enter www.yourdomain.com in your Web browser and see the different version you'll know that DNS servers of your ISP (Internet Service Provider) have been updated. If you have changed your server, resubmit your Web site URL to search engines. If you have changed your domain name, you should also change your Yahoo and Open Directory Project listings. If you want to change your Yahoo listing, go to: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/change If you want to change your Open Directory Project listing: Go to " http://dmoz.org/ ". First locate the category in which the site appears in (search for your domain name), and go to that category. Click the Update URL link at the top of the Web page. Enter the URL of the Web site you would like to update. A new page loads where you can make changes. Click the Update URL button once you've finished with the changes. If you change your domain name, it's likely that you lose your old visitors. Here's advice how to reduce the loss of visitors: http://www.thesitewizard.com/news/movinghosts.shtml Reason #9: Your Web page does not have unique IP address. Does your Web site has a unique IP address? If not, your Web site is running the risk of getting banned from the search engines. Human beings use domain names like yahoo.com, but network computers use IP addresses, which are numeric addresses written as four numbers, separated by periods. Every domain name translates to a so-called IP address. For example, yahoo.com is translated to "64.58.76.225". Just enter "http://64.58.76.225/" in your Web browser and you'll go to www.yahoo.com. Many Web hosting services don't give out unique IP addresses to their customers to save money. They assign the same IP address to multiple domain names. This means that several hundred Web sites could all be using the same IP address as your site does. There are 3 reasons why you need a unique IP address: If you're sharing an IP address with 50 other sites, you're trusting them not to over-submit or spam the search engines. When a search engine blocks an IP address, all the sites that are sharing that IP address are blocked. You could wind up being banned from the search engine. If the server or the search engine spider software is misconfigured, the search engine spider may end up obtaining a Web page from another domain with the same IP address. This may mean that the other Web site gets indexed instead of yours, or your Web site will be found for the keywords which are applicable to the other site. Rumor has it that having your own unique IP address may help your search engine ranking. So when you select a Web hosting service, make sure that your domain name has a unique IP address, even if it means that you have to pay a bit more for your hosting. Are you sharing an IP address with people you don't even know? Here's a way to test it yourself: Go to " http://www.eamnesia.com/hostinfo/i.jhtml " and enter your domain name (for example, yahoo.com). (If this URL doesn't work anymore, go to " http://www.name-space.com/search/ " and enter your domain name in the nslookup field.) The result page shows you what IP address your site resolves to (for example, 64.58.76.225) Copy the IP address to the clipboard. Open a new window in your Web browser, enter the IP address (for example, http://64.58.76.225 ) and hit Return. If your Web site appears, you have your own IP address. If another Web site or an error message appears, you probably share the IP address with others. If you are unsure, ask your Web hosting service company if your Web site has its own IP address. Reason #10: You are hosting your Web site at a free Web space provider. Some search engines (e.g. AltaVista) limit the number of pages they will index from a single domain. For example, if your Web page is hosted at Geocities.com or Tripod.com, it might happen that your Web site is not listed just because the maximum page limit for that special domain name is reached. Some search engines no longer even index pages residing on common free Web hosting services. Their complaint is that they get too many spam or low-quality submissions from free Web site domains. However, Google is the exception. Google does index Web pages on Geocities.com and Tripod.com. Those pages also seem to have a Google PageRank of at least 3/10 because they are linked from a popular domain. In summary, if you are serious about doing business on the Web, it helps tremendously to have your own domain name. Put yourself in the customer shoes: Would you buy from a Web site that is called "sub.free-web-space- provider.com/~category/162742/ my_business/home.htm"? A domain name is easier to remember for your customers and it helps to build trust. And while we're at it: A recent survey by Consumers Union found that only 29 percent of Americans trust Internet sites that sell products. Consumer WebWatch research report on trust: http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/news/1_abstract.htm How to gain your customers' trust: http://www.ecommercebase.com/article/37 Reason #11: Your host server was non-operational during spidering. It can happen that your Web server is down when a search engine spider tries to index it. If your Web site fails to respond when the search engine spider visits your site, your site will not be indexed. Even worse, if your Web site is already indexed and the search engine spider finds that your site is down, you'll often be removed from the search engine database. It's essential to have Web space on servers that are very seldom down. Choosing a reliable Web space provider is very important for a successful online business. At first it sounds impressive when your Web space provider promises 99% server reliability. But take a moment to calculate it. It means that 1% of the time, your potential customers cannot reach your Web site. One percent of a year means that your Web site will be down for nearly 4 days per year. That equals 4 days without sales. As you can see, 99% reliability is not enough. You must constantly monitor your server so that you can act immediately if your server is down (e.g. call the service provider to restart the server). Here's a free monitoring service: http://www.internetseer.com Another free Web site monitoring service (without ads): http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime/ A freeware tool that can monitor the uptime of your site: http://www.idyle.com/software/internet/host-monitor/ Monitoring service for bigger companies: http://www.atwatch.com/ Reason #12: You don't allow robots to index your Web site. Imagine you're a Internet marketing service company and you keep trying very hard to get a top ranking in the search engines for your customer. Even after several weeks, the customer's Web site hasn't been listed in any search engine. Then you start to realize that the search engine spiders and robot programs cannot access the Web site because your customer blocks them (by mistake). There are two ways to block search engine robots: a) with a simple text file in the root directory of the host server, or b) with a certain META tag in the Web pages. a) Robots.txt The host server might have a plain text file named "robots.txt" in the root directory. It contains rules for the search engine spiders. The rules in the robots.txt file follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a document designed to help Web administrators and authors of Web spiders agree on a way to navigate and catalog Web sites. The content of the robots.txt file consists of two main commands: "User-agent" and "Disallow". The User-agent command specifies the name of the robot for which the following commands should be applied to. You can set this to "*" to have the spidering commands applied to any robot. The second command, "Disallow", specifies a partial URL that should not be indexed by the Web robot. The text --- User-agent: * Disallow: / --- tells all search engine spider programs to go away. If you find a text file called "robots.txt" in the root directory of the host server with the above content, you should delete it immediately. The text file says that no search engine is allowed to index your Web site. Even if your robots.txt file don't contain the above commands, you should make sure that its syntax is correct. A robots.txt file with a faulty syntax also prevents search engine spiders to index your Web site. To check the syntax of your robots.txt file, you can use this free tool (just enter your domain name www.domain.com): http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html b) The META ROBOTS tag There's a second way to stop search engine robot programs to index your Web site: the META ROBOTS tag. If you find the following HTML tag in your Web pages: --- <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow"> --- you should replace it immediately with --- <META NAME="robots" CONTENT"="index,follow"> --- If you want all search engine spiders to index all Web pages, you can also remove the META ROBOTS tag from your Web pages. Further information about both ways to stop search engines to index your Web site can be found at: - http://www.wdvl.com/Location/Search/Robots.html - http://www.ebrandmanagement.com/whitepapers/robots2.htm Reason #13: Your Web pages require a full-fledged browser. When search engines crawl the Web to find new Web pages, they use special software for it, called "spiders", "robots" or "crawlers". These crawler programs don't have the functionality of full-fledged Web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. In fact, search engine robot programs look at your Web pages like a text browser does. They like text, text, and more text. They ignore information contained in graphic images but they can read <IMG ALT> text descriptions. This means that search engine spider programs are not able to use Web browser technology to access your site. If your Web pages require Flash, DHTML, cookies, JavaScript, Java or passwords to access the page, then search engine spiders might not be able to index your Web site. Therefore, it might be a good idea to test your Web pages with very old versions of Web browser applications or with the software program "Lynx", a text-only browser. Lynx is available for download here . Here's an online version of Lynx that allows you test your Web pages with a text-only browser quickly and easily: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html . "Simulation of a search engine spider", see how search engines see your Web site: http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi Reason #14: Search engines could not resolve your DNS name. There's a mistake that novice users often do. They register a domain name (for example, www.my-great-site.com), and they immediately submit the Web site URL to the search engines. Then they wonder why the search engines didn't index their site. The answer is, they weren't able to do it. It takes approximately 2-4 days until a domain name becomes active. All Internet access providers must update their records (DNS tables) to reflect new site locations. The process of updating DNS tables is called propagation. Search engines must also update their DNS tables and until then, the new domain name www.my-great-site.com doesn't work. So when you register a new domain name, you must wait about 48-72 hours until you can submit the domain name to the search engines. If you're interested in other factors that might prevent your Web site from getting top rankings on search engines, visit our newsletter archive: http://www.Axandra.com/news/index.htm Reason #15: Your Web site has a low link popularity. Link popularity is becoming _the_ determining factor for a top search engine ranking. Link popularity means the number of Web sites linking to your site. However, the quality of links is more important than the quantity of links. For instance, if the New York Times links to your site, their single link might count a lot more than 30 links from your friends' personal homepage. By now, all top search engines use link popularity in their ranking formulas: AltaVista, Inktomi, MSN Search, HotBot. For Google, it's even the most important factor in ranking sites. The idea behind link popularity is that other Web sites will link to your site only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. So if many Web sites link to your site, search engines come to the conclusion that your site must be very popular and deserves a high ranking. As Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview: "...a page that is pointed to by many other sites is important. In other words, external approval raises a page's ranking." Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will the most important search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you. In addition, as more sites link to you, the odds increase that search engine spider programs will encounter your site more regularly so that it's less likely that they drop your site from their index. What's the link popularity of your site? The freeware Windows program Link Popularity Check tells you the link popularity of your Web site is and compares it with competitor sites. Link Popularity Check is a classic freeware application: it has no nag screens, it doesn't change the system registry, it makes no unauthorized connections to the Internet and it comes with a hands-free uninstaller. Download Link Popularity Check (freeware). How to improve the link popularity of your Web site: You can search the search engines for Web sites that are related to your business, find the webmaster's contact information and then solicit a reciprocal link. Do this every day and your link popularity will climb steadily but slowly. And it's very time-consuming. That's why we created ARELIS, which automates most of the time-consuming tasks. Read the interesting comparison of the old-fashioned way of improving link popularity versus ARELIS , the new way. Reason #16: Your Web page URL contains special characters. Most search engines have problems indexing Web pages when their URLs contain special characters. The following special characters are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers": ampersand (&) dollar sign ($) equals sign (=) percent sign (%) question mark (?) These characters are often found in dynamically generated Web pages. They signal the search engine crawler program that there could be an infinite loop of possibilities for that page. That's why they ignore Web page URLs with the above characters. AltaVista and Lycos explain on their help pages why they cannot index such Web pages: http://us.altavista.com/help/search/faq_web#13 http://insite.lycos.com/searchservices/ frequently_asked_questions.asp?b=n#10 HotBot recommends that you submit your dynamic Web pages with all parameters added onto the URL (for example, "www.site.com/articles/query.asp?article=83"). Google and Inktomi utilize crawler programs that are able to index dynamically generated Web pages, even those that use question marks. So what can you do if you have dynamically generated Web pages with special characters? If you use the Apache Server, ASP, CGI/Perl or ColdFusion, the following Web page provides some solutions: http://spider-food.net/dynamic-page-optimization-b.html Reason #17: Your Web site has a slow host server. Search engine crawler programs that index Web pages don't have much time. There are approximately 2-4 billion Web pages all over the world and search engines want to index all of them. So if the host server of your Web site has a slow connection to the Internet, you may experience that your Web site will not be indexed by the major search engines at all. AltaVista and Google specifically mention the problem on their Web sites. AltaVista: "If a site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex, it might time out before the crawler can index all the text." Found at: http://help.Altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_wellindexed Google: "Your site may not have been reachable when we tried to crawl it because of network or hosting problems. When this happens, we retry multiple times, but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be listed in our current index." Found at: http://www.Google.com/webmasters/2.html#A3 You may also want to limit the size of your homepage to less than 60K. It'd also benefit the still numerous users that connect to the Internet with a slow modem. For even the casual Internet user, the performance of a Web site can make the difference between pleasure and frustration. How you can test the speed of your server: http://web-hosting.candidinfo.com/site-response-speed.asp Reason #18: Do you use the right keywords? It's important that you use the keywords on which you want to be found in the right places on your Web pages. Imagine your Web site sells garden flowers. Your HTML source might look like this: --- <HEAD> <TITLE>Garden Flowers at Flower Garden Farm</TITLE> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="garden flowers, flower arrangements, wildflower seeds, seed mixes"> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Many different garden flowers available for your home, yard, garden and patio."> </HEAD> --- Some search engines (AltaVista, Inktomi) index the META Keywords tag, some (Google, AllTheWeb/FAST) don't. For the search engines that index the META Keywords tag, it's important that you actually use the keywords of your META Keywords tag on your Web pages. Some search engines nowadays consider it spam if the keywords of your META Keywords tag don't appear in the body text on your page. Of course, you know that the most important thing for a good search engine listing is content on your Web site. Search engines need text, text and even more text to index your Web site. For example, if you sell cars, have articles about cars on your Web site. If you offer package holidays, provide some tourist information about your destinations. Build this content and optimize the text for your target search terms. In other words, make sure that the content on your Web pages contains the keywords that are important for your site. And don't forget to use only those words in your META Keywords tag that appear on your Web page. Now make the test with your homepage: Go to "http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com". Enter three of your META keywords in the three keyword fields. Leave the ratio fields empty. Copy and paste the body text of your homepage into the big edit field. Click the "Update" button. Now look at the ratio fields. If a keyword has a ratio of 0%, consider adding contents about that keyword on your Web page. Reason #19: Have you waited long enough? The Internet is growing rapidly. According to a study of the NEC Research Institute, most search engines need about 6 months to index a Web site. Source: NUA Internet Surveys http://www.nua.com/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905355013&rel=true The data was collected when there were by far fewer Web sites than today. With todays number of Web sites, it might take even longer (although many search engines have also improved their equipment). That means that your Web site submissions may need up to half a year until they appear in search engine listings. The result of the study shows that it's important that you submit your Web pages the right way, right from the start. When search engines need six months to index your Web site, you should make sure that they'll index your pages correctly. No one can guarantee a good search engine ranking. However, if you don't make the mistakes which we outlined in our 19-part series, a good ranking is much more likely. <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 9:37 PM EST </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/132105/19-common/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/132105/19-common/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('132105')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/132105/19-common/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="date">Sunday, 2 November 2003</div> <div class=""> <div class="entry"> <span class="title">SEO TOOLS</span><br /> 1. Keyword Analyser<br>http://www.jimworld.com/tools/keyword-analyzer/<br>http://keywordcount.com/<br>http://www.webjectives.com/<br>http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi<br> <br>2. PPC Bids<br>http://www.jimworld.com/tools/top-ppc-bids/<br> <br>3. Rank Checker<br>http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/search_engine_position_checker.asp <br>http://sitecook.com/<br> <br>4. Search Engine Relationship<br>http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/search_engine_relationships_chart.asp?Set=1&PPC=0&Engine=0&check=please+wait<br> <br>5. Spider Eye View<br>http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/spider_viewer.asp<br>http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi<br>http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi<br> <br>6. Keyword Tools<br>http://www.wordtracker.com/<br>http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/<br>http://www.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp<br>http://www.goodkeywords.com<br> <br>7. Link Popularity<br>http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com/<br>http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/<br> <br>8. Browser Emulator<br>http://www.anybrowser.com/siteviewer.html<br> <br>9. Others<br>Info about Site Technology - www.netcraft.com<br>Http Viewer: http://www.rexswain.com<br> <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 7:43 PM EST </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/129600/seo-tools/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/129600/seo-tools/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('129600')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/129600/seo-tools/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class=""> <div class="entry"> <span class="title">Search Engine Strategies </span><br /> Search Engine Strategies <br><br>Background<br><br><br>* Up until very recently web site owners, web masters and Internet promotional companies were totally reliant on the skill and knowledge of the web designer or the person responsible for SEO (search engine optimization), to get the pages on client websites listed and highly ranked in search engines. <br>Since November of 2001 a number of important changes have occurred in the way in which search engines can return results and the advent of additional tools such as:<br><br>o Pay for Inclusion1<br>o Pay for Placement2.<br>o Pay for Performance3<br><br>Means that here are now additional resources available to achieve both search engine listings and high rankings. <br><br>As a result of a number of useful meetings with the leading search engines and directories, as well as our own practical experiences, the way in which we recommend Internet Promotion to our valued clients now has to reflect these important changes.<br><br>In order for us to explain our reasoning it is important for our clients to understand the 3 main areas of change we are talking about. <br><br>1. Pay for Inclusion<br><br>Pay for Inclusion means that a website is submitted to a search engine or directory and is added provided a fee is paid. <br>Examples of this include: Yahoo (@$299 for inclusion and annual fee - see below), Look Smart (@$299 for inclusion) and many others. It is almost now impossible to get listed by the major search engines without actually paying at least 2 or 3 of them for inclusion.<br><br>Because of the power of the major search engines and directories, (Yahoo in particular), they can offer this pay for inclusion service with NO GUARUNTEE, (check the learn more link below), that the website submitted will actually be listed therefore careful attention to spamming, (deliberately misleading to achieve higher rankings or listing), has to be considered before the web site is submitted. Additionally all websites submitted to the major search engines and directories under this service are checked by HUMAN, and are subject to strict submission policies.<br><br>Yahoo! Express<br>7-Day Guarantee<br>US$299.00 non-refundable, recurring annual fee<br><br>* Required for commercial listings but available for any site <br>* Guaranteed and expedited consideration of your site within 7 business days<br>Learn more...<br><br><br>Suggest via <br> <br><br><br><br><br><br><br> <br><br> <br>List your site in the Look Smart directory to drive targeted traffic from across the Look Smart Network, which includes Microsoft's MSN, AltaVista, I Won, and more than 370 ISPs. <br> <br> <br> * Reach 77 percent of US Internet users across the Look Smart Network <br>* Get accepted in as little as two business days <br>* It's simple -- fill out one form to reach millions of users <br><br> <br><br><br><br><br>Not for profit websites still get free submission but all commercial websites will eventually have to pay to be listed. <br><br>There are some benefits and drawbacks to pay for inclusion - The main ones are detailed below:<br><br>Benefits:<br>o Eventually no one will submit poor web sites or pages<br>o Eventually all directories and engines will return more useful results<br>o Due to submission policies duplicate sites will be removed<br>o Clearer less cluttered search results with more relevance<br>o A more commercially aware Internet Service<br>o Potentially more "cost effective" form of advertising<br><br>Drawbacks:<br>o Increased costs for adding websites to directories and engines<br>o Multiple charges for country specific search engines (eg: Alta Vista)<br>o Money paid but NO GUARUNTEE of inclusion<br><br><br>In summary: <br><br>Altogether Abacus Ireland would welcome this move by the major search engines, although it will cost more to get listed initially eventually the "bad sites" will disappear from the web and healthier e-commerce opportunities will be available to all genuine "advertisers. <br>Immediately all NEW websites will have to be submitted to at least 3 major search engines using pay for Inclusion. Eventually the pay for inclusion charge will become an annual one with all search engines and directories, (already yahoo are charging a fee of $299 to REMAIN in their directory from 1.2.02 onwards), and a budget will have to be provided each year to maintain your web site listing with all the major search engines.<br><br><br><br>2. Pay for Placement<br>Pay for Placement is a service offered by several major search engines and is a methodology of raising awareness of your web site, or listing an advert near the top of the page. For instance:<br>Google, one of the web's fastest growing and used meta search engines, offers two programs, called Ad Words Select, and Premium Sponsorships which rank ads based partly on how much an advertiser pays and partly on popularity, or click-through rates. Ad Words Select requires advertisers to pay only when a visitor clicks on the ad. Google's previous program, Ad Words, was based on a traditional online system that required payment by the number of impressions delivered. <br> <br><br>Premium Sponsorships allow you to purchase highly targeted advertising. No more than two enhanced text links appear at the top of the Google results page whenever the keywords or phrases you have purchased are searched for by a user. This form of advertising is becoming more competitive, therefore more expensive, as more website owners are realizing the opportunities available to them. <br><br>All main search engines offer premium-advertising packages of one sort or another varying in price from $2000 to $10,000 per month minimum spend to access the service.<br><br>For the smaller client Ad words, or each search engines equivalent of them, is the better way to test the Internet advertising waters. For comparatively low cost (from 100$ lodgment upwards) it is possible to examine the value of advertising in your own field.<br><br>There are some benefits and drawbacks to pay for placement - The main ones are detailed below:<br><br>Benefits:<br>o Good exposure on premium sites<br>o Low Cost versus High return advertising<br>o Guaranteed positioning on the page<br>o Higher profile for specific search terms you can chose<br><br><br>Drawbacks:<br>o Increased costs (has to be added to submission costs)<br>o More people doing it adds to the value, therefore the price<br>o High cost of Premium Advertising<br><br><br>In summary: <br><br>Abacus Ireland would recommend trying Ad Words and other search major engine small business placement programmes and monitoring the response from all advertising sources. By doing this you will quickly ascertain the benefit to you. Immediately: This form of advertising does work, if done by professionals and a reasonable return on your investment can be assured. <br>Eventually: This will become an expensive form of promotion as more and more people take advantage of the current low costs and market demand will eventually force up the price for small ads and listings.<br><br><br><br>3. Pay for Performance<br>Pay for Performance is a service offered by companies, usually on behalf of the major search engines. Essentially you have to create an account with the service provider and "bid" on Keywords, or Key Phrases, which you think are the most relevant and will be searched for by web users in your chosen business field. Because you are bidding against your competitors and by the very nature of pay for performance this is without doubt a "Dutch Auction" to achieve the highest placement and has to be continually monitored to achieve the best results. <br>An example of the best-known pay for Performance Company is Overture. Although a search engine in their own right (formally known as Go2), their traffic figures pale into insignificance when compared to their Partner sites, which include Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, MSN, Excite, Terra Lycos and a number of lesser known but still very significant search engines or directories.<br>How it works- Introduction:<br>Overture partners with meta-search companies and with tens of thousands of Web sites to provide search results on their sites. Some of their notable agreements include Yahoo!, MSN, Info space, Excite, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista and Lycos. When a user does a search on any of these sites, Overture advertisers have the potential to get that traffic. More than 90 percent of Overture's traffic is generated through its network of tens of thousands of affiliate sites. Their affiliate network makes Overture the largest Pay-For-Performance search network on the Internet. In the fourth quarter of 2001, Overture made more than 442 million paid introductions between advertisers and users clicking on their listings. And, Overture receives more than 3 billion search queries per month. <br>How you set up and use the account:<br>First you have to create an account, and then select your appropriate keywords. You then choose how much to pay for each potential customer by bidding on the keywords or phrases that you think will attract high quality web traffic to your site. Overture listings are ranked by bid amount, which is what you pay when a user clicks on your listing. Therefore the most popular and competitive businesses are always attempting to outbid each other to get to the top of the rankings.<br>You can then manage your account on line using the DirecTraffic Center, an online account management tool for Overture advertisers. This tool gives you the ability to view your account balance, add money to your account and change your bids 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You also can use the Direct Traffic Centre to add, modify and delete your search listings, view reports to see your click activity, change your password, and modify your contact information. <br>In Summary:<br>AI has used this method of promotion for several months now for a number of Domains and has had the opportunity to measure the traffic response, using overture in both the UK and USA. <br>Altogether we are pleased with the click through rate so far but in order to take "optimum" advantage of this service there is a need to constantly monitor the bids, competitors' actions and costs. One small error can be very costly both financially and performance wise.<br>Immediately: This form of advertising does return good traffic results but has to be done by professionals as it is so "labour intensive". Eventually: An ever more expensive form of promotion as more and more people take advantage of the key search terms and market demand will eventually force up the price for a click thorough.<br><br> <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 6:49 PM EST </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/129543/search-engine-strategies/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/129543/search-engine-strategies/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('129543')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/129543/search-engine-strategies/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="date">Wednesday, 29 October 2003</div> <div class=""> <div class="entry"> <span class="title">Page Rank</span><br /> What is PageRank?<br>PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Search engine like Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated. <br>PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one. <br>From here on in, we'll occasionally refer to PageRank as "PR". <br>How is PageRank calculated?<br>To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site. <br>PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn)) <br>That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough. <br>In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85. <br>We can think of it in a simpler way:- <br>a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it) <br>"share" = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page. <br>A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to. <br>From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it. <br>If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,.....PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links. <br>Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site's PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms. <br>For a page's calculation, its existing PageRank (if it has any) is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the PageRank "voted" for it by its current inbound links, which may have changed since the last time the page's PageRank was calculated. <br>The equation shows clearly how a page's PageRank is arrived at. But what isn't immediately obvious is that it can't work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other, and neither have any other links of any kind. This is what happens:- <br>Step 1: Calculate page A's PageRank from the value of its inbound links <br>Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new PageRank value hasn't been worked out yet, so page A's new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can't be accurate. <br>Step 2: Calculate page B's PageRank from the value of its inbound links <br>Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can't be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate. <br>It's a Catch 22 situation. We can't work out A's PageRank until we know B's PageRank, and we can't work out B's PageRank until we know A's PageRank. <br>Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can't we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate. <br>The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. 40 to 50 iterations are sufficient to reach a point where any further iterations wouldn't produce enough of a change to the values to matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it's the reason why the updates take so long. <br>One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale (known only to Google) to arrive at each page's actual PageRank. Even so, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than<br>Importance of page ranking <br>Websites are designed to expand your business and to let the world know more and more about you as well as your business. You hire a good designer to design your website as it can make your many dreams come true and to achieve that you've tirelessly submitted your pages to hundreds of search engines. But you still may not be getting the traffic that all you desire and your hard work deserves. <br>AS there are million of pages are on internet, to find your page is seems to be though then? Submission to the search engines is not enough these days and that can be solution of this.<br>To achieve the target and get your business in top list you must be listed within the first two or three pages of search engine results. As highly placed, can bring high volume of traffic, but if you don't have that then no one is going to be viewing your products or services. That is why you must set your page in the first place, with this you can achieve your desired position!! This is the one of the main reason to understand concept of Page ranking.<br>We do page ranking to increase site promotion. Web site ranking is an art now a days. There are many little known areas that may contain keywords. To get that make sure that your designed pages have all those rich keywords you require and can give a higher rating.<br>Web site ranking is important because having your business or service listed within the top thirty listings of AOL Search, AltaVista, Excite, Google, Goto, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, Northern Light, Open Directory, Snap, WebCrawler, or Yahoo is the best way to market your product or service on the Internet. If your page is not in the top thirty of at least one of these major engines, then thousands of your potential clients are heading elsewhere...probably to the competition! Having a high web site ranking would showcase your product or service to thousands of potential web surfers that otherwise would never see your page. After all, the whole point of setting up a web site is to increase your business. If no one can find your pages in the search engines, your web site will not grant you any new customers. Our service could very well be the best investment you could ever make for your company. That's the importance of web site ranking.<br>To achieve the desired results, we require that the following conditions are met: <br>You must have the ability to make changes to your pages. you should always approve the proposed changes After changes have been approved, and uploaded to your site, the pages cannot be altered without prior approval from Top Web Site Ranking for the duration of the promotion process<br>There are many company who design and create of highly optimized web pages, designed specifically for your targeted keywords. <br>The three important significant ways exist to increase your qualified web site (or website) traffic: <br>1. Advertise or somehow disseminate your web address to your target audience. To increase website traffic to any significant degree through this method requires a rather large budget. Unless you buy online advertising, your audience will only occasionally be logged on the Internet when they come across your address. Asking that audience to remember your ad and your web address when they do get online is asking a bit much. Any increases to your traffic obtained via this method will diminish or disappear as soon as your advertising budget decreases or dries up.<br> <br>2. Have links to your website appear on web pages outside of your site that your targeted audience is visiting when they are interested in obtaining information about your types of products and/or services. This method to increase web site traffic includes having links on websites of your business affiliates: vendors, suppliers, customers, professional organizations, online trade publications and directories, etc. <br><br>This is a good method to increase web site traffic in limited cases, but unless you are a very big and known organization, it is difficult and time-consuming to obtain many of these types of links, even if you place reciprocal links on your website. Plus, the audience on those sites, unless it is an industry-specific directory, are often not seeking or ready to purchase your type of product or service at that particular moment.<br> <br>Search engine marketing: (a) Keywords and Key Phrases, (b) pay-per-click keyword textbox ads, and (c) search engine optimization (also known as web site optimization).<br>Keywords and Key Phrases<br>Keywords and key phrases are the keystone of a good search engine<br>Some helpful tips for you :<br>You must be aware of the keyword combination a visitor can think or write.You must check the terms or phrases which can be use to search for your site . you should examine your competitors' sites for their keywords and key phrases so you can check the status of your key words <br>When a visitor is referred to your page from a search engine or directory, he leaves a footprint that reveals what keywords and key phrases he used to search for your site, product or service <br>Finally you can use professional tools for keyword effectiveness to rank keywords and phrases on popularity and competitiveness and also go for manual submission to the major search engines and directories Mostly tracking search engine ranking starts after 2-4 week Search engine marketing is the best know way to increase web site traffic with qualified prospects who are ready to buy when they visit your website. Buy finding your site through a search engine, the visitor has already declared a particular interest in something that is mentioned on your web site. In today's business world, people who make the important business decisions no longer have time to waste, so if they find your website on a search engine, it's because they have a real need or problem to solve -- and they do not currently have a preferred vendor. Undeniable Internet marketing data clearly shows that millions of transactions are conducted daily on the Internet by people who found a website through a search engine query. Approximately 85% of all Internet traffic these days starts with a search. <br><br>If your optimized web site (or paid-for link's entry page) is properly prepared to greet visitors who find it through a search engine - it contains relevant and important information, it's well-written, it's easy to navigate and use - then you should be able to convert a healthy portion of this qualified traffic to inquiries for more information, requests for quotes, and sales. It happens every minute of every day. It consistently happens for our clients. It can happen for you, too! All you need to do is enter the arena to join the competition. <br><br>Tips for a Higher Ranking<br>You can use html coding for optimization and other tags like Meta tag.<br>Effective site promotion can greatly increase the amount of traffic to your web site. The <TITLE> and META Tags are the most important components in every web site listing in respect to getting a high web site ranking.<br>The meta tag is a line of HTML code that you insert into your finished web page. It is "hidden" in that it has no effect whatsoever when the page is viewed in a browser. However, when the search engines see this tag, they will read the contents and index these words. Then, depending on it's algorithm, either indexing will then stop, or it will continue to index the remainder of the page.<br><br>The HTML code for meta tags look like this:<br><br><Head><br><Title> Your Title Here </Title><br><Meta Name="description" Content="write a compelling description here"><br><Meta Name="Keywords" Content="keyword1,keyword2"><br></Head> <br>Important: Do not list keywords multiple times in the meta tag. If you do, you stand a chance having your submission rejected. Several search engines will reject pages that have any keyword used repeatedly in the meta tags. Include meta tags in all your pages. They increase the chances that your web site will have multiple pages in the engines. Web design programs do not automatically include the meta tag, so you'll have to add them manually, or purchase a program that will create your META Tags for you.<br><br>Optimizers compile a database of terms that people search for. When some one enter some keywords to search that could be related with your business, optimizer can tell you that how often people search for them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords.<br>Then for each major search engine, we'll show you the chances of making the top 10.<br>You need related keywords to take advantage of other keywords that mean the same thing. You'll end up with a lot more traffic.<br><br>With this example w can understand this concept better<br>Here our site is myrug.com and visitors can come to any search engine with the following key words like rugs, oriental rugs, carpets ,only rugs, secondhand rugs .SO how we `ll able to understand that how much traffic is coming on which word actually when visitor write a keyword in any search engine's search bar then it will collect that keyword and store it and after some time it can show this type of table <br><br><br>*Count Keyword <br>1902 rugs<br>877 Oriental rugs<br>351 carpets<br>320 Only rugs <br>205 Second hand rugs <br>up to 500 keywords for each search..<br><br>Hi douKeyword <br>Rugs<br>Oriental rugs<br>carpets<br>Only rugs <br>Second hand rugs <br><br>In above exmple rugs, oriental rugs, carpets ,only rugs, secondhand rugs are the key words used to get a good rug site so Your aim is to discover frequently used keywords with little or no competition. Use them to generate traffic to your website.<br><br><br> <br> <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 2:13 PM EST </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/125128/page-rank/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/125128/page-rank/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('125128')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/125128/page-rank/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="date">Saturday, 25 October 2003</div> <div class=""> <div class="entry"> <span class="title"></span><br /> Keyword Optimization<br>Search engine optimization (SEO) is about adding finely tuned keywords and phrases to your pages so that you can bring as many relevant visitors to your site as possible. Web site optimization (WSO) is the process of optimizing web sites for maximum speed, which ideally includes SEO as part of the optimization process. WSO and SEO are often used interchangeably, but they are different. WSO is an umbrella term that can optionally incorporate SEO, while SEO is devoted solely to raising search engine relevance to acquire relevant visitors. Now that we've got that straightened out, let's look at what we'll cover in this chapter.<br><br>To fully optimize a web site, you need to optimize its keywords. Although the focus of this book is on speed optimization, it's important that you optimize your keywords so that your audience can find your site. A lightning-fast web site won't succeed if no one can find it. This chapter summarizes keyword selection and placement techniques that you can use to maximize the search engine positioning of your site.<br><br>The Big Picture<br>The idea is to place keywords strategically within your pages that match both the gestalt of your site and the terms users actually enter when searching for content like yours. The strategy is to choose keywords that best match the overall theme of your site, but yield few enough appropriate search results that you can achieve competitive rankings. These are your optimum keywords.<br>WordTracker's Secret Weapon<br>WordTracker's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) can help you identify the keyword phrases that are most likely to succeed (www.WordTracker.com). The KEI is the ratio of the number of times a term appears in the WordTracker database (its popularity) versus the number of pages that target that phrase (the competition). A keyword phrase with a KEI of 100 is "good," while a KEI of 400 is "excellent"and more likely to be successfully targeted.<br>Although many developers perform SEO after they've created a site, the best approach is to research keywords and keyphrases beforehand, and build your site around them. The best time to employ optimized keywords is when you are choosing a domain name and organizing your site. If possible, enhance your keyword relevance by using a domain name that contains your top keyphrases. Pay special attention to top-level directories and files because search engines give these higher relevance.<br>Target Multi-Word Phrases<br>Unless they are unique, targeting individual keywords is a losing proposition. The competition is intense, and single keywords can sometimes be misleading. Users know that they'll get better search results with multi-word phrases than with individual words (like "cruises in Caribbean" versus "cruises"). Unless you can effectively target unique words like "UNISYS," "JavaScript," or "your ACRONYM or product name here," stick with multi-word phrases for the best results.<br>NOTE<br>An NPD Group study of May 9, 2000 found that multiple keyword searching has become more popular than single keyword queries (http://www.npd.com).<br><br>How Search Engines Rank Sites<br>Fredrick Marckini, founder of iProspect.com, says that most search engines rank the relevance of your site by using the following keyword factors:[1]<br>[1] Fredrick Marckini, Search Engine Positioning (Plano, TX: Wordware Publishing, 2001). The definitive guide for SEO professionals.<br>* Prominence-- How high in your HTML and DOM hierarchy your top keywords appear (title, h1, etc.).<br>* Frequency-- How often your keywords appear.<br>* Weight or density-- The ratio of keywords to the total number words within a web page, or a section of a web page (that is, title tag density). Used to detect "stuffing" of keywords by search engines.<br>* Proximity-- How close keywords are to each other.<br>* Placement-- Where you put your keywords within your HTML shows their relative importance and can indicate what your page is about. Search engines favor the following areas for keyword placement:<br>o The title tag<br>o Heading tags (h1, h2, and so on)<br>o The keyword meta tag<br>o The first 25 visible words<br>o Hyperlinked text, URLs, and titles<br>o alt attributes<br>* Off-the-Page Criteria-- In some search engines, the way external sites refer to your page can be more important than what's inside your page:<br>o Inbound Links-- Google, Teoma, and other search engines rank relevance in part based on the number and popularity of inbound links to your page. These "virtual votes" by other webmasters are a good way to improve relevancy.<br>o Term Vectors-- A data-mining technique that converts inbound and outbound link characteristics and page terms into numbers representing points in space (vectors) and compares these numbers against an existing database of term vectors to classify pages according to subject and "theme." Focusing your page content on two or three keyword phrases can better define your theme, and thus raise your relevance.<br>Inbound Link Popularity<br>Here are two tips for building inbound links to your site:<br>* Find sites similar to yours that rank highly on Google and other search engines, and ask for a link or an exchange of links.<br>* Outbound links can also help raise your relevance, so be generous with links to sites you recommend.<br><br><br>Keyword Optimization Guidelines<br>The following guidelines will help you optimize all of these factors, except inbound links. Maximizing the effects of this factor requires a lot of hard work and time spent gathering external links to your site. Here's a summary of the search engine optimization process, which I expand on in the sections that follow:<br>1. Determine your keyword phrases.<br>2. Sort by popularity.<br>3. Refine and combine keyword phrases.<br>4. Sort by popularity again (repeat steps 2 and 3 as needed).<br>5. Write a title using your top two to three phrases.<br>6. Write a descriptionmeta tag.<br>7. Write a keywordsmeta tag.<br>8. Add keywords into key tags and attributes, and mix well.<br>9. Submit to search engines.<br>10. Watch the hits roll in.<br><br>Step 1: Determine Your Keyword Phrases<br>The first and most important step is to determine your most important keywords. Ask yourself which keyphrases you want folks to use when finding your site. Include terms that people not familiar with your products and services will use. If you don't know what an emulsion is, you'll never look for it. Use film or pictures instead. Be careful to avoid general terms like car or travel because they are overused on the Internet. Instead, use more specific keyword phrases that closely match your offerings. Then determine whether people actually use these terms when looking for your site.<br>Brainstorm Keyphrases<br>Brainstorm a list of the top 10 terms that describe your site. Find similar terms with www.Thesaurus.com and www.WordTracker.com. List these terms by their relative importance. Using two or more words as a keyword phrase is best. Single keywords are much more common and are harder to target effectively than multi-word phrases, unless they are unique, such as DARPA or DHTML.<br>Use WordTracker's KEI to find the terms most likely to be targeted successfully. Choose terms with higher KEI values. These are popular phrases with fewer competing sites. To illustrate the process, I'll show you how I optimized the keywords for the companion web site for this book, www.WebSiteOptimization.com. Keyphrase List 15.1 is my initial stab at our top 10 keyphrases.<br>Table 15.1. Keyphrase List Initial Top 10 Terms for WebSiteOptimization.com<br>web site optimization <br>web page optimization <br>html optimization <br>graphics optimization <br>web speed <br>performance tuning <br>java script optimization[*] <br><br>fast web sites <br>download time <br>improved usability <br>[*] Note that I split the term JavaScript into two words after discovering the phrase java script is more popular. Note also that I'm using all lowercase phrases. This fits the habits of most users who usually don't capitalize words when searching. Most search engines are pretty insensitive when it comes to capitalization.<br>Step 2: Sort by Popularity<br>Next, use a search voyeur service like Overture.com's Search Term Suggestion Tool (formerly Goto.com) or WordTracker to find which of these terms are the most popular and most likely to succeed (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). Figure 15.1 shows an example.<br>Figure 15.1. Overture.com's search term suggestion tool.<br> <br>Here's our list of potential keyword phrases, sorted by popularity:<br>Table 15.2. Keyphrase List Sorted by Popularity<br>Number of Hits Keyphrase <br>8,995 web site optimization <br>574 web page optimization <br>431 fast web site(s) <br>391 performance tuning <br>348 web speed <br>126 graphic(s) optimization <br>198 download time <br>39 html optimization <br>0 improved usability <br>0 java script optimization <br>NOTE<br>Commercial services like WordTracker (http://www.WordTracker.com) can help you brainstorm and refine keyphrases and sort by popularity and KEI. For more search voyeur services, see the list at Search Engine Watch (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/facts/searches.html).<br><br>This list tells you how often people searched for each term at Overture.comin the last month. As you can see, we have some work to do. A couple of the terms had no hits in the past month, and some terms are relatively popular. There is indeed a difference between the keywords we think people will use, and those they actually use. Let's brainstorm keyphrases again and see if we can improve our results:<br>Table 15.3. Keyphrase List Improved by Popularity<br>Number of Hits Keyphrase <br>11,208 internet speed <br>8,995 web site optimization <br>1,714 fast internet <br>574 web page optimization <br>431 fast(er) web site(s) <br>414 quick web page <br>391 performance tuning <br>348 web speed <br>126 graphic(s) optimization <br>68 java script performance <br>39 html optimization <br>This is much better, though some terms are still not as specific as they should be. There also are some near duplicates that we can discard. That's where techniques like word stemming and proximity grouping come in.<br>Word Stemming<br>Most search engines parse words for their roots, removing all prefixes and suffixes. By using longer words and plurals, you'll get more matches with fewer keywords. For example, use "graphics optimization," not "graphic optimization." Users searching on the word graphic will still get a hit if you use the plural, graphics.<br>Eliminate near duplicates and include or extend keywords to replace them. Don't use "stop words" like a, and, it, of, that, the, and too because they are filtered out by the search engines anyway. Also avoid "filter" words like web that are so popular they are routinely eliminated from non-quoted queries.<br>Proximity Grouping<br>Search engines rank web page relevance in part by keyword proximity; that is, by how close terms are to each other. You can use this creatively by combining similar terms into one longer phrase. If you tack keywords onto either end of popular phrases, you can combine multiple phrases into one. For example:<br>11,208--internet speed<br>2,720--faster internet<br>1,002--speed boost<br>These can all be combined into:<br>14930[ ]--(faster) internet speed (boost)<br>[ ] means the total phrase value. Parentheses denote phrase combinations.<br>By using proximity grouping, you can get more phrase matches with fewer words.<br>Step 3: Refine Keyword Phrases<br>Now brainstorm on other relevant phrases for your site. Don't hold back.<br>Write down every keyword you can think of that could be used in searching for your site. Look at the meta tags of your competitors to see which terms they are using. Cross check your search logs to see what your users are actually searching for. Analyze your referrer logs to see which search phrases are bringing in search engine traffic. Break out that thesaurus (or use www.Thesaurus.com) to find similar words. Reuse online brainstorming services like WordTracker.com to refine keyword phrases. Then refine your list of terms with those on other search engines that display related searches, like AltaVista and HotBot, and cross check for related terms at Yahoo!.<br>Don't worry if your list gets too long. The popularity filter will bubble the better terms to the top. Go through your list again, and remove any terms that don't apply to your site or that you feel won't fare well with existing sites. Here's my updated list:<br>Table 15.4. Keyphrase List Brainstorming Other Possible Keywords<br>(optimizing) animated gif(s) <br>web page design <br>crazy fast web sites <br>advanced html <br>hyperspeed web pages <br>hyperspeed hypertext <br>(fast) internet speed <br>warp speed connections <br>web site ranking <br>fast web site <br>fast flow state <br>web site search engine optimization <br>speed boost <br>optimized keywords <br>web page optimization <br>html compression <br>bandwidth <br>increased usability <br>accelerate the web <br>faster downloads <br>meta tag optimization <br>html optimization <br>jpeg compression <br>java obfuscation and optimization <br>javascript obfuscation and optimization <br>java script archive <br>web site performance <br>server performance tuning <br>Step 4: Sort by Popularity Again<br>As you can see, this is an iterative process. You'll find that certain terms will appear wildly popular for searches; for example, computer, software, free, and web design. Avoid the temptation to use those phrases. Use only the terms that accurately describe your site and are popular, but not too popular. Any terms with ratings over 100,000 hits are probably too popular and not worth pursuing. Also, reuse WordTracker's KEI to find terms most likely to be targeted effectively. The higher KEI, the better (over 400 is "excellent"). For each keyphrase, WordTracker will let you know potential referral traffic and the number of competing web pages for each search engine. You may go through the sort and refine steps 2 and 3 a few times until you are happy with your list.<br>Here's my refined list of keyphrases, sorted by popularity:<br>Table 15.5. Keyphrase List Refined Master List Sorted by Popularity<br>Number of Hits Keyphrase <br>92,663 web site design <br>84,390[ ] <br>(optimizing) animated gif(s) <br>39,303 web page design <br>34,438 bandwidth <br>14,415 web site development <br>11,208 internet speed <br>9,990 web site ranking <br>9,198 web site search engine optimization <br>8,995 web site optimization <br>8,253 bandwidth speed test <br>7,739 performance appraisal <br>7,351 web accelerator <br>3,946 faster downloads <br>2,926 improve search engine ranking <br>2,720 faster internet <br>1,725 speed up internet <br>1,714 fast internet <br>1,346 fast web <br>1,192 fast download <br>1,002 speed boost <br>980 advanced html <br>904 web usability <br>873 fast browser <br>858 web site load testing <br>776 compression software <br>711 image compression <br>706 increase web site ranking <br>638 optimization services <br>583 increase internet speed <br>574 web page optimization <br>564 optimize keyword <br>505 meta tag optimization <br>488 web optimization <br>483 keyword optimization <br>479 java script archive <br>466 jpeg compression <br>441 jpeg optimizer <br>431 fast web site <br>414 quick web page <br>401 web site optimization services <br>391 pFerformance tuning <br>357 web site performance <br>348 web speed <br>337 file size <br>320 java script validation <br>319 internet optimization <br>268 maximum performance <br>263 optimized meta tag <br>254 web site usability <br>745 lzw compression algorithm <br>277 gif optimizer <br>242 url optimization <br>214 slow response <br>210 jpeg compressor <br>200 zip compression <br>196 optimize web site <br>187 jpeg compression <br>179 performance optimization <br>164 web server performance <br>160 lossless compression <br>145 lossy compression <br>127 gif compression <br>126 graphic(s) optimization <br>106 professional web page optimization <br>99 web site optimization consultant <br>92 high speed web site <br>77 html compression <br>62 html compress <br>52 optimized web site design <br>43 compress html <br>39 html optimization <br>28 shrink web page size <br>[ ] denotes terms and scores that were combined.<br>Now you have your master list. Let's combine and refine these terms strategically, using the proximity technique you learned earlier and weed out the terms that don't apply to your site. The crossed-out terms in Keyphrase List 15.6 have been discarded for more popular and relevant terms.<br>Table 15.6. Keyphrase List Combine and Refine<br>Number of Hits Keyphrase <br>84,390[ ] <br>(optimizing) animated gif(s) <br>42,691[ ] <br>bandwidth (speed test) <br>14,930[ ] <br>(faster) internet speed (boost) <br>10,034[ ] <br>web site optimization (services) <br>9,990 web site ranking <br>9,198 web site search engine optimization <br>8,253 bandwidth speed test <br>7,739 performance appraisal <br>7,351 web accelerator <br>1,777[ ] <br>fast web site(s) <br>1,714 fast internet <br>1,002 speed boost <br>980 advanced html <br>904[ ] <br>(improved) web usability <br>853[ ] <br>(html) compression software <br>748[ ] <br>web site performance (tuning) <br>745 lzw compression algorithm <br>711[ ] <br>(jpeg gif lzw) image compression <br>638 optimization services <br>574 web page optimization <br>564 optimize keyword(s) <br>505 meta tag optimization <br>488 web optimization <br>483 keyword optimization <br>479 java script archive <br>466 jpeg compression <br>441 jpeg optimizer <br>414 quick web page <br>401 web site optimization services <br>391 performance tuning <br>383[ ] <br>(page) file size <br>348 web speed <br>319 internet optimization <br>277 gif optimizer <br>254 web site usability <br>242 url optimization <br>210 jpeg compressor <br>196 optimize(d) web site <br>187 jpeg compression <br>179 performance optimization <br>164 web server performance <br>160 lossless compression <br>145 lossy compression <br>139[ ] <br>html compress(ion) <br>127 gif compression <br>126 graphic(s) optimization <br>106 professional web page optimization <br>99 web site optimization consultant <br>92 high speed web site <br>62 html compress <br>68 java script performance <br>52 optimized web site design <br>43 compress html <br>39 html optimization <br>28 shrink web page size <br>[ ] denotes terms and scores that were combined.<br>You should now have a list of approximately 20 to 50 prime keyword phrases that describe your site, sorted by popularity. You'll use these keywords to craft your key HTML tags. If you've really planned ahead, you can use them to choose your domain name and URLs, because search engines place a high value on keywords in these locations.<br>Start with Your Home Page<br>The home page of your site is the most important page search engines index. You need to ensure that your home page has a keyword-rich URL (if possible), title tag, meta tags, headers, img tag alt attributes, filenames, links and link text, and other information that makes effective use of your key terms.<br>Step 5: Write a title Using the Top Two to Three Phrases<br>Other than your domain name, the title tag is the most important item that search engines index. Title tags should use your top two or three terms and total between 7 to 15 words, ideally 10 words or less. Search engines and directories generally index the entire title but display only 55 to 90 characters of your title, with most averaging 70 to 80 characters in length. Put your top keyphrases first. Don't use "Home Page" or "Welcome to our Company.com." For example:<br>[View full width]<br><br><title>WebSiteOptimization.com - speed up your site with web site optimization and <br>optimized html</title> <br>Note that our top term is also our domain name. This optimum placement of keywords is not by coincidence. Using your top term as part of your domain name is the best way to ensure that you'll be found on the Internet. I also repeat my top term later on, and include the book title.<br>Due to the overuse of the keywordsmeta tag, most search engines place lower importance on its contents. Therefore, it's important to spend time crafting a good title tag that concisely conveys the message of your site and top keyword phrases. And, if that's not enough, you also need to make your site sound irresistible. Search engines use the title tag to create a link to your site in their results list, so you need to make your title text appealing. Because your title tag carries a lot of weight, you need to spend some time on it to make it count. So instead of this meaningless title:<br><title>Welcome to our company!</title> <br>Do this:<br><title>Sprockets, gears, and gizmos - Sprockets.com gets you in gear</title> <br>Step 6: Write a description meta Tag<br>Next, you need to craft a succinct description of your site, reiterating your most important keyword phrases. Don't just repeat your title tag, because search engines often use the description tag to annotate your link. The same title copy would yield the same sentence twice! The description should be no more than 25 words (search engine display limits range from 150 to 200 characters and index from 200 to 250 characters). Make this description an attractive summary of your content without marketing hype. Again, weave in the keyphrases by which you want to be known. For example:<br>[View full width]<br><br><meta name = "description" content = "Web site optimization speeds up web page downloads <br>and increases website rankings. Optimizing web pages increases website speed and <br>decreases bailout rates, using advanced html, image, javascript and java optimization and <br>compression."> <br>This paragraph has 32 words, which is close enough to the 25-word limit. Descriptions typically are used by search engines on results pages and in some directory listings. Make sure that your most important descriptive text is in the first 25 words (or 150 to 200 characters) because some search engines may cut off your description at this point.<br>Step 7: Write a keywords meta Tag<br>The keywordsmeta tag contains keyword phrases that describe topics covered within the page. Make sure that you include the top terms by which you want your site to be found, plus any key terms already within your page. The keywordsmeta tag should be 200 characters or less. Here is an example:<br>[View full width]<br><br><meta name = "keywords" content = "web site optimization services faster internet speed <br>boost bandwidth speed fast web site search engine optimization web page optimization <br>ranking advanced html compression http web site usability image compression quick web <br>page performance tuning"> <br>Commas can be used to delineate phrases, and you can omit spaces after commas to save space. I prefer not to use commas and to carefully place important phrases next to each other for more proximity hits from search engine algorithms. Be careful, however, because omitting commas can yield new combinations with unexpected meanings. You can add commas as needed to clear up any ambiguities.<br>Note also that we include terms here from our home page, which we analyzed using a word frequency summarization tool in our favorite text editor. If you include terms that appear within your page, you can raise your relevancy in search engines by "magnifying" these terms. Do not repeat the same term more than three times.<br>Search engines now emphasize title tags over the keywordsmeta tag, so you can save some bytes by shortening the keywords tag. For household names like Yahoo! or AOL, you can even omit these meta tags altogether or use conditional meta tags, which are discussed in Chapter 17, "Server-Side Techniques."<br>Step 8: Add Keywords into Key Tags and Attributes, and Mix Well<br>Make sure that your top keyphrases are well represented throughout your page. Liberally, but not too liberally, add your top phrases within your body text, especially in h1s, the first 25 words, link text, URLs, and alt attributes. This should occur naturally in relevant pages. Search engines generally know every trick in the book and can penalize or banish sites for keyword "spamming" techniques (or "spamdexing"). Avoid using artificial techniques like double title tags, keyword-rich comments, and alt attributes stuffed with keywords.<br>Keyword Density<br>Shorter pages generally rank higher than longer pages because with fewer total words per page, the percentage of relevant keywords increases. However, search engines may flag extremely short pages because they look for realistic pages based on average page lengths. Optimal page length varies from around 400 to 700 words, according to WebPosition Gold's reporter. So don't stuff in too many keywords, or search engines may flag your page. Depending on which search engine you target, the keyword density (keywords/ visible word ratio) should be lower than 3 to 10 percent or you'll risk banishment. Search engine designers favor naturally occurring patterns in web pages rather than artificial ones.<br>Keyword Placement Priority<br>Search engines vary in the way they calculate relevance, but they all place more importance on the following factors:<br>* Domain-- Keywords in domain<br>* title-- Keywords in title<br>* h1 to h6-- Keywords in headline elements<br>* HTML-- Keywords in the first 2KB to 3KB of your page<br>* meta tags-- Keywords in description and keywordsmeta tags<br>* Links-- Keywords in anchor URLs, text, and title attribute<br>* alt attribute values<br>Some of the newer search engines like Google.com and Teoma.com also take external and internal links into account. Google's PageRank algorithm is seemingly immune to influence and "keyword spam." Instead, it relies in part on the inbound links to your site.<br>But all links are not created equal. Links are relevant only if the theme of the linking site matches yours. A link from an off-topic site carries little weight compared to a link from a similar site. Strive to get targeted links from sites like yours.<br>In my experience, there is no substitute for longevity on the web. The older your site, the more external links you'll generally have (assuming that you have some up-to-date content worth linking to). It's important to get your site out there and publicized as soon as it's ready.<br>Step 9: Submit to Search Engines<br>Once you're happy with your new and improved keywords and have placed them strategically throughout your pages, it's time to submit. The best way to submit your pages to search engines and directories is to do it by hand. Automated services can help, but would you trust your listing in AltaVista or Yahoo! to some automated spider?<br>Make sure that you check out the search engine's help pages first, before you submit. Each has different rules and guidelines with which your site must comply. Some search engines require only that you submit your top-level URL, while others require more information.<br>Don't over submit! If a page is already listed, don't submit it again. Check whether the page has been indexed using the link: or url: syntax (see the search engine's help page for specifics).<br>For details on which sites to submit to and other search engine topics, I recommend Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineWatch.com (http://www.searchenginewatch.com) and Fredrick Marckini's iProspect.com (http://www.iProspect.com).<br>Step 10: Watch the Hits Roll In<br>Anywhere from a few minutes to weeks later, you'll start to see referral traffic from the search engines that have added your site to their databases. By the time you read this, Google will probably have overtaken Yahoo! for search referral traffic. However, getting a high listing in Google doesn't happen overnight. Google's PageRank algorithm weighs external links from popular sites heavily when ranking web site relevance. So before you submit to Google, be sure you first have some links to your site--the more the better. I have found that there is no substitute for one-to-one networking and time.<br>SEO should be followed up every month. Check your server logs to see what people and spiders are doing on your site. Adjust the site accordingly. Perhaps introduce extra keywords, or expand popular topic areas, or create new content in topics users are searching for. Check the positioning of your pages in all major search engines and any specialized directories and search engines in your topic area. Webposition Gold (www.WebPosition.com) is a valuable tool for monitoring your progress.<br><br><br>Spider-Friendly Design Tips<br>Most search engine spiders don't index everything you embed in a web page. Flash, Java, Shockwave, graphics, and frames are a few of the roadblocks automated spiders run up against when parsing pages. Spiders don't read graphics or many embedded objects, but text is easily digested. Text is the universal language of spiders. Here are a few spider-friendly design tips to keep in mind:<br>* Dynamic content-- Avoid the question mark (?) for dynamically generated content, as most search engines don't follow these links. CMS tools like Vignette Story Server (http://www.vignette.com) can generate pages without the query command.<br>* Flash-- Flash content is not indexed; instead, only the alternate content or HTML page is indexed. Make sure that you provide alternatives. Flash MX addresses these accessibility issues to some degree.<br>* Frames-- Some spiders don't support frames. Avoid frames, especially on home pages. They can degrade usability and slow page display.<br>* Images-- Provide text alternatives for all functional images. Substitute styled text for graphic text where possible.<br>* Links-- Always use an anchor tag to link pages (such as <a href="...">), not a javascript: link. Most spiders don't follow javascript: or Flash links; they understand only HTML.<br>* JavaScript and CSS-- Use external JavaScript and CSS files to maximize relevance. External JavaScript and CSS files are search engine friendly and move your content higher up in your code. You also can use keywords in class and id names.<br>* Structure-- Favor breadth over depth for site hierarchy. Spiders don't crawl more than two or three links deep, which means that sites with deep site hierarchies may not be fully indexed. Avoid splash screens because they add another level.<br>* Hidden text-- Avoid using text that is the same color as the background. Search engines flag this common keyword "stuffing" technique.<br><br>Page Characteristics of High-Ranking Results<br>Axandra (http://www.axandra.com/), a German company, has studied which factors affect high rankings in popular search engines, including Google, AllTheWeb, iWon/Inktomi, Wisenut, Teoma, and AltaVista. Their April 2002 "Google Ranking Study"[2] looked at the characteristics of pages that ranked in the top 10 for 1,721 popular keyphrases.<br>[2] Andr? Voget and Johannes Selbach, "Google Ranking Study, Q2/2002," [online], (2002), available from the Internet at http://www.axandra.com/search-engine-studies/. An empirical analysis of top 10 results on Google.com.<br>Johannes Selbach, cofounder of Voget Selbach Enterprises GmbH, says about the study: "We want to give our readers accurate data on what kind of web pages Google (and other search engines) currently rank in the top 10 so that they can make their own conclusions."[3]<br>[3] Johannes Selbach, email to author. 22 August 2002.<br>They analyzed more than 100,000 web pages for various measurable characteristics such as matching keyphrases, placement, frequency, and more. Some of their findings may surprise you. Figure 15.2 shows you what their JavaScript Usage section looks like.<br>Figure 15.2. Axandra.com Google ranking study--JavaScript usage.<br> <br>For example, most results pages on Google ranking in the top 10 have these characteristics:<br>* Have zero or one matching keyphrase in the title or h1 tags.<br>* Have head sizes from 50 to 700 bytes.<br>* Are older than three or four years.<br>* Use two or three meta tags.<br>* Average 20.4KB per page.<br>In addition, the following is true of the top 10 results:<br>* Nearly 85 percent have search term densities of around 0 percent.<br>* 94 percent have search term densities of less than 5 percent.<br>* 4.3 percent use Flash or Shockwave.<br>* Less than 3 percent use Java.<br>* Over 81 percent don't have search terms in hyperlink URLs.<br>So the typical high-ranked page on Google is over three to four years old (this provides external links to your site), and low-tech (few use Flash or Java). It uses two or three meta tags in a trim head from 50 to 700 bytes in size, averages around 20KB, and uses keywords sparingly. Fat keyword-filled pages clearly don't rank well on search engines like Google.<br>There's an entire industry of firms that are built around attaining high search engine rankings. Some of these firms are bogus, while others are legitimate. Choose wisely, because the reputation of your site may hang in the balance. By applying what you've learned in this chapter, you'll have a solid keyword foundation that will attract qualified customers interested in buying your products instead of undifferentiated traffic.<br><br>Summary<br>The purpose of search engine optimization is to make finding your site easy for users who are interested in your topic areas. By tagging your pages with the phrases that best match the overall theme of your site, you can ensure that users will find your site when searching for content like yours. Choose popular--but not too popular--phrases that best describe your site, and use them strategically within your pages. Studies have shown that a restrained approach works best with popular search engines like Google.<br>Here is a list of this chapter's highlights:<br>* Target multi-word phrases unless your keywords are unique.<br>* Gather external links on high-ranking sites like yours through tireless PR and compelling up-to-date content.<br>* Use word stemming and proximity grouping to maximize hits and minimize words.<br>* Find your optimum keywords through iteration, popularity, and WordTracker's KEI.<br>* Write a keyword-rich title tag. Put the top keyphrase up front.<br>* Use your optimum phrases in your title, h1 through h6, metadescription, metakeywords, and body text, and link URLs, text, and title attributes.<br>* Include your top keyphrase(s) in your domain name--ideally, your optimum keyphrases would determine your domain name choice and top-level directory and filenames.<br>* Minimize the head section for maximum relevance.<br>* Use external JavaScript and CSS files to raise relevance.<br>* Use meaningful alt attribute values (alt="company.com", not alt="logo image").<br>* Don't overdo it. Target one or two keyphrases that describe your site.<br>* Practice spider-friendly design--Avoid spider-stopping technology like ? and JavaScript in links, frames, and Flash.<br>* Watch your keyword density or risk banishment.<br>Online Resources<br>Try these sites for more information:<br>* www.iProspect.com-- Search engine positioning firm.<br>* www.Pandia.com-- An SEO portal with many useful resources.<br>* www.PositionPro.com-- Web-based submission service.<br>* www.se-optimizer.com-- The Search Engine Optimizer program checks web pages for optimum relevancy.<br>* www.SearchEngineWatch.com-- Danny Sullivan's search engine information portal.<br>* www.SearchEngineWorkshops.com-- SEO workshops and information from John Alexander and Robin Nobles.<br>* www.Thesaurus.com-- Helps find similar words.<br>* www.WebPosition.com-- WebPosition Gold Software is the gold standard for SEP. It includes a suite of integrated modules designed to raise relevance, including page generation and critique, and submission.<br>* www.WordTracker.com-- Brainstorm keywords with this subscription-based service. Choose phrases with a high KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index).<br><br> <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 7:15 PM EDT </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120782/keyword-optimization/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120782/keyword-optimization/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('120782')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120782/keyword-optimization/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class=""> <div class="entry"> <span class="title">SEO Writing Strategies for Graphical Sites</span><br /> SEO Writing Strategies for Graphical Sites by Karon Thackston (c) 2003<br><br>As a copywriter, I'd love to tell you that every site on the Web needs tons of copy. However, the simple truth is not all do. Many sites simply produce better sales when they use more graphics than words.<br><br>Since search engines are hungry for words you simply have to use copy if you plan to get ranked highly. Quite a dilemma, isn't it?<br><br>So what do you do if you're a graphic designer, if you sell jewelry, or if you have another site that needs more pictures than copy? Don't despair. There are some strategies that can help you reach a happy medium, satisfying your visitors and the engines both.<br><br>1. Use Descriptions - Place keyworded descriptions under each graphic on your pages. Just a sentence or two for each one can add up and give you enough room to achieve good keyword saturation.<br><br>2. Break the Copy Into Sections - Instead of having all 250-350 words of copy in one place, break your copy into small sections. For example, place a headline and three sentences at the top of the page, a few words under your bottom navigation bar, and a short paragraph above your "Order Now" link. The engines will find the words regardless of where on the page they are, but your visitors won't be overwhelmed by seeing all the copy in one place.<br><br>3. Don't Neglect ALT Tags - but don't abuse them either! ALT tags (technically known as image alt attributes) are designed to give short descriptions of graphics on your page. They are read to those who can't see well (when they use special text-to-speech software).<br><br>Abusing ALT tags by stuffing them full of arbitrary keywords or an extremely long description is frowned upon by the engines. However, feel free to assign a short keyword phrase that describes each graphic you have.<br><br>4. Go Below the Fold - Copy can always be placed "below the fold."<br><br>This term is used to describe the section of your index page that is not visible when the page first loads. In order to see it, the visitor would have to scroll vertically. If you've designed your index page to be fully visible without scrolling, consider using the space below the design to insert your copy.<br><br>5. Use the Sidebar - If your site design uses a sidebar for the navigation links, use the empty space for short bits of copy. Even the statement "Order ________ Now" will give you one more instance of keyword placement.<br><br>6. Create Bulleted Lists - Many people don't perceive lists as copy.<br><br>For this reason, you can use bulleted lists (or numbered lists) where traditional "sentence" copy wouldn't work. Tip: Instead of creating a list that reads:<br><br>We meet all your ____ needs by:<br><br>* offering the lowest price.<br><br>* providing first-rate service.<br><br>* shipping your order in just 24 hours.<br><br>Create a list that reads like this:<br><br>At ABC Company, we offer you:<br><br>* the lowest price on ______.<br><br>* first-rate service. Ask us any questions you have about ____.<br><br>* shipping of your _____ in just 24 hours.<br><br>See the difference? More keywords in the same amount of copy.<br><br>If you use a little creativity, you can get enough keyword saturation in your copy without cluttering up your site. This is sure to please both the search engines and your site visitors.<br><br> <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 7:05 PM EDT </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120772/seo-writing-strategies-for-graphical-sites/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120772/seo-writing-strategies-for-graphical-sites/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('120772')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120772/seo-writing-strategies-for-graphical-sites/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class=""> <div class="entry"> <span class="title">Tools</span><br /> 1. Keyword Analyser<br>http://www.jimworld.com/tools/keyword-analyzer/<br>http://keywordcount.com/<br>http://www.webjectives.com/<br>http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi<br> <br>2. PPC Bids<br>http://www.jimworld.com/tools/top-ppc-bids/<br> <br>3. Rank Checker<br>http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/search_engine_position_checker.asp <br>http://sitecook.com/<br> <br>4. Search Engine Relationship<br>http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/search_engine_relationships_chart.asp?Set=1&PPC=0&Engine=0&check=please+wait<br> <br>5. Spider Eye View<br>http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/spider_viewer.asp<br>http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi<br>http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi<br> <br>6. Keyword Tools<br>http://www.wordtracker.com/<br>http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/<br>http://www.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp<br>http://www.goodkeywords.com<br> <br>7. Link Popularity<br>http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com/<br>http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/<br> <br>8. Browser Emulator<br>http://www.anybrowser.com/siteviewer.html<br> <br>9. Others<br>Info about Site Technology - www.netcraft.com<br>Http Viewer: http://www.rexswain.com <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 7:01 PM EDT </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120769/tools/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120769/tools/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('120769')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120769/tools/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class=""> <div class="entry"> <span class="title">A-1 Internetdesign Keywords</span><br /> A-1 Internet Design <br> <br><br>There are three criteria for selection Keywords<br><br>Relevancy - would this bring the right kind of traffic for us. If people come to our site, would the buy our service? <br>Ans. This is best measured by doing a search on Google and Yahoo and seeing what kind of sites pop up. It is also qualitative. When people type Professional Web Design, they are probably looking for a web design firm. But if they type Web Design, they maybe looking for articles about web design or books etc. <br><br> <br><br>Occurrence - How often do people search for it? <br>Ans. Do people even use this term. Is it worth focusing on?<br><br> <br><br>Competition - Can we get a high ranking for this term? <br>Ans. Some terms are so generic and there is so much competition, it would be very difficult to get a high ranking. Even if the other two criteria are satisfied, we would still be ranked low. <br><br> <br><br>Based on all this, we can assume that good keywords should be specific (3 words or more). This would probably fulfill most of these criteria. <br><br> <br><br>There are only 20 Search Engines on the web worth focusing on. We can safely ignore everything else. These 20 Search Engines would give us over 99% of our traffic. These search engine would be divided between Directories such as Yahoo and Search Engines such as Google. We are therefore going to optimize our site for both an human audience and spiders. Accordingly, we will ignore strategies such as Meta Tags stuffing (we can get a penalty), irrelevant linking thru FFE (we can get classified as Spam) etc. <br><br> <br><br> <br><br>KEYWORD SELECTION and UTILIZATION<br><br>Focus on 10 - 15 Keywords <br>We need to have them prominently displayed in the following areas: <br>Title Tag - this is considered primary text by all the Search Engine (We don't even have it on our site). This is also the 1st text shown in the display on Search Engine and can mean the difference between someone clicking or not. It also gets captured in Favorites. Title Tag on each page should be unique as the Url on the page maybe uniquely ranked. <br>Body Text - not more than 800 words on a page (can get classified as SPAM). Search Engine will always index body tags. Therefore this is important as the words here will go into determining Keyword Relevance for Search Engine. Thus the Body Text needs to be seeded with Keywords even while it makes sense to the reader. The Keyword should be used prominently in introduction and repeated in the other para and also used prominently in conclusion. <br>Keyword Prominence - Search Engine consistently consider the word at the top of a web page more important than the rest of the page. Here we can use techniques as having a primary Tag just below the logo "New York Based Web Design Firm". This would give us the following advantages - it uses the word - New York and Web Design Firm. New York is searched 272793 and Web Design 477328 times on Overture during May 2003. Also this uses the Power Combo Strategy - two keywords repeating. This should be our logo but it should appear as Text (NOT GRAPHIC) so that it can be indexed. <br>Headline Text - Below the logo there should be a Headline Text which repeats the Title Text. <br>Breadcrumb - Each page should have a breadcrumb (Yahoo uses Breadcrumb prominently). <br>Hyperlinks to Keywords on other pages in the body text are very useful (Many Search Engine consider text around Anchor tag to be important and give it higher weightage). So for example in the body text for Professional Web Design, we can refer to Web Store and hyperlink to that. We can also refer to Auction Site, Search Engine optimization, etc. The text that goes before and after the hypertext will get higher weightage and must be properly selected. <br>Meta Tags - Google does not use Meta Tags. Alta Vista does. Yahoo and other human director editors look at Meta Tags (and some spiders) and if they see stuffing, then they will not index the site. Accordingly, it must be used with caution. Some thumbrule <br>Between 200 - 250 words <br>Do not use filler words (as they are ignored) <br>It should be relevant <br>The 1st para should read like a proper sentence as it sometime can show up in a search engine result. <br>Alternative Text - This is the text placed inside Graphic Image in HTML code. Some Search Engine index this and thus this can be imp. in getting a higher ranking. Here we can use keywords. <br>Use Keywords in the url path. This can be useful. Thus the url for professional web design can be - www.a1internetdesign.com/professionalwebdesign.html <br>Anchor Text - Many Search Engine give greater weightage to Anchor Text. Accordingly it should be used judiciously. <br>Menu Items - the keywords should correspond to the menu items as it increase relevancy. <br> <br><br> <br><br>KEYWORDS<br><br>Web Development - Priority 1<br>Professional Web Design - SELECTED<br><br>Overture - 5321 (May 2003). This is a good keyword as it is 3 words yet has a fair degree of search results and on a qualitative level appears to be useful and relevant. If we search on Google for this search item, a number of our competitor popup. This can also be used in tandem with terms such as affordable web design, cheap web design, New York Web Design etc. which are also relevant keywords. <br><br> <br><br> <br><br>Online Retail WebStore - NOT SELECTED<br><br>Overture - 0 (May 2003). This fails the 1st test, no one searches for it. It also would fail other test such as being relevant. Some alternatives would be webstore (958), web store (2497) and online store (27,440). Online store which has a much higher search count has a negative i.e. a search on Google brings all kind of various irrelevant links such as Apple Store. Therefore we should go ahead with Web Store Keyword as a substitute for Online Retail Store. A search on Google brings some relevant links. Another positive is that it can be combined with various other Keywords for a power combo strategy - Book Web Store. The negative is that from a qualitative perspective, I don't see our customer typing this term to necessarily look for a firm. OPEN TO OTHER SUGGESTIONS. <br><br> <br><br>B2B Ecommerce - <br><br> <br><br>Portal Sites <br><br> <br><br>Multimedia Content <br><br> <br><br>Advanced Web Features <br><br> <br><br>Corporate Branding <br><br> <br><br>Online Marketing <br><br> <br><br>Search Engine <br><br> <br><br>Optimization <br><br> <br><br>Web Hosting <br><br> <br><br>Ecommerce Maintenance <br><br> <br><br>Application Development <br><br> <br><br>Startup Services <br><br> <br><br>TITLE TAG KEYWORD <br><br>New York Based Web Design Firm - This is term that I feel can be used as a title tag on all the pages. It has the advantage of using New York and Web Design. (See explanation above). <br> <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 7:00 PM EDT </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120767/a1-internetdesign-keywords/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120767/a1-internetdesign-keywords/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('120767')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120767/a1-internetdesign-keywords/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class=""> <div class="entry"> <span class="title">Backlinks</span><br /> When Will Backlinks Show Up?++<br>From: Joshua Friedman<br>Hi Jill,<br>I'm pretty new to this sort of thing and there's a LOT of info out there so I'm hoping your newsletter can help me out. My site comes up great on MSN and ok on some other sites, but I'm having a hard time<br>getting it on Google. I've been spending my days trying to get<br>reciprocal links with good (high PageRank) Websites so hopefully that will help in the coming weeks.<br>I guess a quick question I would have (2 actually) is:<br>Roughly how long after someone adds me to their link page should it come up in a Google reverse link search? I've been on a few other sites for about a week now but the Google backlinks only show me on one site.<br>The second question is (and of course this is the $25,000 question):<br>any other quick pointers for a beginner trying to get on Google? What would your 1 main point be for someone like me who has a pretty small budget but would really like a top 10 or even 20 listing on Google? I am all the way up to #3 on MSN when you search for one of my main keyword phrases, but I'm nowhere to be found on Google. I've used their AdWords a bit but would really like a ranking.<br>Thanks for any further help and I look forward to reading your newsletters.<br>Regards,<br>Joshua Friedman<br>~~~Jill's Response~~~<br>Hi Joshua,<br>Once a site adds a link to yours, it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months before you'll see it showing up as a backlink in Google. If the link is on a page that has a PageRank which is less than 4, it may not show up at all. That doesn't mean that it's not counted towards your overall link popularity quotient, but you may not see it in the list of links to your site.<br>In regards to your second question, I don't usually take a look at the sites that people email me (cuz I'd never get any work done!), but for some reason I took a look at yours. Unfortunately, whatever advice you were previously given was very bad. Your site is basically "spamming" the search engines, and because of this it is doubtful that you will see high rankings in Google. (Kind of interesting that MSN doesn't care.) You're focusing on way too many keyword phrases on the home page, and then you have *stuffed* them everywhere on the site where they don't belong. Your Title tag is way too long and keyword stuffed, and you have comment tags that are spammy, along with all kinds of other keywords stuffed into non-standard tags which are not even supposed to be used for search engine optimization purposes.<br>None of this will help you with Google, and most of it will probably hurt you.<br>I would remove the link to the spammy search engine optimization company who did all this for you, and start over from scratch. I hope you didn't pay them too much. It's companies like that who give us a bad name. (And they always seem to be the ones that require a link back to them too...sheesh.) Please read through my articles and the past newsletters to learn how to do things correctly, and hopefully you'll eventually have a chance at high rankings.<br>Think about just 2 or 3 targeted keyword phrases per page when you optimize, and don't simply stuff them places. Have a writer create some great content based on your phrases. Professional copywriting is worth every penny!<br>[Jill's note: I was going to go into a bit more detail on what the spammy SEO company had done with Joshua's site, but since I emailed him this info yesterday, I see he's removed the spam already! Good work, Joshua.] One thing I just noticed that you still have on the site is a link to a "link farm" type of site. They are smart enough to claim that they are *not* a link farm, and yet they require a link to them if you want to add your site to their directory. I would strongly suggest that you get out of that program quickly. It doesn't appear that the link-swapping site is considered a "bad neighborhood" at this time (it has a PageRank of 5 on the main page), but it could very well be penalized at some point in the future.<br>A better way to build high-quality links to your site would be to have something interesting to offer potential partner sites. Have you written some articles on your area of expertise? Many sites are looking for well-written material they can publish online, and will be happy to add your article (which could include a link back to your site). This is a much smarter approach, as you won't have to worry about whom YOU are linking to. Plus, you can establish yourself as an expert in your field at the same time.<br> <br clear="all" /> <p> <div class="time"> <div> Posted by nybanker at 6:58 PM EDT </div> <div> <div> <a class="timelink" href="" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120764/backlinks/'); return false;">Share This Post</a> <img alt="Share This Post" src="/adm/blog/img/buttons/sharePost.png" onclick="javascript:share_this_page(this, 'http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120764/backlinks/');"> </div> <a class="timeLink" href="javascript:add_comment('120764')">Post Comment</a> | <a href="http://nybanker.tripod.com/webmarketing/index.blog/120764/backlinks/" class="timeLink">Permalink</a> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p class="entry"> Newer&nbsp;|&nbsp;Latest&nbsp;|&nbsp;Older </p> </div> </body> </html>