Search Engine Optimization (ARTICLE)

[CrossMediaGroup]

by Rodney Burutsa

Rodney Burutsa is the owner of CrossMediaGroup.net and an author of articles and tutorials on the Internet, e-business, and online marketing. These articles are free content you may reprint or publish in your newsletter, website or e-book as long as the links and appropriate credit bylines remain in context.

The objective of search engine optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in search engine results. Search engine optimization is the key to obtaining visitors for very little to no cost at all. In fact, SEO is absolutely vital to your online marketing success.

Design For Promotion

Good website design is done with the promotion of the site in mind. Here are a few elements to keep in mind while designing your site for search engine optimization:

Text links: If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page.

Site map: A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site can use the navigation bar.

Be bold: Use the tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do not use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Link Popularity

Search engines, like Google, use various algorithms to rank search results. The most important of these is link popularity. Link popularity is gained by the number of sites linking to yours. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot of points; but if that site has few sites linking to it, you get only a few points.

Reciprocal linking: The sites linking to you must cover the same topics as your linking page in both directions. All other links are of minimal importance (or in the case of spam they are ignored or even penalized). Exchange links with sites similar to yours, not sites directly competing with yours. Don't overdo the anchor text. You don't want all your inbound links looking the same, because it looks like automation – something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, or descriptive text as well. See the article on Link Exchange for more on this subject.

Deep linking: Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. Having other sites link to different pages on your site tells search engines you have a lot of worthwhile content. When all your links are coming in to the homepage it tells search engines you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

Copywriting: Offer articles to newsletter or ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives. Another method of publishing your content online is through article exchanges, similar to link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else's article with a link back to their site. They publish your article with a link back to your site. You both have content and high quality links. See the article on Content Writing (Copywriting) for more on this subject.

[ehomebusiness]

Thank you. I enjoyed the article very much, however, more detail would be nice too.

Thanks

[Brandon]

It is good for a basic article.

Seochat.com has some more indepth articles for someone wanting that.

[DrColorChip]

As someone who used to dominate the search engines years ago, I can tell you that good text in a web page is a must. By that, I mean think about what words you would use to find your page (beside the name of the site). Think of a few primary words, then a few supporting words.

EX: "paint chip repair" is the focus....but what other words could be used to help sell that business? How about "automotive", "touch-up", "car" "color", "scratches" These are the supporting words to use around the primary phrase. Another example might be 'rentals', with supporting words like seasonal, florida, vacation, summer, winter, golf course, etc. "Rental" is the main word, but a lot of other supporting adjectives will be used in a SE search as well.

Gear the page around the primary words, but then use supporting words nearby. Don't use them to the point that they are repeated in each sentence or the engines will kick you out or lower your ranking. Use a fair amount of text in the page as well. If you don't have much to say, make up some stuff that is readable, but not necessary to sell your product just to get the words on the page. Spiders will crawl a site and look for the meat and potatoes of a website, which is the body text. Meta tags are good, but aside from the title bar, the body text is the most important part of the page for the engines to find food for their indexes.

I could go on and on with other comments, but this is one of the most important parts of a website that I often see overlooked. Good text and suporting keywords are golden!

[Lanier]

Hi There

Thanks for advices Rodney. One thing that comes to my mind about linking, is that the inbound links should mainly come from quality websites that have a better ranking than your site. Poor sites with low ranking can damage your ranking on the search engine index.


All the best,
Lars

[teknicks]

Lanier,

That is correct. Part of a professional and quality link building program includes linkage cleaning and removal. It’s not about quantity so much as quality. The 3 single most important attributes of a quality link building program is 1. Related Content 2. Google Rankage 3. Anchor Text. The inbound link must come from a site that is related to the topics of your site. They should talk about the same services and subjects, should contain similar keywords in the copy, and should have a similar topic focused title. Secondly, don't waste your time if that potential incoming link is coming from a site that is not indexed and ranked by Google. And third Your text link should contain your keywords!!!!!!! Glad to help....Happy Holidays

[estoretech]

keep in mind of these "DONTS" for the search engines:

* Do not use text that is the same or slightly different color as the background to 'hide' keywords.
* Do not repeat the keywords in the Meta tags (use them only once), and do not use keywords that are unrelated to the site's content.
* Do not create a title like "web hosting, web hosting, web hosting." This is considered spam.
* Do not repeat the keyword to increase its frequency on a page (Keyword stuffing). Search engines now have the ability to detect this: they can spider a page and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion to the rest of the words in the document - this is also known as keyword density.
* Do not optimize a page for top ranking, and then swap another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.
* Do not put misleading words on the page in the hopes of attracting visitors looking for another topic.
* Do not submit a page to the search engines that, once loaded, automatically redirects to a page of different information.
* Do not create a page that prohibits the user from using the browser's back button to return to the search engine results.
* Do not create "doorway pages."
* Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same search engine.
* Do not put multiple instances of the Title Tag in the HTML code.
* Do not put pages of content in layers and position them off screen or practice the same kind of behavior by turning the visibility of the layers off.
* Do not use small or 'invisible text' in the page.
* Do not send query to a search engine with an automated 'rank reporting tool' hundreds of times per day.
* Do not purchase multiple domains and put duplicate copies of the web site on each domain.
* Do not participate in Link Farm programs.
* Do not submit different versions of the web site in the hope of getting multiple listings.
* Do not submit more than the allowed number of pages per engine per day or week. Each engine has a limit on how many pages one can manually submit to it using its online forms.
* Do not cloak.
* Do not support affiliate sites with the same or similar content but different site designs.
* Do not create a page which is stuffed with keyword content so far down the page that it is unlikely anyone will ever scroll down that far.
* Do not create a plain page specifically designed to rank highly, and then once indexed, upload a different page to your server.
* Do not put hundreds of 1x1 transparent .gif's on your page and assign them all the same ALT text. This is rather easy to detect.
* Do not use CSS to set the text size of a particular tag to 0% and then fill your page with 'invisible text.'

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to fool the search engines, but just about all of them are detectable - and that makes them very dangerous.

[rich]

One other thing to bear in mind is choosing the right keywords. There is no point in using keywords that people in your industry use if the average customer out there never uses them.

Similarly, there is no point in targeting a keyword such as 'hotel' when there are already over 500 million sites listed on google competing for that keyword - yes, lots of people are searching for it, but your unlikely to see much (if any) of that traffic. It is much easier to compete for keywords where there are plenty of searches done, but not much competition.

A simple way to find out what keywords people are searching for, and the number of searches, is to use a service such as overture. You can manually check these keyword phrases it will provide you with to see what the competition is like in google etc, or you could save yourself time and use wordtracker, which will provide you with a list of keywords sorted by KEI (the ratio between the keyword popularity and the competition for it).

Find some good keywords associated with your site, and build it up around them.

[gHiros]

The article provided by CrossMediaGroup is about 9 years old, and with the advent of the current Google updates (e.g., Panda, Hummingbird), SEO techniques need to be revamped for 2014. Google updates have focused on improving the search results for the user. And thus, focusing on providing good quality content for your website and giving your visitors an awesome web experience, are keys to crafting your website as relevant and useful in Google's eyes. And, which hopefully will result in nice rankings on the SERPS.

[delusional]

keep in mind of these "DONTS" for the search engines:

* Do not use text that is the same or slightly different color as the background to 'hide' keywords.
* Do not repeat the keywords in the Meta tags (use them only once), and do not use keywords that are unrelated to the site's content.
* Do not create a title like "web hosting, web hosting, web hosting." This is considered spam.
* Do not repeat the keyword to increase its frequency on a page (Keyword stuffing). Search engines now have the ability to detect this: they can spider a page and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion to the rest of the words in the document - this is also known as keyword density.
* Do not optimize a page for top ranking, and then swap another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.
* Do not put misleading words on the page in the hopes of attracting visitors looking for another topic.
* Do not submit a page to the search engines that, once loaded, automatically redirects to a page of different information.
* Do not create a page that prohibits the user from using the browser's back button to return to the search engine results.
* Do not create "doorway pages."
* Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same search engine.
* Do not put multiple instances of the Title Tag in the HTML code.
* Do not put pages of content in layers and position them off screen or practice the same kind of behavior by turning the visibility of the layers off.
* Do not use small or 'invisible text' in the page.
* Do not send query to a search engine with an automated 'rank reporting tool' hundreds of times per day.
* Do not purchase multiple domains and put duplicate copies of the web site on each domain.
* Do not participate in Link Farm programs.
* Do not submit different versions of the web site in the hope of getting multiple listings.
* Do not submit more than the allowed number of pages per engine per day or week. Each engine has a limit on how many pages one can manually submit to it using its online forms.
* Do not cloak.
* Do not support affiliate sites with the same or similar content but different site designs.
* Do not create a page which is stuffed with keyword content so far down the page that it is unlikely anyone will ever scroll down that far.
* Do not create a plain page specifically designed to rank highly, and then once indexed, upload a different page to your server.
* Do not put hundreds of 1x1 transparent .gif's on your page and assign them all the same ALT text. This is rather easy to detect.
* Do not use CSS to set the text size of a particular tag to 0% and then fill your page with 'invisible text.'

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to fool the search engines, but just about all of them are detectable - and that makes them very dangerous.

I think this is more valuable information than things you SHOULD do. People always try to sneak past the system but if they get caught, the repercussions are very hard on your website. Your ranking means a lot and if you get punished for abusing the system, you're going to have a bad time.