JENN

SEM SEO PPC

Search Engine Optimization

How to optimize a website and get results

This process has been used by some of the most experience professional search engine optimization technicians in the search engine marketing industry. Set aside all the hype that you read and hear about this being more effective than that and how long it will take before you see results. If you follow these simple steps you should start to see results in as little as 1 to 6 months (brand new websites and domains take 6 months).

The key to effective search engine optimization is not necessarily the development of the site, nor does effective search engine optimization come from incoming links from other websites – and no, it's not about listing your words in your title or filling your website with your key words as much as possible. It's about balance.

Effective search engine optimization is a complete balance of all the correct or "natural" techniques known to all search engine optimization experts.

Understanding your demographics –

Just as you would with any marketing task, your search engine optimization should start with understanding the demographics of your key audience. All the way down to where this person lives, what they wear, how many friends they have and so on. Knowing as much as you can about the person visiting your website will help you understand not only what terms you should target, but how the title, and description should read along with how your site should appeal and navigate to the user once they do find you.

Start by answering the following questions:

What is the industry your company is in?

What are 5 words that describe your website/business?

What is your geographical focus? (Local, national, global)

Choosing the right key terms -

The next step is building off of your words you listed and choosing terms that people are searching. There are a number of different programs where you can access this information.

Two more popular websites that offer this information are:

www.digitalpoint.com – This service is free and the data pulled is a bit limited but gives you a quick idea of how many times people are searching these terms.

www.wordtracker.com – You have to sign up for a membership but well worth the money spent. You can access both the Wordtracker database and the urchin database as well. The system also brings back suggested terms that you might not have ever thought of. You can also run a competition report which helps you gauge how aggressive you will need to be with those terms.

The next step is to pull the 3-5 most important most relative terms to your site. These will be your "competitive" terms. They are terms that searched the most have 100% relevance driving the most leads to your website and will generally have the most competition. Hold onto your list of words with your competitive terms highlighted so you don't forget which terms you are targeting as you optimize and build your website.

The rest of your terms will be "seeded" throughout your website content, other pages, etc.

Knowing where to place your terms is the next important step. Now that you know how many times these terms are being searched and how many other web pages you need to beat out for the top position you should have a pretty good idea of how to place these terms throughout your website effectively.

Structuring your Meta Tags -

The next step is getting your meta tags together for the pages of your website. Meta tags are a huge source of debate in the search engine optimization community. There are some SEO gurus that swear that they are completely irrelevant, some even play it safe by saying that they are being phased out. To understand meta tags better it is good to know the history and the true effectiveness visit SEM Discussion – The Importance of Meta Tags

If you want to get results faster it is good to spend the time in getting your meta tags on your site. The key is to get them implemented properly. Throwing your key terms into your meta keyword list and simply adding a title, and description is not the way to get results. You also need to pay attention and focus on not only the site wide terms, but to optimize each page individually. Getting this step accomplished is not the easiest, but it will bring you the fastest results.

The first step in gathering your meta data together is pulling your main key terms together by order of importance. Look at the count of the terms you chose to focus your site on. Put them in order of what term has the highest count. Then reshuffle as needed putting the most relevant term to your website at the top, with the second, third, etc. If the order of count is how you want to target your terms, then leave them, if you see a term that has a count of 200 is the most relevant and you have 3 terms that have a count of over 500 then put the term with the count of 200 at the top, and list the three under it.

These are your terms, and your order of importance for your whole website. Any time you add a new page, write copy, or someone ads a link to your site, these terms will be in your mind, and essentially in all that you do.

Next you want to get your "blanket" metas together. This is the set of meta tags that you will implement on every page of your website and will build your individual page terms off of.

The Title Tag –

The title tag is the phrase that shows up on the top of the browser as your user hits each page. You don't want to make your title tag too long as it needs to be user friendly and you also want to keep your site from looking spammy. The first term in your list is your main focus. That is the term you want to start your title with on every page of your website since it is the term you need to be most aggressive with. To maintain your user friendly website design, you need to put the name of your company or website after this term. If you can work the term in with the name then all the better.

Play around with the words keeping your main term as close to the front as possible along with the name.

You can add more of your terms to the title tag if you have terms that have a high count with a lot of competition. Just be sure not to make your title tag too long. This is where some search engine optimizers get into trouble without knowing it.

The Meta Keyword Tag –

Though it may seem pretty straight forward how this tag works, there really is more to it than just listing out your words with commas. Some words have plurals to them and some don't. Some search engine optimization specialists have trouble with getting the terms listed out rather than just listing them word after word. The "blanket" set of metas will have your main terms listed in the order of importance. Some search engines place a higher priority on the terms that they read first and so on. If you back your first term up by listing it out in your title tag you are letting the search engine know that this is an important word, and should be regarded as a high priority when placing your site in the ranking results. If it's between your site and several thousand (sometimes millions even billions) of other websites and your site has your keyword in your title tag and in your keyword meta and the others do not, it just gives you that much more of a leg up on the competition.

So list your keywords out in order of importance or priority. Listing your main term first (which is backed up in your title tag) followed by the second, third and so on.

The Description Tag –

The description doesn't help your rankings, but plays an important factor in getting the user to click on your result. You may show up on the first page for your terms, but so do 10+ other websites. Most users will look at the title and description to determine if that result is really what they are looking for. The main objective to the description is through marketing.

Most search engines will highlight the term being searched with bold letters in the results. So if you can work the words from your terms into your description while making it still read to be interesting than you will have a good change of driving traffic to your website through your natural search results. These words don't have to be listed out like your terms. If your main term is "Loudon County Real Estate" and you are also targeting " Real Estate Agent Loudon County " as well as "New Homes in Loudon County " Your description can read something like:

Donald Smith is an experienced real estate agent in Loudon County representing new homes for any budget.

Notice how it appeals to the person looking for a new home or real estate in the area of focus, and covers low or high income home buyers. If the real estate agent wanted to target multimillion dollar beach front homebuyers you would want the description to read something like:

Donald Smith is an experienced real estate agent in Loudon County representing exquisite new homes with private beach access.

It's all in the adjectives. Get as descriptive as possible, but remember to keep your description short. One or two sentences are all you need. Most search engines only show 100-200 characters in the results before cutting it off with a "…".

There are other meta tags you can add to your website. Some like to add the author, some like to add the language, robots indexing, category, and so on. These tags aren't really necessary for rankings, but they do help web researchers pull data easier. If it is a foreign targeted site, you can add the language, or if you would like to categorize the site with a focus you can add the category tags. It's all up to you, but for rankings all you need is the title, keyword and description tags.

Optimize each page of your website -

The next step is to individually optimize each page. The "blanket" set of meta tags will go on every page, but you will want to tweak each page so that that page will get individual rankings and generate traffic for the terms it was optimized for. Just as pay per click advertisements have landing pages, you can generate more qualified traffic by optimizing your pages naturally to be landing pages.

The meta tags you just created will stay on the home page as is. Don't ever change these tags. If you find people are finding you (as in you are getting first page rankings for your terms) but you aren't getting traffic, chances are it's because of the way your title tag is showing up or your description is reading. You can tweak the title and description then, but don't mess with it too much. The key is to optimize your site and to sit back and watch the results increase over time. Every time you change a part of the site, no matter what it is, you start all over as the search engines try to place you amongst all those other websites again.

This is where things get specific. You will want to keep your Wordtracker or digital point site open as you go through each page. You will also want the list of words you started with open as well. For the most part it's good to stick with that first list, but sometimes you come across a page that isn't totally relevant to the rest of your website. For example, a real estate agent may have real estate, new homes, and property terms, but if they have a page on MLS properties, or a page on a specific community then having words in the meta tags around that pages focus is best for getting rankings for terms relevant to that page. Essentially bringing the user looking for that community to the page about the community and eventually leading them through the site where they can look for a new home, and contact the realtor that owns that site.

Don't forget to keep the "blanket" meta tags as they are to show precedence on those main terms. Just add to the end of the title tag, and keyword list. You can change your description since it doesn't really affect your rankings, and you want it to encourage the user to visit that page of the site.

Your search engine optimization doesn't stop there. There are three major factors when it comes to search engine optimization. Of course every search engine is different, with different algorithms bringing different results, but in general all of them are consistent when indexing a website.

Now that you have gone through each page of your website and added your key terms, adjusted your title tag, and refined your description, it's time to back all of it up with page copy or "spider candy". Words words, and more words. The more the better…

Of course you need to keep in mind that your visitors will be reading your page copy so you need to maintain a balance of making sense, almost selling, and working your key terms within the website with the right densities. It's easy to repeat a term over and over, and mention your keywords several times in each paragraph, but that would be considered spamming, and could get your website penalized.

If you have a page with 5 paragraphs of copy and mentioned your key term 10 times in each paragraph it tends to send up a red flag to the search engines. However, if you have 5 paragraphs and the first paragraph has your key term a couple of times, the second has the term 3 times, the third only once, and so on you will find that you will get better results, and will beat out all of those websites that are trying to trick the search engines into getting instant rankings.

This is where you want to have your terms in front of you. When writing, or rewriting, your copy, keep your meta tags open. Remember how your keywords are listed out in order of importance? Use that as a guide while writing. The 3-5 main terms that go on every page will need to be worked in once or twice on each page. The terms that are specific to that page need to be backed up in the copy. The first of those terms should be mentioned at least once in each paragraph, the second can be mentioned once or twice in the whole body, with the rest being mentioned once or twice within the document.

As you watch your rankings climb once you are finished with this process, you may find that you will need to tweak your copy here and there. If the terms for that page aren't getting the best results, then add a couple more paragraphs with those terms, or just add the term that isn't getting results into the existing copy once or twice more than it is on there now – just remember to keep the terms spread out.

Proper Indexing of the Site -

We're almost done… The next step in this process is getting the site spidered efficiently. Javascript, images, and dynamic navigation can affect how your website gets indexed by the search engines. If a bot visits your website and can't see all of the pages within the site efficiently it will simply drop off and move on to the next site which could highly affect your rankings. If you happen to have javascript navigation or image navigation then a web map is a great way to present the search engines with all of your pages effectively. Try to keep links to a minimum. Google specifies to keep the links under 100, but other search engines might be pickier about links on pages. Not to mention that Google could change their mind while battling those that try to spam them just to get results. There are tools that a search engine optimization specialist will use to analyze how a bot sees the website, but without having to buy the software it takes to analyze your website there are a couple of different ways to see if your site is getting indexed by the search engines. Go to Google.com and type "site:" followed by your website url. For example: site:www.pwoo.org – This will list out all of the pages that Google sees in the results of the search. For Yahoo type "domain:" and submit. If only one page is getting indexed, then you know you have a problem. If you have 100+ pages of your site and you see only 20 you know that something is wrong, and you will need to fix it.

Creating a web map with links to each page, or links to the directories located in your website is the best way to get every page seen. You can also add a robots.txt file to the site to eliminate the bots from seeing pages and directories of your website to help the bot see the pages that are relevant and not waste time on the files that aren't.

Google also has their sitemap program in which you can create an xml document that will let Google know details of your website. The sitemap program is a beneficial way of not only letting Google know about your website, how often it is updated, page importance, etc, but the program also brings back data about your website and rankings. Google lists out terms that people are searching for which your site shows up along with the average position for that term. It also tells you what terms people are clicking verses terms that you are showing up for but aren't getting clicked on.

To read more about the Google sitemap program visit Google SiteMaps

Links that point to your site -

One last step when it comes to optimization is links. Google revolutionized the search marketing industry with their page rank algorithms. What began with meta tags page copy and traffic Google added on the importance of links. The main idea of links is that each link is essentially counted as a "vote" to a website. The more "votes" that point to a website or page of a website the more popular that website is presumed to be. In the constant battle for the top position people began cross linking (trading links with one another), submitting to directories, software was even created that would add your link to directories and other websites, nowadays people are selling link space on their websites to make money (link farms). The downside to this is that Google and the other major search engines (that have adopted this algorithm) have began cracking down on how they look at links. Cross links are irrelevant as they essentially cross each other out knocking out the "vote"; Link farms are penalized for having too many outgoing links on a website; and directories are flagged as not being search engine friendly rendering the links irrelevant.

Now that your website is getting indexed efficiently, and the copy and meta data are all being calculated, it's time to work on your linking. There are fast ways of obtaining links. You can purchase links from a website like www.linkworth.com or add your website to directories in hopes that the link gets picked up. But it's much more than just adding a link pointing to your site. Spend some time browsing the internet. Search for websites that rank on the first page for your key terms. Look through the website. make sure they have a high page rank on every page (you can install the Google toolbar for your browser at toolbar.google.com ) Make sure the page is relevant to your website, check for pages that have more than 10 links on a page, and even run a site: or domain: check on the site to make sure it is getting indexed. If all of this checks out contact the site owner and ask them if they would add a link to your site. Most people will kindly add your link; some will ask for money; most will just say "no". It's an ongoing process, but if you can at least get 3 or more links with your key terms from relevant websites pointing to your site then you will start to see great results on your rankings. To learn more about linking go to SEM Discussion - Effective Linking

Now just sit back and watch your rankings improve dramatically. It depends on your market and your keywords, some will see results in just a few weeks, some will see results in a few months, and new websites with new domains could take anywhere from six months to a year. The key is to do the initial optimization and be patient. Revisit your website every 3 months to see where you are at and "tweak" the site accordingly. You can keep track of your page ranking with software like webposition gold at www.webposition.com . Be sure not to run your report more than once a month (every 3 months if possible) and don't run it on too many words. Just the words you targeted with your optimization.

There are many more techniques you can use to help boost your rankings. Whether they are effective or not is still in question. RSS feeds, blogs, submission software, the list goes on. This system has been around for many years and has always proven to be effective. Feel free to test out the other techniques; just try not to change what you have done with your website in doing so.

Search engine optimization is a great way to generate traffic to your website without having to spend a lot of money on advertising. With a little time and a lot of patience you will find that not only will your traffic increase, but that the people visiting your site will be qualified leads in the end increasing your return on your investment (ROI).