promo you site: August 2008

Designing Your Site to be Search Engine Friendly25
•The all-important content
•The importance of keywords in all aspects of your Web site
•The elements that are in the search engine algorithms or formulas that
are outside your Web site
•The importance of link popularity and link relevancy to your search
engine placement.
Methodology to Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
To make your site search engine friendly, you have to:
•Decide which search engines are critical for your success.
•Learn as much as you can about their ranking criteria and the weighting
given to each criterion in their algorithm. It is also important to know
which databases they are using.
Then you must:
•Determine the keywords that your target market is using in the search
engines to find what you have to offer,
•Assign those keywords to specific pages throughout your site, and then
•Populate the pages with the assigned keywords in the appropriate places
given the ranking criteria for your targeted search engines.
The remainder of this chapter walks you step-by-step through this process.
Understanding Search Engines
Search engines use programs or intelligent agents, calledbots, to actually search
the Internet for pages that they index using specific parameters as they read the
content. The agent reads the information on every page of your site and then
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follows the links. For example, Google’s spiders continu-
ally crawl the Web looking for sites to index and, of course,
index sites upon their submission. Google is obviously very
important in the search engine community, so be sure your
site is easily accessible to its spider. A detailed discussion
on submissions to search engines and directories can be
found in Chapter 8.
Registering with search engines is fairly simple. In most cases, you simply
have to submit your URL or Internet address on their submission form. Even if
your URL is not registered with search engines, a number of the major search
engines will eventually find you, as their bots are continually roaming the Inter-
net looking for new sites to index. Your odds of being indexed increase signifi-
cantly if you have a well-developed links strategy. There are millions of sites out
there, so I suggest that you be proactive and register your site to ensure a speedier
listing. Once you are registered, some of the bots will periodically visit your site
looking for changes and updates.
A common problem faced by Internet marketers is how to influence search
engines to index their site appropriately and how to ensure that their site ap-
pears when people use relevant search criteria. Many of the interesting and
creative sites on the Internet are impossible to find because they are not indexed
with the major search engines. The majority (85 percent) of Internet users em-
ploy search engines or directories to find what they are looking for on the Web.
They do this by typing in a keyword or phrase that represents what they are
looking for. Usually people use a two- or three-keyword phrase. The following
sections explore how to make your Web site more search engine friendly.
Many search engines and directories either partner with or license the use of
the search technology of another search engine or directory. If you submit your
site to a search engine that uses Google’s index, then the design of your site
influences how you’re indexed in all search engines that rely on Google for their
search results. For example, Google’s results can be found on AOL, Netscape,
HotBot, Lycos, and more. Google’s paid advertising results appear on many
other sites as well.
In a similar fashion, you often find other search engine and directory data
intermixed or included in some form with the data of another search engine or
directory. To take this example further, some search engines are built on the
premise of pooling the search results of many search providers and presenting
the results to the end user—they do not maintain their own index, but rather
manipulate the results of many other search engines in hopes of providing a
better search experience. This type of search tool is called a meta-search engine.
Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com) is an example of a meta-search engine.
BOTS
Programs used by search
engines to search the Inter-
net for pages to index.
Designing Your Site to be Search Engine Friendly27
When designing your site, you must always keep the search engines in mind.
Something as simple as a DHTML drop-down menu on your site or a Flash intro
can cause problems with the search engines and the indexing of your site if imple-
mented incorrectly. You want to do everything you can to ensure that your site is
designed to meet the needs of your target audience while remaining completely
search engine friendly. Search engines can produce a significant amount of traffic
to your site if you can manage to be placed in the top search results.
Decide Which Search Engines Are Important
To start this process, you want to decide which search engines you are going to
be concerned about when taking steps necessary to rank high in their search
results. For this section we are talking aboutorganic listings rather than pay-
per-click or sponsored listings.
Organic listings are the search results that are displayed to the left of the
page and below the sponsored listings. Organic listings are free listings and are
gained by how your site is ranked based on a unique formula, or algorithm, for
each search engine. Pay-per-click or sponsored list-
ings, on the other hand, are listings that are paid for
and gained through a bidding process. Sponsored
listings are always displayed at the top of the results
and down the right-hand side of the page. Ranking
high in the pay-to-play search engines is discussed
more in Chapter 9. See Figure 2.1 for organic and
pay-per-click positioning on the search engine re-
sults page.
You want to select a number of the most popular search engines for your
concentration. You also want to be indexed in topic-specific search engines for
your industry. You can find the most popular search engines by doing your
research online through sites such as Search Engine Watch (http://
www.searchenginewatch.com). You can keep up with what’s happening in the
search engines by joining one of the many discussion lists on the topic.
As it stands at the time of this writing, the major players in the search en-
gine industry are:
•Google (http://www.google.com)
•Yahoo! (http://www.search.yahoo.com)
Organic Listing
A free listing of a site in the
search results ranked by the
search engine’s ranking
formula or algorithm.
28101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site(promote.maxpress.com)
•MSN Search (http://search.msn.com)
•AOL (http://www.aol.com)
•Ask (http://www.ask.com).
Learn the Search Engine Ranking Criteria
Each search engine has its own unique ranking criteria and its own unique
algorithm, or formula, giving different weighting to each of the criteria in its
formula. For the search engines that you have decided to focus on, you have to
learn as much as you can about their ranking criteria and relative weighting.
See Figure 2.2 for a breakdown of how the search engines score sites. The site
with the highest score appears at the top of the results and the rest appear in
descending order of their score.
The search engines are all fighting for market share. The more market share
a search engine has, the more valuable the company is. To gain market share, a
Figure 2.1.Pay-per-click or sponsored listings appear at the top of the search results
and along the right hand side of the page, whereas organic listings appear on the left
hand side of the page and under the sponsored listings.
Designing Your Site to be Search Engine Friendly29
search engine has to provide better results than its competition. It is for this
reason that the search engines are changing and improving their formulas on an
ongoing basis. You have to keep up with changes in these formulas, tweak your
site accordingly, and resubmit when necessary.
The search engines use different databases for their search results. They
have different algorithms or formulas for their ranking. They have different
weighting for the various elements within their formula. They change their for-
mulas over time and they change their ranking over time. Sound complicated?
Things have changed quite a bit from the early days. Elements that used to
have significant weighting may now have very little weight. You have to re-
member that it is the highest total score you are looking for, so even if an ele-
ment has reduced weighting, if the element has any points at all you want to
incorporate that element to maximize your total score. Sometimes the top sites
are within a small number of points of each other.
It is not as daunting as it might sound, because the major search engines
tend to look at similar information but weight the relevancy for particular items
differently in their algorithms. That having been said, here are the most impor-
tant areas on a Web page that you must address when performing organic search
engine optimization:
•Title tags (page titles)
•Keyword meta-tags
Figure 2.2.Formula for how the search engines rank Web sites.
How the Search Engines Rank Sites
Keyword Phrase Placement Points
+
Link Popularity/Link Relevancy Points
+
Miscellaneous Points
=
Total Score
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•Description meta-tags
•Alt tags
•Hypertext links (e.g., anchor text)
•Domain names and file names
•Body text (beginning, middle, and end of page copy)
•Headers
•Between the “NOFRAMES” tag of framed Web sites.
Page titles and text-based page content are the most important of the noted
placement areas. Keyword meta-tags are not as critical as they once were, but
are still applicable for some engines. Remember—it is the absolute highest score
you are looking for; if there are any points available, you want to design your
site to take advantage of them.
Because Google is the favorite search engine for the time being, let’s take a
closer look at how it ranks pages. Google uses its internal index for its primary
search listings. Google has many other features as well, some of which include:
•An images search
•Usenet news database
•A news search feature
•Froogle (a shopping search tool)
•A local search
•A blog search
•A video search
•A product search
•A directory search
Designing Your Site to be Search Engine Friendly31
•A catalog search
•Advertising services through the Google AdWords programs.
The ranking formula for Google’s main search function looks for the key-
words in the visible body text, header tags, title tags, hypertext links, and Alt
tags. Google gives a very heavy weighting to the link popularity, with extra
points for quality of links and relevancy of text around the links. Google also
has miscellaneous points available for such things as:
•Age of domain/site—The longer your domain name has been registered,
the more likely you are serious about being online for the long term.
•File size—Try not to exceed 100k. A recent study found that the body
section of your site ranks best between 50 and 70k in size. More than
100k in size might not be cached unless it is considered exceptional
content.
•Freshness of content—Google is always looking for sites that are up-
dated on a regular basis. The more frequent you update your site, the
more frequent Google’s spiders will visit your site.
•Links from directories—Google awards points if directories such as
Yahoo!, Looksmart, DMOZ, and About provide a link to your site.
Most of the search engines are giving heavy weighting to link popularity—
that is, the number of links to your site from other sites on the Internet. The
search engines are getting very sophisticated in the weighting of link popularity,
with the search engines giving extra points for link relevancy—that is, how high
the site with the link to your site would rank for the same keyword. Other
points are awarded based on the keywords in the text around the link pointing
to your Web site. For strategies on generating significant links to your site, see
Chapter 16.
Keywords Are Critical
Keywords are the terms and phrases that your target market uses when search-
ing the major search engines and directories for the products and services you
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sell. Your keywords are used in everything you do and are the key determining
factor in how you rank in the search results among many of the major search
engines.
A critical step in natural search engine optimization is to select the right
keywords for your business, products, or services (including descriptive words),
and your target market. Understand whom you are targeting and build your
search engine optimization efforts around your audience.
You need to choose keyword phrases that are going to bring sustainable
targeted traffic consisting of potential customers—not just anything and every-
thing. What you may think is the perfect keyword phrase may not be used at all
by your target market in their search queries, which is why it is so critical to
research and validate your keywords.
Ideally, each page of your Web site is going to focus on a different set of
keywords that are specific to the content at hand. If you were to focus on the
same set of keywords on every page, then you would hit only one small portion
of your market potential because you are only going to hit those same key-
words over and over again—it is self-defeating.
First, you want to gather a master list of all possible keyword phrases. To
make the data easier to manage, you can create different keyword list profiles
that represent individual topics as opposed to trying to cover all topics in a
giant master list. For example, if you have two product lines, you can create a
keyword list for each. Naturally, some keywords are shared across the lists, but
it is important to understand that the people looking for one topic (for instance,
“jobs”) are not necessarily the same people looking for another topic (let’s say,
“trucks”), and as such they are going to use different keyword combinations in
their searches.
How do you create your master keyword list? Here are four solid tech-
niques for generating a list of potential keyword phrases:
1. Brainstorm, survey, and review promotional material.
2. Review competing and industry-leading Web sites.
3. Assess your Web site traffic logs.
4. Use keyword suggestion and evaluation tools.
Be sure to record the keywords you gather in a text document in your word-
processing program or in a spreadsheet. Including them in a spreadsheet or
database makes them much easier to sort when it comes time to prioritize the
keywords and weed out the junk.
Designing Your Site to be Search Engine Friendly33
As you work your way through the list of techniques, you want to cycle
back to some of the techniques because you will come across search terms that
can expand the scope of your original efforts and open the door to new, more
targeted phrases that you might have missed the first time around.
Brainstorming, Surveying, and Reviewing Promotional Material
At this stage, the idea is to gather all the keyword phrases you can, within
reason. Sit down with a pen and paper and jot down all keywords that come to
mind. Bring other members of your team in on this process to fuel ideas. There
is nothing scientific or technical to be concerned with here—the sky’s the limit,
but try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes.
Try to think as your target market would if they were to do a search for
information on a topic contained within your site. Do not just think about what
people would do to find your site, but what they would do if they didn’t know
your business existed and were looking for the types of products and services
you sell.
Here are several questions to help you with your brainstorming process:
1. What business are you in (for instance, automobile parts or con-
struction)?
2. What is the focus of your Web site (is it a resource, a guide, a store)? What
would people search for if they were looking for a Web site like yours?
3. If your customer were to take a guess at your Web address, what would
it be? Remember, they do not know who you are, but they know what
kind of products or services they are looking for.
4. What products and services do you sell? What are some of the descriptive
words or benefits of your products and services that might be familiar to
your target market? For example, if your site offers information on resort
spas, then one descriptive keyword you might choose could bemassage.
Also, include words that describe the benefits of these services or the ser-
vice in more detail, such asmassage therapy andfull-body massage.
Your current corporate materials, brochures, and other marketing collat-
eral can be a valuable source of keyword phrases. Begin by indiscriminately
highlighting any words that people might search for if they are looking for
products or services your company has to offer.
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To assist you in developing your keyword list, consider asking your custom-
ers for their input. Ask what keywords they might use to find a site like yours.
You can always turn to a thesaurus for additional ideas if you get stumped.
Review Competing and Industry-Leading Web Sites
Check out your online competition. The termcompetition is referenced quite
loosely in that industry leaders with whom you may not directly compete are
also included here. Look at the sites for which you have a record and look for
sites in the major search engines using some of the keyword phrases you have
gathered so far.
You want to see what sites are in the top 10 positions and understand them.
By reviewing top-ranking Web sites, you can look for themes and patterns in
the sites that give you a good indication of what they are going after and how
they are doing it. You can then turn around and apply this newfound knowl-
edge to your own Web site.
When reviewing competing Web sites, you should look at the same general
areas you would optimize on your own Web site. As mentioned earlier, the most
critical keyword placement areas include:
•Title tags (page titles)
•Keyword meta-tags
•Description meta-tags
•Alt tags
•Hypertext links (e.g., anchor text)
•Domain names and file names
•Body text (beginning, middle, and end of page copy)
•Headers
•Between the “NOFRAMES” tag of framed Web sites.
By searching for your most important keywords and observing what the
top-ranking sites are using with respect to their page content, title tags, descrip-
tion meta-tags, keyword meta-tags, and so on, you can formulate a good plan
Designing Your Site to be Search Engine Friendly35
of attack. Remember that if you don’t appear in the first two or three pages of
search results, it is unlikely that prospective visitors will access your site through
the search engine.
Check to see what meta-tags your competitors have. Not only can you learn
from the sites that catch your eye, you can also learn from your competitors’
mistakes. After you have done a thorough job of this market research, you are
in a good position to develop a description that is catchy and adequately de-
scribes your site.
To check your competition’s meta-tags in Microsoft Internet Explorer, you
simply go to their site, then click “View” on your menu bar, and select “Source”
from the drop-down menu. This brings up the source code for that page in
whatever your default text browser is.
Pay special attention to the title tag of the top-ranked Web sites. To get a little
more specific, you can narrow your search to keywords in a title tag. The reason
for doing this is that optimizing a title tag is a given when it comes to search engine
optimization, so it only makes sense to look at who else is doing it as well. On
Google you can enter “allintitle: keyword phrase,” without the quotes, to search
for all pages with the noted keywords in their title tag. This approach is a little
more focused than simply looking for all pages with a certain set of keywords
because the keywords might just be there in passing, as a part of an article, and not
something the site is intentionally trying to target. If the keywords are found in the
title tag, there is a better chance their reason for being there is intentional.
As noted earlier, you can learn not only from the sites that catch your eye,
but also from your competitors’ mistakes.
Assess Your Web Site Traffic Logs
Your Web site traffic logs can be a source of pertinent keyword information.
You can view your traffic logs to see what search terms and search engines
people are using to locate your Web site and to help you fine-tune future search
engine optimization efforts.
If you are not sure whether you have access to a Web site traffic analysis
program, check with your current Web site host to see if they provide one to
you. If not, there are plenty of tools available to you. (See Chapter 28, “Web
Traffic Analysis,” for helpful information.)
Understand that the search terms displayed may not be the most relevant;
they just happen to be the search terms people are executing to find your site
during the selected time frame. Applying new search engine optimization tech-
niques with relevant keywords changes how people find your Web site. The
Web site traffic analysis package you use gives you the power to measure the
impact of your optimization efforts.
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Your traffic logs can be a source of inspiration for generating your master
keyword list. Note the search terms people are currently using and add them to
your list. For a more complete look at the search phrases reported on your Web
site, expand the date range to cover a larger spread—say, over the period of a year.
When your site is optimized, your Web traffic analysis tool will become
your best friend in monitoring your success.
Keyword Suggestion and Evaluation Tools
There are a number of services available that can help you with selecting the
most appropriate keywords for your site. These services base their suggestions
on results from actual search queries. Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com)
is an example of such a service.
Keyword research tools can help meet your current needs, whether you’re
looking for a place to start, are plum out of ideas, or simply feel like you’re
missing something. See the Resources section of my Web site at http://
www.eLearningU.com/max for a list of keyword research tools.
Fine-Tuning Your Keyword Phrases
Now that you have your master keyword list, probably with a few hundred
keyword phrases, you have to drill down and figure out which keywords you
are going to target for each page of your Web site that you want to optimize.
Keep in mind that each page you optimize should lean toward a different set of
keywords. Why? What good is buying 100 lottery tickets for the next drawing
if they all have the same number? It is the same idea here.
Your efforts should focus around those keyword phrases that bring in a fair
volume of traffic and that are highly targeted. The return on investment for
such keywords will be much higher. When reviewing your keyword list, you
need to consider:
•Which keywords are vital to your objectives
•Which keywords are popular enough to generate reasonable, sustain-
able traffic
•Which keywords do not have so much competition that it would be coun-
terproductive considering the time and effort necessary to target them.
Designing Your Site to be Search Engine Friendly37
For a car dealership to have the keywordcar stand alone on the dealership’s
Web site would prove a waste of effort.Car is a vastly popular keyword, which
is good, but it is too generic and too competitive to be worthwhile. You have to
make judgment calls from time to time. In some cases a word is relevant and
popular, but also competitive to the point of being intimidating. If this word is
essential to your business, however, then go for it.
Organize your keywords according to their level of importance. When com-
pleted, you will have a refined master keyword list that you can refer to when
optimizing your Web site. Also, different directories allow different numbers of
keywords to be submitted. Because you have organized the list with the most
important words first, you can simply include as many of your keywords as the
directory allows.
You can begin editing the list by deleting words that either are too generic
(for example,business) or are not appropriate for keyword purposes. Review
each word and ask yourself, “Would people search using this word if they were
looking for the products and services available through my Web site?”
For each page that you are optimizing, take a copy of the comprehensive
master list and delete words that are not appropriate for that particular page.
Reprioritize the remaining keywords based on the content of the page you are
indexing. Now take the keyword phrase you have assigned to this page and
put it at the top of the list. This is the keyword list for that particular page.
Repeat this procedure for every page you are optimizing. This is also a great
procedure when you are developing the keyword meta-tag for each page of
your site.
What I just covered is a very basic approach to organizing keywords. If you
are up to the challenge, you can take it further by adding weights and multipli-
ers to your keyword list to further refine it.
You can choose to keep it basic while you are learning the ropes, but as
you become more familiar you might want to be more critical in selecting
your keywords, to boost your performance in the search engines. The more
knowledge you are armed with, the better prepared you are to optimize your
Web site. Here are some additional tips to keep in mind when refining your
keywords master list:
•Plural and singular keywords—There is some debate about whether it is
better to use only the plural version of a keyword or whether it is best to
use both the plural and singular forms. Is your target market looking
for both? As an example, some people might search forpicture frame,
and others might search forpicture frames. Google matches exactly what
the user searches for, so it is important to use both where possible.
38101 Ways To Promote Your Web Site(promote.maxpress.com)
•Using the names of your competitors—There is often the question as
to whether to include your competitor’s name in your keywords. The
idea here is that if someone looks for your competitor, they are going
to find you as well. Never include a competitor’s name in your key-
words. Because several search engines read only a small amount of
content for keywords, you lose valuable page real estate to irrelevant
keywords when you use your competitor’s name. In addition, there
have been recent legal battles regarding the use of competitors’ names
within one’s keywords.
•Common misspellings of words—There are many words that people
misspell on a frequent basis. The question here is, do you include those
misspelled keywords in your site or not? My stance is “No.” Although
people use them in their searches, it hurts your credibility in that you
come off as a company incapable of correctly spelling its own products
and services. There are exceptions to every rule. Canadian sites often
have U.S. customers as their target market and U.S. sites often have
Canadian customers as their target market. There are a number of words
that are spelled differently by these countries—theatre in Canada isthe-
ater in the United States,centre in Canada iscenter in the United States,
colour in Canada iscolor in the United States, for example. If you are
caught with one of your important keywords spelled differently by your
target market, you might want to optimize a page of your site to accom-
modate this. Perhaps you might offer a page that is designed for Our
Canadian Friends or for Our American Friends.
•Case sensitivity—Some search engines are not case-sensitive and others
are. Regardless, most people search in lowercase, so to keep the process
simple; for now you should record your original keyword master list
using lowercase. Once you begin finalizing your keyword list, you might
notice that people are actually searching for the proper spelling of a
word, in which case you would reflect the changes in your keyword list.
•Stop and filter words—Filter words are words that search engines sim-
ply ignore during searches. Stop words are extremely common words
that search engines use as triggers to stop grabbing content on a given
page, such as “and,” “a,” and “the.” Some search engines view stop
words and filter words as the same thing, but you need to remember
only one thing: search engines bypass these words to save time as these
words are not considered to add any value to the search. It is best to try
to avoid using stop words where possible in your keyword phrases. Fol-
lowing is a sample list of some of the more common stop words:

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