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SEO
or search engine optimization strategy now becomes widely
popular among online business operators. Nothing strange about
it as it allows to substantially increase your gross income,
as a result of growing traffic or visitors flow.
That is
why one point should be stressed out - your business return
on SEO is directly proportional to the results your business
have now. It means that SEO strategy, unlike marketing optimization,
directed to boost quantity, not quality. If your business
enjoys 1% response rate for any action you demand, whether
it is sale, subscription, feedback or other it keeps on having
similar response rate after SEO will be accomplished, although
the response will grow in absolute numbers as a result of
increasing traffic flow.
As you see SEO is not a panacea. The highest
and the most efficient return on your SEO campaign as well
as business investment may be reached upon one condition.
Only when your current business model and marketing campaign
has already been optimized and reached high level or response
rate and efficiency, it is smart to grow your business "in
quantity".
The reason for such attitude lies within the
next speculation as well. Having inefficient business model
under conducting web-site SEO will force growing number of
visitors to turn your online business down for good. The obvious
reason is that too few people actually return to the site
once they left it for any reason, so having low response rate
will substantially decrease your SEO result!
Let's draw an example. With previously mentioned
1% response rate from every 100 visitors you get, would mean
that 1 visitor only takes desired action. Suppose SEO campaign
increased the flow of targeted traffic to 1000. Using children's
math we can easily come up with 9 new people, who would start
to express their interest in your offer every month.
Now what if your, as some marketers say, "conversion"
rate is 10% (10 visitors from every 100) and the SEO helped
to bring the same 1000 targeted traffic. You now have 100
“desired actions” per month! In other words, your
net SEO achievement is 90 new people. Compare this to 9 people
with 1% conversion rate and it all becomes clear. That is
why SEO is mainly about quantity, while response rate is mainly
about quality.
I haven't intentionally mentioned about high
quality of traffic search engines generate. Many experts would
probably be skeptical by now for my evening-out the quality
of traffic and focusing on quantity only. The explanation
is simple - the quality of SE traffic is an Individual parameter.
Unlike many marketing and SE experts I cannot
tell you how "quality" visitors coming from SE will
be for your particular business as I don't know your present
promotion methods. That is why the quality of traffic SEO
campaign brings may be neutral, slightly positive or even
negative. Yes, it may be negative.
I anticipate a small shock among online marketers,
who were taught for their whole internet business career that
search engine traffic is the most quality traffic they may
have. It is not true under some conditions. If banner or classified
ads were the only ways of generating traffic for you, then
SEO will surely bring a quality improvement to your business
response, on the other hand, imagine, that your present visitors
are interested readers of your books, ebooks, reports, articles
and other publications. Do you really think that "response
quality" of people coming from "Description tag"
of your search engine listing will be higher? Hardly, you
can surely expect a slight decrease in response rate of SEO
campaign, despite the unquestionable quantity growth in accordance
with our previous example.
Next vital point is to understand that before
anything we, firstly, should have those web-pages, otherwise
there would be nothing to optimize. That basic logic will
lead to another obvious conclusion. The more theme-based web-pages
you have the better SEO result you can achieve. If your online
business represented by 3 web-pages (main sales letter, about
the author and contacts), your initial SEO "resources"
are too weak to reach any substantial goal. SEs look for information,
that is why, content rich web-sites may truly enjoy advantages
of SEO.
Secondly, your pages should have already been
listed in SEs. If you haven't submitted your web-site to SEs
yet, no point to optimize the SE listing position you don't
have.
An important dilemma every business operator
faces is the extent s/he allows to reach in desire to get
outstanding SEO results. Here is what I mean. As we all know
the basic rule of successful web-site optimization is focusing
on keywords with low or very low competition. In other words,
the less supply of internet resources for some particular
keyword or phrase is, the more chances are for your web-page
of being "noticed" and ranked high.
Here is the problem, if you want to get a
maximum for your web-site SE position you should be prepared
not just to rewrite or edit your web-pages, but to completely
change the theme structure and priority of informational content!
There would undoubtedly be web-site sections
or pages with extremely high competition that would stress
the popularity and importance of that topic, so if you decide
to keep it "as is", optimization will raise your
listing, but somewhere from 796,021 place to 545,932. Does
it help you?
The extent of your "flexibility"
and how far you can go to look "pretty" from SE
viewpoint is what should be decided beforehand, because there
are always 3 parts: you/your business, target market/consumers
and search engines/directories, between which about 90% of
informational preferences are common, but the rest 10% differ
and it is up to you to decide what themes you should focus
on. Whenever you are implementing any of the SEO tactics mentioned
in this publication, keep in mind your business and consumers'
needs.
Having understood these fundamental features
of SEO, could we make a step further into a complete web-site
search engine optimization, expanding your business to the
new markets.
Note that SEO, despite all mentioned above,
is all about "asking for high ranking" and there
cannot be any results guarantee as no one except for SE developers
themselves control ranking algorithm and determine "who
is where". More than that, SEO takes much time before
effecting your listing positions and this timeframe may range
somewhere from week to several months, so don't panic if your
optimization efforts haven't resulted in Google #1 position
by tomorrow morning.
Structure
Let's start from drawing a scheme of your
web-site link structure very similar to one every web-developer
draws before designing a web-site. Under other equal conditions,
we will speak about later, it is also clear that the more
theme based web-pages or even web-site sections you create,
the more chances of being ranked high you have, no matter
how optimized your competitor's single web-page is.
Each web-page of web-site section should represent
a particular theme or topic. This way you can diversify your
"keywords market", increasing chances of high rankings.
Despite obvious visitors advantage your site is more likely
to win market recognition.
For now try to have "horizontal"
as well as standard "vertical" link connections
between pages. If one of your pages got a high ranking position
(Google Page rank) it may help to improve the rankings of
web-pages connected to it as well.
Keyword analysis
Next step is to determine keywords, mainly,
phrases that we would like to target. Talking about mentioned
dilemma, I would like to point to the other approach you should
know about, that is suggested by some experts. Let's call
it SE-oriented approach.
According to this approach, before creating
a web-site your first step implies searching for the best
key phrases via competitive analysis on main SE and then starting
to develop content around these keywords. It means that your
web-site will get highest SE ranking, but the informational
richness will be dictated by neither you nor your consumers.
Under such conditions it is SE or, to be more specific, your
compe tition will determine what kind of content you will
have at your web-site. As you see, according to SE-oriented
approach, the more competitive some key phrase and based on
it topic is, the less attention you should pay to developing
that theme at your own site.
My attitude is slightly different. I offer
at first to create and evaluate your current web-site content
based on your business preferences and your niche-market needs
and then optimize those web-pages according to keywords taken
from your existed web-pages, no matter how tough the competition
may be. Of course, you are free to create new pages around
keywords with low competition just for traffic building purposes,
but the primary accent should be focused on your business
development and marketing needs.
As for the keywords, the basic rule is to
choose the most targeted phrases rather than single words
for two reasons:
* Phrases could describe your web-page theme
usually more precisely than a word;
* Phrases usually have substantially less
competition in comparison with one-word.
Write down 3-5 the most targeted key phrases
for each web-page or section we are going to optimize. Then
by evaluating supply/demand ratio find the easiest keywords
for SE positioning.
Standard procedure of determining your key
phrase competition or, as i said "evaluating supply/demand
ratio" is to look at their supply and demand at popular
SEs. Supply is determined by results of searching them on
SEs while demand can be found through query on PPC programs
at Overture.com or Google.com's AdWords that have tool for
discovering how many time keywords or phrase have been searched
on them.
By doing so we are searching for the most
prospective and promising for optimization key phrases. Having
them allow us to go further and start optimizing the web-pages
themselves.
Source code optimization.
{title}...{/title}
This tag is to be a winner. This is a primary
spot to include our keywords for SE spiders, bots or crawlers
("spider" hereafter). {title} tags are the best
"dainty dish" for SE spiders. They eat them as cakes,
so make title tags to be tasty for them, about 65 characters
long.
{meta name=description content="..."}
Important Meta tag. Very often the description
you put will be shown at the SE searching results. To my personal
opinion they have more important marketing role of attracting
visitors than actual optimization. The SEs' trust in "description"
tag as well as our next "keywords" tag has been
greatly discriminated due to fraud and unfair competition.
Make it no more than 250 characters long, including, of course,
your targeted keywords as well.
{meta name=keywords content="..."}
Another advisable to use Meta tag should be
included with all your targeted and untargeted, but related
to the topic, key phases separated by commas. Note that highly
popular and stand alone keywords like "web-site",
"internet", "business" etc. will give
you nothing more than increase the size of your web-page.
I won't be mistaken, if I say that about several millions
of web-pages have them. Don't overuse your keywords as well,
spiders don't like to be forced to eat what they don't want
to.
{meta name=author content="..."}{meta
name=copyright content="..."}{meta name=language
content="..."} etc.
Subsidiary Meta tags that are used more likely
to satisfy webmasters' ego, rather than bring any real help
in rankings.
{h1}...{/h1} {h2}...{/h2} {h3}...{/h3}
In contrary to the previous tags the importance
of, let's call them, "body" tags have substantially
risen for simple reason, they are readable by visitors and
it is hardly to cheat SE with them than Meta description or
keywords tags where any webmaster may put anything s/he wants.
Given that these tags determine the headers of your web-page
from the SE spiders' viewpoint, try to include your targeted
keywords in them.
{img src=: alt="..."}
"Alt" is just a comment for every
image you insert into the page. Use this knowledge at your
advantage. Include your key phrases where possible and safe.
By "safe" I mean common sense, don't input comment
like "ebook package" into the image of the button
that leads to your partner, say, "Pizza ordering"
web-site. On the contrary, if your web-site has graphical
menu and buttons, it is very wise to include "alt"
comments according to directions they lead to, i.e. "Home",
"Services", "About Us", "Contacts"
etc. If for any reason visitors have their browser with images
turned off, they won't see any menu if you haven't inserted
"alt" comments.
Content
Your informational coverage should be keyword/phrase
rich, the same way as headers. In general the more relevant
key phrases your textual information will contain, the better
your chances of being "remarked" by SE spider are.
HTML text format tags like bolding {b}, italic
type {i} and underlining {u} may also have some weight in
SEs placement.
Key word density and frequency are another
indexes vastly used by SE to rank web-pages. Don't overuse
them though.
Link popularity (page rank)
Another extremely important parameter for
your listing position nowadays. In general the more links
on third party web-sites point to your site the better. Although
try to avoid "link farms" or other "clubs'
the only aim of which is to artificially increase your link
popularity. These tactics may simply result in penalization
or banning of your web-site.
Link popularity without any doubt helps to
increase the relevance of searched terms more often than it
doesn't, but makes SEO even more far-reaching target, because
establishing quality "incoming" links pointing to
your site is beyond your direct power.
To be short, your task is to find web-sites
that have highest SE listing positions and/or page rank (determined
via Google Toolbar) and negotiate a link to your site in return
for some service, product or solicit simple exchange of links.
As you see these "manual" work is the most time-consuming,
but it repays if you are focused to get as much relevant links
as possible.
You may apply viral strategies by offering
some free/paid service that implies putting a link back to
your site.
Google has developed its own link popularity
evaluation tool called Page Rank. It is calculated basing
on consistently changing number rules: current rank of the
site the link to your page is pointing from, its relevance
to your web-site topic, presence of targeted words etc.
Fake tactics
They are what I call them and used by webmasters
similar to ways some "marketers" use spam to promote
their businesses.
Unfortunately, usual internet users don't
have ability to "ban" spammers the same way SEs
penalize those "smart" webmasters. I don't recommend
you to use any of these tactics, even on someone's "advice".
They include excessive use of related and
totally unrelated keywords, comment tags, hidden layers, text
on the background of the same color, artificial link farms,
numerous entry pages etc. This game simply won't be worth
candles if your web-site is banned for good.
robots.txt file
Very important file every web-site should
have. It allows you to literally rule or direct SE spider
to the "proper" places, explaining what and where
should be scanned, not just blind waiting of your lucky day.
With its help you can also protect your confidential web-pages
and or directories from scanning and showing at the SE searching
results, very important feature many web-masters solve with
"tons" of Java or even Perl coding instead of one
line string in the robots.txt file that will forbid to scan
"download", so-called "thank you" pages
or anything you want!
General rules of creating robots.txt file
you can find here http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
Design & Layout issues
Next point is to have a textual info. The
simple declaration of content rich web-site is not enough,
SEs need text to scan.
Clear
to follow links. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation
menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links
as well. Most SE spiders cannot distinguish dynamically created
web-pages with the help of ASP, Perl, PHP or other languages.
(Webmasters Resource Guide: PHP
web hosting, ASP
host, Perl
host)
It is
also clear that all web-pages, access to which was forbidden
(no matter how) by administrator, would also be left unnoticed.
The same relates to HTML frame sites. What frames actually
do is complicate the way web-site is being scanned, no more,
no less. When I see web-site made of frames, it is like webmaster
telling me: "I want lower SE position."
Because of the excessive work spiders have
to do in order to scan as many pages as possible, their scanning
"accuracy", if we can say so, have dropped, so they
will hardly scan each and every of your pages from the very
top to the bottom, it is more likely to be selective scanning,
so, to ease this process you should try to arrange the most
valuable info, including header tags and text at the very
top of web-pages. Having "site map" page with all
link connections of your site not only does it help your potential
visitors, but SEs as well.
All link names, inside your informational
content, are to contain your related keywords or phrases,
not just "click here" or "download here".
Avoid a lot of javascripts, cascade style
sheet tags or a lot of image tags at the top of the page that
could occupy more than a page of HTML source code with almost
no textual info. If you have java or .css coding save them
as separate files and upload on request, leaving one string
of code in your HTML document only. This tactic is also very
smart considering general web-page optimization and space
saving purposes.
Allow the Internet market to know your business
better.
About The Author
Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur,
founder of ASBONE.com, where you can find everything to make
your business prosper.
info@asbone.com
Article
Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
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