Your Online Business Can Grow With SEO

Selling and marketing a product or service in today’s realm does not only reserve itself to actual store presence and sales. In these days, setting up an online storefront is an innovative add-on to and actual store presence, and probably less expensive and more valuable than ever, as more and more people get relaxed shopping online

Putting up an online storefront is an innovative method of starting a business or generating sales by expanding the reach of your current business, and whether you are opening your shop online for the first time or have already started down the path, you can boost your online sales through techniques that are helping today’s online businesses thrive. Any or all, or some of these strategies can be integrated to help increase traffic, and drive more people to your site and make it more attractive to prospective customers.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, An SEO considers how search algorithms work and know what people are lookingfor. An SEO’s efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could stop search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more helpful stuff may include adding unique content to a site,and making sure that the content is easily indexed by search engine robots, enabling the site to look more appealing to users.

SEO’s Can Help Generate More Sales

An SEO may help generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, so their algorithms may change, and there would be no guarantees of continued referrals. However, due to this portent for the lack of guarantees and certainty, a company that relies much on search engine traffic could suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending or attracting web visitors. According to notable web analysts, operators should liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. A top ranked SEO blog, Seomoz.org, has analyzed that “Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines.” Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.

Keywords Are Crucial In The Web

Search terms are important. Even one’s most frequent and loyal customers are likely to discover your site by searching. Having relevant keywords in your page titles, product titles and links could make all the difference when one tries to lead customers to your site. For those with established sites, it is imperative not to t forget that keeping your keywords current and relevant is an everyday thing. Ensure that you check your Web logs regularly to see what visitors search for on your site, and identify pages and products appropriately.

Relevant Content Matters

Adding as much relevant content as you can to your site improves your customers’ appreciation an experience, as well as the positioning of your site on the search engines. The important term here is relevant. Content that isn’t related to your products could work against you, as it may confuse the potential customers and gives search bots the impression that you’re tricking them. A better method to add relevant content to your site is to add descriptive paragraphs about each of your products, which are placed next to your photos. Use as much detail as possible and necessary, and be sure to use the terms people are most likely to enter when searching.

10 Costly Search Engine Mistakes to Avoid

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It’s the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.
Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it’s going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a “pretty” website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site…after all, isn’t that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively.

This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords.

When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites.

How many times have you heard or read that “this is the Internet and it’s ok” to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don’t do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to your website.

Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as “sex”, the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn’t have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing.

Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the “alt=” HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying on hidden text.

You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn’t hurt. Wrong…. Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text.

This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same.

Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting.

Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements.

Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will increase.

Back in Time to the Advent of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Did you recently learn what search engine optimization means? Learn a brief history behind this new industry, including which search engine first implemented what later became known as search engine optimization, and how initial unethical SEO practices forced the search engines to tighten their measures on how their robots rank and index Web sites.

As long as the Internet has been around, it has remained a mystery to the mainstream public how Web sites are listed at the top of search engine results. There are many theories of how search engines and search engine optimization (SEO) initially began.

<b>The 1990s</b>
Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, created the first “search” program in 1990 called Archie (still in use today), to archive Web documents. The following year, Gopher started at the University of Minnesota, and this is when the concept of search engines began. In 1993, Matthew Gray created the World Wide Web Wanderer, the earliest known search engine robot that assists with ranking Web sites. But search engines as we use them today were born in 1994. In that same year, Galaxy, Lycos and Yahoo! were all started, two of which are still widely popular search engines today.

Yahoo! was among the first to implement SEO techniques, even though at the time they were unaware of the potential growth the industry would soon have at the turn of the century. Yahoo! Founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were trying to get their site seen by others on the Internet by giving it more exposure. Some excellent structure and tricky hand-coding, their site became more available for new visitors. They were not questioned about ethical business practices because nobody was sure what was considered ethical or unethical – there were simply no standards in place yet.

As the initial search engines were cataloging the early Internet, many business owners soon learned to appreciate the value of their Web site being listed in the search engines, as they first saw increases in visitors to their Web sites. They began submitting their URLs on a continuous basis, and changed their sites to support the needs of search engine robots. SEO companies started showing up, when they began experimenting with the concept of search engine optimization, with the emphasis initially on the submission process alone. Soon afterwards, the first automatic submission software was released, and it was then the notion of Spam came into existence.

<b>The 2000s</b>
SEO professionals have been seen in a negative light over the last five years, due in part because in early 2001, enthusiastic webmasters quickly realized they could overwhelm search engine result pages by over submitting Web sites. Unfortunately, as the Internet industry developed, search engines quickly became cautious of new SEO companies attempting to generate visitors for their clients at any cost, however unfair or unethical. Tactics such as keyword spamming, doorway pages, cloaking, and hidden white text placed on white backgrounds proved too much for the search engines to tolerate. As a result, the search engines replied with numerous countermeasures, created to filter out any techniques considered spam. That is good news, although it forced ethical SEO companies to start using more subtle techniques to assist their clients Web sites with obtaining rankings in the engines.

The “big 3” search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo!, have recently come to the realization that SEO as an industry is here to stay, and to maintain effective results, they needed to accept the industry, even embrace it, and engines eventually partnered with successful, ethical SEO companies to establish typical standards for fair and ethical optimization. This is important to help keep information relevant and beneficial to visitors while still being unbiased to people who create the content on their Web sites.

<b>The Current State of SEO</b>
Today, there are major differences in how search engines work and how to get ranked in them. With the assistance of proper search engine optimization, Web sites can now have a equal fighting chance of obtaining high rankings. Because SEO is a highly specialized trade that requires both technical skills and business marketing knowledge, it is only through the combination of these two skills that one can properly implement SEO techniques to obtain high search engine rankings. Many SEO specialists have since now realized it is “search engines or bust.”

Your Website Is Beautiful – But Where Are The Profits?

Most new e-business owners realize they need a website that looks professional.  But how elaborate do you need to be? How much energy, creativity and money should you invest so that visitors gasp, “Wow – what a beautiful website?”
Experienced business owners know: Your goal is to create a website that sells, not a site that wins the electronic version of Miss Universe.  Most of the time you’ll want to win sales contests – not beauty contests.
Remember the commercial about the beer and the dog?   A man sends his dog into the kitchen to get him a beer.  We hear sounds of a refrigerator opening and a can opener humming…and then we hear lapping sounds.  Oh no! The dog is drinking the beer!
Great commercial, right? Except … can you remember the brand of beer?
And of course we’ve all seen that big pink battery-powered rabbit. But many viewers can’t remember the sponsor’s brand.
(1) Emphasize your marketing message.
Recently I heard a speaking professional say, “My speaking wardrobe is designed to avoid calling attention to me. When the audience is thinking, ‘What a beautiful suit!’ or ‘What a mess!” they’re not listening to my message.”
Your website works the same way. Stay focused on the content.
(2) Use graphics sparingly.
Graphics take awhile to load.  And what sells your product? Not graphics – copy.
Research shows visitors seek information.  So use graphics to convey specific messages. A fitness site could show a before-and-after. And real estate sites can show examples of real houses.
(3) Use meaningful graphics.
One award-winning site featured a menu on an elaborately drawn 3-ring notebook.  The words were hard to read and frankly I’m not sure I remember what the site was all about. A 3-ring binder could be a calendar, a student notebook, or …
But let’s say you want to target a business audience.  You’d show pinstripes and briefcases. Sure, your target market wears business casual and carries canvas.  But they’ll pick up the symbolism, especially if you’re trying to differentiate yourself from a leisure or family market.
(4) Skip flash and frames (usually).
You probably know this already.  Search engines don’t like frames and your visitors will get impatient waiting for flash to load.
If you’re a famous musician (like Coldplay) or author (like Lawrence Block) you can create an elaborate site and your fans will wait half an hour, if need be.  They’ll expect something out of the ordinary.
And if you’re a web designer, you probably need to showcase some of your tricks.
But most of the time, I believe websites are like basketball games. Web copy is out on the court, putting points on the board.  Readers look for smooth moves and sharp uniforms but they’re mostly paying attention to the action.
Graphics remain on the side, cheering the team. But let’s face it: most of us don’t come to a game to watch the pep squad.
(5) Create a great headline for each page.
Research shows, over and over, that readers respond first to your headline. If they’re intrigued, they’ll go on to read your copy.
Readers look first for headlines that communicate, “I share your pain!”  They’ve got problems and they’re surfing for solutions. And they don’t have much time.
Bottom line: Focus on creating and communicating a great marketing message.  Frame your message so you come across as professional – but keep your website focused on learning how you can provide solutions to their challenges.

An SEO Tip – Pay Attention To Your Embedded Links!

Optimizing any web page involves both on-page and off-page optimization. Whereas on-page optimization emphasizes the use of carefully selected keywords to write a web page, off-page optimization is all about building links to the web page from other web pages as well as other websites. The leading search engines’ ranking algorithms have placed much importance on links that it is not possible to achieve a high-ranking based solely on competitive keywords.

Links

There are two basic types of links used in websites. One is the navigational link which connects pages within a site. The other one is the hypertext link which offer parenthetical material, footnotes, digression or parallel themes that can serve to provide relevant information in relation to the main content of the page. Both types of links however, can be disruptive or problematic in the overall site design when not used in its proper context.

Links can distract attention especially if a paragraph or text is filled up with invitations to readers to proceed to other pages or sites. This threatens the smooth flow of content as readers jump from one page or site to another. The context of information can entirely be altered as readers find themselves in an unrelated territory without the benefit of any introduction or proper explanation.

The primary purpose of having links is the reinforcement of an author’s original message by providing a choice of connected materials. Links should be geared towards pointing to other resources within the site which uses related texts or visuals. A reader should be made clearly aware when he/she leaves one website and enters another through a link.

Good hypertext linking aims to maintain a site’s contact with its readers. A simple link will usually work within a single browser window where the original content disappears substituted by the linked page. This can be avoided by adding the TARGET = “main” argument to link tags. Through this, the linked page will appear in a new browser window in front of the original one which allows the reader to access the new material without losing visual contact with the original site. The use of frames is another way to maintain narrative and design context. Frames can be used to split the browser screen between site navigation and the material intended to be brought out.

Website navigational links can be provided through plain text links, JavaScript links, PHP links or graphical links. Plain text links are the easiest to implement and its use is recommended even if other link types are being used as a main navigational structure. All search engines are able to follow them although it can be very difficult to maintain them for websites that have more than 50 pages. Providing careful attention to website design can address problems associated with this. JavaScript navigation is used to build complex drop down menus for large websites. It offers the advantage of an almost effortless change procedure once it is implemented but it requires more knowledge and expertise to implement. However, this type of link is not followed by search engines hence the pages referenced by the said links may not be indexed without some other form of navigation provided.

Linking in Relation to Usability

Usability is the ability to successfully and confidently learn or complete a task with a reasonable amount of comfort provided to the end user. Usability in the eyes of a website designer or application developer is being able to design and build websites that can be understood and easy to use in accomplishing a task. It is essentially about meeting the needs of customers and anticipating their other needs to help them reach their goal through a website that is true to its own goal of providing the right information or at least access to it.

A usable website stands to reap the benefits of conversion and customer satisfaction. A website should be able to tell the reader what it is all about, what product or services are being offered and what procedural steps are being taken that will earn the trust of customers. Most importantly, it should be able to meet the needs of both humans as well as search engines. Both are intent on understanding a web page, knowing how to get to the next relevant page and being able to find that all important link. The information structure of a website should be construed in a way that would enhance the speed and understanding of it.

The priority of SEOs is to get clients’ web pages into search engines and directories as well as to have them ranked good enough to be found by end users. Marketing and usability should come hand in hand so that the site owner does not only have prime spots in search engines but also customer conversion as well. The ultimate challenge of any website developer is to be able to ultimately build sites for people and not for search engines only.

A link has two ends – the source anchor and the destination anchor. The term link however, usually refers to the source anchor while the destination anchor is called the link target. The most common link target is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) used in the World Wide Web which can refer to a document such as a web page, other resource or to a position in a web page which is achieved by means of an HTML element.

Hyperlinks are usually displayed in a web browser by some distinguishing way such as a different color, font or style. The usage of a mouse cursor changing into a hand motif may also indicate a link in a graphical user interface. Links in most graphical web browsers are displayed as underlined blue text when not cached and underlined purple text when cached.

Having the right link in the right place at the right time and page is the dream of any website owner. Most pages have some type of main navigation to access major categories within the site. Another set of links pointing to things like a privacy policy may also be seen. Many sites use secondary navigation on pages within sections of the site. A different section may provide a different set of links in the secondary navigation which can be very helpful to users and search engines. The navigational links are often seen in a content-rich area on a page. It is very common to see links embedded within the text in the content area of web pages which is very advantageous from a search engine optimization point of view. One of the existing dangers of this practice is when these links are missed due to the reader’s natural tendency to just scan the pages due to time constraints. Embedded links should be placed within the content in a way that they can easily be seen. Having too many can make it very difficult to read the text on a page. Confine these kinds of links to the most important and outstanding links. The rest of the links can be placed in other critical parts of the page.

Getting Indexed, A Little Patience?

Newbie’s and Expert Internet Marketers all have one thing in common:  Trying to get their websites indexed through the top three major search engines quickly.  For larger websites the task is even more daunting, and there are a few small but effective techniques that can assist in the indexing process.  Patience is a virtue and in today’s internet marketing world patience and planning is a key.

Smaller one or two page websites, also known as sales pages, are the easiest and quickest to get indexed in the three major search engines almost anyone can generally succeed by just manually submitting through each search engines submission process.  Websites with a considerable number of pages will often only immediately get their first page indexed which therefore requires small effective planning strategies and a little bit of patience to become completely indexed.

Effective Key Planning Strategies:

(1) Prior to submitting your websites to the search engines or establishing link partners which will cause the search engines to start indexing in your website.  Start planning out the basic website structure so that search engines robots can easily flow through your website and index each page.

(a) Have an sitemap linked from you main index page that thinks through out your website.

(b) If possible, ensure that each page is linked together, not just back to the main index page.  This is not possible depending on what type of website you have, the number of pages, or your website design and structure.  But this has been a successful technique in the past.

(c) Build and submit a Google Sitemap.

(2) Test your websites design and structure using Google Sitemap Software such as SOFTplus GSiteCrawler (Freeware) that will try and index your entire website.  If your unsuccessful building a index of your entire website, then further planning and design changes maybe in order to index your entire website.  If the software can not index your entire website, how will the search engine robots index your entire website?

(3) Instead of manually submitting your websites, submit your website through directories and establish link partnerships.  This will improve how often your website is crawled by the search engines and how fast your website is indexed.  Also, when establishing link partnership and directories higher the Google Page Rank, the quicker your website will be indexed and how often your website is crawled.

(4) Lastly, Patience.  The process the search engine will go through while indexing your website is:  First, the search engine will have to find your website (Hence, establishing partnerships with high Google Page Rank), then crawling through your website and absorbing all the information contained, then ranking each individual page and finally your website will appear in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

What SEO Copywriting Is… and Isn’t

It seems people just don’t get it.  There’s lots of talk about SEO copywriting these days, but hardly any of it is on target.  Everyone seems to be forgetting the fact that SEO copywriting is primarily about copywriting, not the search engines.

I’ve been frustrated lately.  It seems people just don’t get it.  There’s lots of talk about SEO copywriting these days, but hardly any of it is on target.  The majority of the conversations, posts and articles I’ve seen deal with topics like keyword density, allowable limits, over optimization and such.  These people are making search engine copywriting all about the search engines.  They are forgetting the fact that SEO copywriting is still copywriting.

What that means – generally speaking – is you are still writing promotional copy designed to cause a *person* to take a specific action.  Your target audience (your site visitors) should come first.  The elements designed to help the copy rank well absolutely come last.

What good is all the traffic in the world if your site copy doesn’t convert visitors into buyers?  Not much.  That’s why – when writing SEO copy – the human visitor comes first.

Unfortunately, SEO copywriting is getting a bad name because so much of what is being cranked out is repetitious babble. Most of these pages would never have made it on to a site, except for the fact that the site owner wanted to rank highly for certain key terms.

So, in the interest of salvaging the good name of search engine copywriting, before it’s too late, let me offer some guidelines.

SEO Copy Is:

·    first and foremost – written for the visitor.

·    unique and purposeful.

·    natural-sounding – it flows.

SEO Copy Is Not:

·    written exclusively with the engines in mind.

·    mirrored, adjusted or altered to create new pages by simply changing keyphrases.

·    stiff, forced or overly repetitive.

The Dos of SEO Copywriting

When writing SEO copy, you’ll want to:

·    understand who you are writing to.

·    choose what the focus of the page will be.

·    create a plan outlining the message you want to convey.

·    decide how best to communicate that message to your particular target customers.

·    choose which keyphrases will be incorporated into the copy.

·    make sure those keyphrases work well with the page and the planned copy.

·    incorporate keyphrases as you write (not after you write), so they flow naturally with the planned message.

The Don’ts of SEO Copywriting

When writing SEO copy, you should never:

·    create a plan based solely on how to rank high.

·    replace *every* instance of a generic term (car) with a keyphrase (red, convertible car).

·    add pages of copy simply to appease the search engines.

·    rely on useless keyword density ratios and formulas.

·    shove keyphrases in everywhere possible. (No, it won’t get you banned, but it will sound completely ridiculous!)

SEO copywriting is not the process of writing exclusively for the search engines.  It is the process of writing copy to appeal to your visitors, while including elements to help the search engines and your visitors understand what the page is all about.

If you remember who truly makes or breaks your site’s success (your customers!) and focus on them, you’re sure to create SEO copy that rings true.

Choosing The Right Keywords

Internet marketing and search engine optimization hinge on knowing what keyword or keywords web search surfers are searching for on the web. By doing extensive keyword analysis you can zero in on the best keyword terms to use when setting up pay per click advertising, writing keyword articles, and optimizing web pages.

Not only is it necessary to know what keywords are searched for the most but also how many times particular keywords have been searched. There are a number of effective tools available for keyword analysis and keyword suggestion.

Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo has an excellent tool for helping webmasters and Internet marketers determine what keywords people are searching for on a monthly basis. This tool, located at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php is powered by Yahoo Search Marketing that was previously known as Overture.

Wordtracker

One of the more popular tools for doing keyword research is Wordtracker.
WordTracker can be found at http://www.wordtracker.com/. Keyword results provided by Wordtracker are compiled from Dogpile and Metacrawler. Wordtracker is not free but with the ability to do targeted keyword research the results can quickly pay for the software.

Once you have done some preliminary research you will need to decide which keywords or keyword phrases to target in your Internet marketing campaign. It is best to choose keywords that have a good amount of traffic without too much competition for placement.

For example, let’s say you are marketing a variety of photography books and you search on photography only to find that it had more than 1,000,000 searches last month. The competition for placement with this keyword is probably going to be pretty tough. Try researching on more targeted phrases such as nature photography, landscape photography, photography books, etc.

You will likely find that these terms have less monthly searches and much less competition. There will be a lower search to competition ratio. Generally, a keyword with 30,000 to 50,000 monthly searches is going to be one that you can compete for in terms of placement and being found on the search engines. Instead of spinning your wheels marketing for those who are searching for photography instead create multiple campaigns that market to more targeted keyword phrases.

You can evaluate the search to competition ratio by taking the number of searchs of a particular keyword and dividing by the number of web site which return for that keyword when searched. The higher the number the better. For example, if you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times in a month and when you search on that keyword you return 1000 results then the ratio is 100/1000 or 0.10. If you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times but there are 10,000 search return results then the ratio goes down to 0.01. The larger the ratio the better in terms of your ability to be competitive.

Finding the best keywords to use in your web site promotion is vital to effectively driving targeted traffic to your web site. Take the time to find out what people are searching for and your efforts will pay off in terms of traffic and sales conversion.

Designing sites for search engines and directories.
In terms of layout, many web sites are not designed for optimum search engine and directory visibility. People or companies seem so centred on their corporate or personal images, products, and services that they neglect to design their web sites with search engines and directories in mind. Search engines and directories vary in the way they rank your web site in a search query. Some search engines place primary emphasis on the text within your title tags. Some search engines place emphasis on the main ideas presented in all of your text on a single web page. Some directories emphasize the text you submitted in their “Description” field. How and where you place your text, both in the copy your visitors see and within the HTML tags your visitors do not see, will affect your ranking

Keyword selection
Keyword placement
Keyword frequency
Links & architecture
Site statistics

Keyword Selection

Of primary importance is selecting the best keywords for your industry and the keywords you believe your potential customers will use to find you. Selecting the right keywords requires research.

Look at your company’s printed materials. What words do you use over and over? When you speak to new and current customers on the phone, what questions do they frequently ask and what words do they use? Ask your current customers how they would find you on the Internet. Then go to the major search engines and directories. Type in the keywords you want to use. Study the source code of the web sites that appeared in the top 20. Look at how your competitors ranked in a search query. Adjust your keyword selection accordingly.

Keyword placement

Of equal importance is keyword placement on individual pages. The text in your title tag is one the most important elements for ranking well in search engines. The text in your titles should be descriptive, using the words and lingo in your industry, and should accurately reflect the contents of each web page.

For optimum search engine positions, your keywords need to appear at the top of your web pages. Thus, before you design your web page, ask yourself if you (or your web designer) have strategically placed your keywords within your title tags, meta-tags, headings, graphic images, and the first paragraph within your body tag. If not, you might need to rethink your site design.

Keyword Frequency

What is important to both the search engines and your target audience is keyword frequency and keyword prominence. Designing and coding your site with keywords in the right locations and the right frequency is an art form. Keywords need to appear frequently on your web pages, but if they appear too frequently, your site will be penalized for word stacking (also known as “spamming the index”) or could be removed permanently from the index.

Also, some search engines ignore meta-tags. Thus, if you have included your keywords in your meta-tags but have not placed them elsewhere, you have missed a huge target audience, namely AOL users. Sites with frames have problems being indexed well because there is little opportunity otherwise to include additional text with keywords.

Very, very few web sites can get in the Top 10 of all the major search engines (AltaVista, FAST Search, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Teoma) without spamming. We cannot emphasize this enough: if you hire anyone (a submission service, an individual, an online promotion service, etc.) to do the services we just described, they need to have HTML and design experience, online marketing, and excellent copy writing skills. You do not want your web site to be permanently banned from a search engine or directory due to ignorance or lack of experience. Furthermore, submission services usually do just that: submit. Many do not perform keyword research, the HTML coding, and copy writing necessary to get a site optimally placed within the search engines. Ask a lot of questions before handing over any money.

Links & site architecture

Placing keywords throughout your web pages is useless as a search engine marketing strategy if the search engine spiders are unable to record the text on your web pages. Therefore, always have a link architecture (also known as a site map) on your site that the search engine spiders can follow. Oftentimes, this means having two forms of navigation on your site: one that your target audience prefers, and one for the search engines.

Site Statistics

For the first few months after you have your web site submitted to the major search engines and directories, you should see a jump in traffic. If you look at your site reports with your visitor statistics, which should do frequently, you will see when the search engines spider and index your site.

Hopefully, because you have been thoughtful enough to give potential customers a reason to return to your site again and again, people will bookmark your site, and your web statistics will show an increase in a “No Referrer” category under referral URL’s. Your site reports should show you where your potential customers are coming from (i.e. which search engine or directory they used to find you) and which keywords they used to find you.

After your site has listed in the search engines and directories for a few months, review your site statistics and determine where the majority of your traffic comes from. Then focus your advertising efforts on those directories and search engines. You get better sales from targeted marketing than from spreading your net too wide.

One client did exactly what we recommended, from keyword selection to monitoring site statistics. They found most of their sites referral traffic came from Yahoo queries. They bought banner space from Yahoo for two months. Whenever two of their keywords were typed in a search query, their banner would appear. Their traffic increased over 500%, and their sales reached five figures per month.

Lastly, the saying “Content is King” still rings true. You can increase traffic to your web site, but if (1) people do not like what they see, (2) you do not offer potential customers what they want to buy, or (3) you do not give customers incentive to stay and/or bookmark your site, they will click off of your web site as quickly as they clicked on to it.

3 Steps To Getting Listed In The Search Engines

1. Write an article related to the main topic of your website.

Not sure if you know…

You’ve just finished putting in all kinds of effort towards getting your website online. You’re ready to take orders and make sales. The only problem is… No one can find your website! You need to get listed in the major search engines in order to get visitors to visit your website. What can you do? Follow these 3 steps and the search engines will know about your site in no time at all.

1. Write an article related to the main topic of your website.

Not sure if you know enough about writing to write an article? Don’t worry about being perfect. Write about what you know. Keep the article short, between 300-600 words long. When you write the article, give out general information that anyone would gladly post on their site as valuable content. Don’t try to sell your product or service in this article.

Remember the goal of the article is for you to get a valuable link back to your website, not to make a sale. In fact, if you try to make a sale in the article, most webmasters will not want to publish your article on their site. The whole goal of writing articles is to get your articles on as many websites as possible with a link pointing back to your site.

2. Include a resource box at the end of the article with your website link in it.

If you’ve created a good general information article that is relevant to the topic of your website, you are ready to create your resource box. Keep in mind here to get to the point quickly. It is usually considered fine to promote your product or service in this resource box but it is necessary to keep it short. You should remember that the main point of including this resource box is to get a link going back to your website. The secondary purpose of the resource box is to get readers of your article to click through and visit your website.

When including a link in your resource box, make sure that one of your links includes the main keywords of your home page. Keywords are a fancy term for the phrase or words a visitor will type in to find your website. Make the keyword the clickable portion of the link instead of your web address. Put this keyword text in between your html anchor link.

3. Submit your article to the major article directories.

Once you’ve created your article, submit it to the major article directories to get the article distributed on as many websites as possible. Some major article directories include EzineArticles, ArticleCity, <a href=”http://www.zapcontent.com”>ZapContent.com</a> and Isnare. Some services like Isnare will even distribute your article for you for a fee.

Do these three steps and search engines will find, crawl, then list your website in their listings. It’s as simple as that!