SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

The most cost-effective advertisement should be both inexpensive and targeted at exactly the right customer.  Years ago this was something of a pipe dream--today it is a reality.  The Internet is the most comprehensive source of information in human history.  But like any library of knowledge, it must be catalogued and organized for effective use.  And therein lies the perfect solution:  search engines.  Like the card catalog of a library, search engines are a customer's way of sifting through the Web to filter out what they're looking for.  And what better way to make sure you are found then to have an influence on what they find?  Search engine listings meet both of our criteria in terms of focus and affordability.  No other form of advertising is so focused that the customer is actually searching for you.  A search engine user is a highly receptive and targeted audience because you are not trying to sell them on something they don't already want.  They have come looking for you and they already want what you specifically have to offer.  Furthermore, the great majority of search engine listings are free.  Return on investment couldn't be better-- with none of your dollars spent, the very first dollar returned is profit.

According to the Georgia Institute of Technology, 88% of Internet users find new web sites through search engine listings1.  WebCMO data shows that in a side-by-side comparison of different forms of promotion, search engine listings are the number one way to generate traffic on websites2.  Search engine listings send droves of visitors to your site and they are free.  I have personally seen websites where traffic has increased ten-fold as a result of good search engine positioning. Nothing could be better, but there is a catch.

Getting listed on a search engine below 499 other websites simply won't work.  You need to get a listing near the top of your category to collect all the traffic a search engine can deliver.  But the good news is that you can dramatically improve your positioning with a little bit of elbow grease.  All it takes is some key modifications to your website and a little thought.  With good search engine listings a small business can project a large image on the Internet and get the kind of traffic that so many big business sites get.

Search Engine Positioning…

Search Engine Positioning, or SEP, is the process of boosting and maintaining your website's position in the results that Internet users see when they run queries on different search engines.

There are two distinct steps you need to take in order to maximize the effectiveness of your position in a search engine listing.  The first is to make key modifications to your pages in order to gain top positioning within a search engine's index.  The second is something that is commonly ignored.  That position needs to be maintained.  Too often, webmasters gain a great position on a search engine only to let it slip away, taking business away with it.  Don't make this mistake.  This essay is written to give you a good idea of how important SEP is in bringing more people to your website.

As you probably know by now, merely being listed in a search index is not enough to bring new visitors to your website.  Your website must rank at or near the top of the search results in order to collect all the traffic that search engines can produce.  The first major step in positioning your site is choosing descriptive and focused meta-keywords.  The importance of excellent keywords cannot be emphasized enough.

If you choose a good title, and an appropriate description and keywords, you should be able to obtain a good position near the top of the listings.  Now the trick is to maintain that position.  Just because you appear at the top of the search results doesn't mean that you are guaranteed to remain there.  New websites appear by the second and search engines regularly change the methods they use to index them.  To ensure that you maintain your position, you must first re-submit your site around once a month.

Search Engine Spiders…

Search engines need a way to examine the websites that people submit to them.  Some search engines like Yahoo!™ employ people to check each website registered with them, but these are in the minority.  Most other search engines use specialized software called "spiders" or "robots" to do this.  Spiders help search engines deliver accurate search results by determining how relevant a website is to the phrases and keywords a web surfer uses.  Spiders “crawl” through websites, analyzing text content and following hyperlinks.  This information about the website is used to determine how it should be categorized and ranked.  Because the spider's functions are so critical, anything relating to the way they operate is a closely guarded secret that the search engines would prefer you not to know.  It is, however, in our best interest to understand as much as we can about them, and to use that information to our advantage when designing a web page.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when designing your website is to see your site from a spider's point of view.  A spider can only analyze text and words that are in a structured format.  That is exactly why a frames-based site rarely ranks well on a search engine.  The HTML for a frames site doesn't have a conventional format-- all of the content is jumbled about the page in different code sections and script excerpts, and that confuses spiders.  Also, a spider needs to know right away what it should look for when it crawls your site.  Using meta keywords is the best method for doing that.  Otherwise, spiders will try to guess the content on your page and won't necessarily be successful -- getting ranked high for something unrelated to your site isn't helpful at all.

Descriptive and targeted meta keywords aren't the only thing search engine spiders look for.  If you do use meta keywords, a spider tries to find out how relevant those keywords are for your site.  For example, if your site is about recreational fishing, and you use the words fly-fishing, angling, and deep-sea fishing multiple times in your site, the spider will see your site being more relevant to those particular words than words which only appear once (for example, "commercial fishing").  Also, some spiders consider the position of a keyword to be important.  If a keyword is in the page title, or in the first six lines of the page body, some search engine spiders consider that to be very significant.  The "weight" of a keyword is a big factor, as well.  If a keyword appears three times in a page with one thousand words, that keyword has a lower weight then if it was on a page with thirty words.  Pages with heavily weighted keywords are considered more relevant to that keyword, and usually rank higher.  However, it is possible to go too far and actually abuse the way a spider works.

While it is good to optimize your page, overdoing it can cause the spider to think that you are trying to fool it or spam the engine.  The most common way of doing this is by using too many meta keywords.  In an effort to rank their site higher, some webmasters will have an absurd amount of keywords.  They'll include a meta keyword section two or three times in their page.  Not only is this not effective, it is counter-productive.   Something just as common is repeating a keyword over and over again on the page.  Years ago it was useful to do this, but search engine spiders have advanced enough that simple tricks aren't going to fool them.  Another, more devious plot, is called ghosting.  When a spider accesses a site, it tells that site who it is.  So, a Webmaster can detect that a search engine spider is going to look at its site.  Instead of serving up the normal web page that is seen in a web browser, the Webmaster gives the search engine spider a specially optimized page designed to rank perfectly on that engine.  While this practice may seem good for pages with a lot of dynamic content and not a lot of text, it is still abusing the purpose of spiders.  The webmasters who practice ghosting aren't only misleading the search engines, but they are also misleading web surfers coming to their site expecting to find the information they are looking for, but instead find themselves at a site, which they didn't want to visit.  The people behind search engines are always updating their spiders, making them both more effective and better able to sniff out sneaky webmasters trying to abuse the system.

Spiders are the workers behind the scenes at the search engines.  Some of them crawl through millions of websites every month.  A website's success depends on cooperating with the search engines and their methods.  To cooperate with the search engines, it is also important to understand how they and their spiders operate. 

Keyword Importance…

In order to take the right steps towards a better position on the search engines, you must first identify exactly what your website is offering.  Once you have a good idea of what that is, you need to cut down your idea to just a few words, literally.  A search engine doesn't use a full-page public relations newsletter to index sites--it uses words and short phrases.  If you are not sure about what words or phrases best describe your site, look at it from the user's perspective.  How would they find your site?  What search words or phrases make sense?  The importance of these choices cannot be emphasized enough.

The keywords that you choose will dictate the life or death of your website.  When you choose your keywords, you need to be able to compete with them.  It is unrealistic to think that a young and small company's website could rank number one on keywords like “Software”, “Books”, or “Sex”.  Larger, more established companies who have been on the Internet for several years are not only much more well known, but also have links to them from many other websites.  These links give credit to the larger companies and allow them to compete on such general words--engines see these sites as a reliable source.  That credibility is established over a long period of time through affiliate programs, alliances, link partnerships, and other similar programs.  By submitting your site to link directories with AddWeb 6, you can increase your "Link Popularity", and slowly gain similar credibility, as more pages across the Web take notice of you and link to your site.  Hopefully though, you will be using more specific keywords than the ones mentioned above.

The fact that most people do not query search engines on single words such as “Books”, or “Fish”, works in your favor.  Users are more likely to search for something more specific like “Cook Books”, or “Monk Fish”.  The first step, then, in choosing the right keywords, is to make them specific.  You can also be more specific in your keywords by narrowing down your geographic location.  For example, if you were a dentist in Washington, you would be most interested in attracting web site visitors from the Washington area.  Washington Internet traffic would also be more likely to visit you, rather than a dentist in another state.  So you would be best off picking keywords like:

• Dentists WA

• Dentist in Washington

• WA dentists

• Washington Dentist

You also have an excellent chance at ranking well on keywords that are closely related to the main subject of your site.  For example, if your website subject is gourmet foods and culinary arts, you might try targeting related keywords such as “Vietnamese cinnamon” or “Cajun spices”.  The point is, people looking for these items are probably interested in cooking as well.  Furthermore, the competition for these keywords is much less intense than for “food”, or “Cooking”.  You have a better chance of getting an excellent position using focused and targeted keywords such as these.  There are other opportunities as well, such as taking advantage of misspellings.

Misspellings of keywords should be seriously considered for targeting.  People very frequently misspell the search phrases they use on search engines.  If a particular keyword for your site is difficult to spell (Australopithecus afarensis, anyone?), or you are aware of common misspellings for your keywords, be sure to include them!  As crazy as this sounds, many websites already do this to great success.  Remember, getting a number-one listing on a misspelled word can be very easy and rewarding in terms of traffic.

Deciding on the correct keywords can be the most critical decision you can make regarding the success or failure of a website.  The keywords chosen must be specific and narrow in their meaning.  Picking related or misspelled words is also a viable option.  Geography should be used to your advantage as well.  The Internet may be a new business medium, but the same rules of basic survival apply--websites that don't take advantage of every opportunity will be surpassed by the ones that do.

How to Avoid Trouble

While planning your website promotion strategy, it is wise to remember that the search engines are very capable of sniffing out when someone is trying to trick or deceive them.  A certain road to disaster is to consciously try to fool search engines into giving you a better listing. While this may work for a short period of time, invariably the scheme is found out and the offending site is severely penalized or even banned altogether.  Most of us are not, however, intentionally engaged in trying to scam search engines.  Even so, there are mistakes that an honest user can make which are nonetheless interpreted as intentional and malicious behavior.  Here are some of the things you can do to ensure that you will never be penalized or banned by the search engines.

First and most important, don't over-submit your site.  The search engines each have their own procedures and lead times for adding new sites to their indices.  Some may immediately add you while others may take months to list your site, so be patient.  They are happy to accept your submission because it adds to the resources they can offer to their users.  But submitting your site to them repeatedly in an attempt to get their attention will only get you penalized or banned.  Generally, a submission once a month to each of the search engines and directories on your list is sufficient.  Some link pages may allow you to submit more frequently.  Another way that well-intentioned users get into trouble is by submitting too many pages at once.

In most cases, it is only necessary to submit the URL of your home page.  Search engine spiders are then sent to crawl through the site to examine the links and other content of the site.  While there are certain search engines that will allow you to submit as many pages of your site as you like, the majority do not.  Any pages submitted beyond the home page or doorway will be interpreted as submission “Spam,” and will promptly get you penalized or banned.  Submit only your homepage or doorway page.  However, as a side note, never submit a doorway page to Yahoo!™.  Each site submitted to Yahoo!™ is reviewed by a breathing human being.  This is yet another reason not to try to deceive the search engines.

Some ways of trying to deceive engines have become commonplace.  One such tactic is to endlessly repeat keywords over and over again on the home page text, then trying to hide it by making it the same color as the page background.  There was a time when this was a commonly used tactic, and it may have worked for a while.  However, the search engines caught on and they now know how to detect obvious deception such as this.  Don't try this because it will get you penalized or banned.  The same will be true for any new tactics that surface and try to subvert search engine analysis methods.  Some unethical webmasters have resorted to using meta-keywords in their sites that have no relevance whatsoever to their actual content.  This is highly misguided and has potentially drastic consequences for the engines that are trying to return relevant results on a query.  Guerilla tactics like this might work for a short time but the search engines will catch on and you will be penalized or worse.  Remember that many search engines share common indices of listings.  If you get your site banned on one of these engines, chances are that you will be banned on several engines at once.

Other elements of your website can cause you trouble if you're not careful.  Some web sites still use a “Frames” format.  Frames may look nice, and they can help novices to organize their sites, but they are devastating to your site's ability to get a good position in a search engine index.  Most search engine spiders simply cannot make sense of frames-based pages and therefore make a well-intentioned but frequently useless attempt at trying to determine what the website is about.  The consequence is that the site usually is not indexed at all or it is indexed at such a poor position that no one will ever see it.  If you must use a frames-based website, be sure to build a doorway page that has no frames in it.

By building your page with a little forethought, you can avoid any pitfalls and should be safe from any conflicts with the search engines.  If you follow these simple steps, not only will you avoid being banned by search engines, but you should also start to see your position rising to the top!

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