Search Engine Preperation

Step 0 - Make sure your site is useful!

I'm always amazed by how many people miss this simple concept. They spend a huge amount of time trying to get good search engine rankings and lots of visitors, and then what do the visitors find? A poorly designed, badly written website. If there's one bit of advice I wish I could drum into everyone who visits this site, it is this: "It isn't how many 'hits' you get, but how many 'sales' you make." Making your pages "people-friendly" is as important as making them "search-engine" friendly. It's usually much easier to double the effectiveness of your website than it is to double your traffic, and the bottom line result is the same. At the bottom of this article, I'll give you some advice on how to do that. But for now, let's talk about what you can do to help out the search engines.

Step 1 - Determine your Key Phrases

People get obsessive about their keywords. This is wrong. It is difficult if not impossible to get high rankings based on keywords. Instead, you need to think about keyphrases. The easiest way to do this is ask yourself "what would someone trying to find me type in when they search?" Make a list of these. Try them out on the search engines -- pretend to be someone looking for your product or service. When your business is geographically restricted by demand or by choice, then your keyphrases should reflect this. For example, if you are a a real-estate broker in Wilmington, North Carolina, then the key phrase "buying real estate" is a waste of time; instead, the more specific phrase "buying real estate in wilmington north carolina" is what you want to be thinking about.  Getting general phrases only means your trying to buy a "lottery ticket" for that one big out of state sale and you should be real about your goals.Think about variations on the key phrases and write them down. Continuing with our example:

 

The above is only a partial list, but you get the idea. You can also get a good idea of what keyphrases and page design techniques work well by looking at other pages that do well in the searches you've tried. I discuss how to do that in more detail in my Improving Your Rankings article. Note that this sample list is just a list of possible keyphrases -- we're not going to use all of them because we won't have room.
One of your fellow users, Stephen Sherman, pointed out an interesting subtlety about keyphrase selection. Let's assume you find a keyphrase that you think people will type in a lot. Try it, and look at the results. If the results seem to be "on topic", then people are likely to drill down several pages to find a listing that is just right for them. This kind of keyphrase is one you want to target, but if you don't get on page one, you'll still get traffic. If, on the other hand, the results are mostly irrelevant (or full of spammed listings), then people will rarely look at page 2, or even more than the first few listings. These keyphrases are thus not as valuable. This doesn't automatically mean you shouldn't try to target it -- none of the criteria are absolutes -- but it does mean that it will be more difficult to get a useful listing with that keyphrase.

Two great resources for finding out what keyphrases are the most effective are the Overture.com Search Suggestions Page and WordTracker. On Overture's search suggestion page, you just type in a very general keyphrase (like "real estate") and it tells you all of the more specific keyphrases that relate to that keyphrase and how many hits they got. Using our example of selling real estate in Wilmington, NC and entering "real estate" into the Overture tool, I found that in October 1999, the broad keyphrase "real estate" was searched for 67016 times (on Overture). However, you'd never want to target that keyphrase, because you don't care if someone in Kalamazoo wants real estate; you're only interested in people who want houses in Wilmington. Looking down the list of results, I found that "north carolina real estate" got 489 searches. That's a possibility. Doing a search suggestion on "wilmington" revealed several hundred hits on "wilmington north carolina," "wilmington nc" and related topics. Zooming in even further, getting a suggestion on "wilmington real" found 36 hits on specific queries related to real estate in wilmington, NC. These queries obviously don't get a huge amount of traffic, but because they're so focused on what you're trying to do, they're often the best ones to target. WordTracker goes a bit further. It helps you develop lists of relevant keyphrases, ranked by their popularity. It then queries the major search engines to determine which keyphrases are the least competitive. It's usually not much use targeting a popular keyphrase (lots of searches) if there are millions of other pages that contain that keyphrase. On the other hand, a relevant keyphrase that only gets a few searches a day but which has only a few pages competing for it is a good candidate, because it will be much easier to get a high ranking. WordTracker has a free trial that will give you a lot of information, and additional services available by subscription - including some great tools for working with Overture.

My advice is to use the Overture tool to get a rough idea what your keyphrases should be (and find ones you might not have thought about), and then use WordTracker to determine which ones you really should be targeting - and (this is key!) to rank them in order of importance. OK. At this point, you know what your best keyphrases are. You've got your list. You've checked it twice. Now it's time to use it!

Step 2 - Crafting your The reason for this is that the three most important places to have keyphrases and phrases are your title tag, your meta tags, and your first paragraph. You want them to all contain the same important words; this increases your keyphrase density and improves your rankings.

 Step 3 - The Meta Tags The fabled Meta tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed. Meta tags go in the section of the HTML page (the same section as the:

  • Some search engines won't list you unless you do.
  • People are more likely to buy if you have your own domain name. What looks better to you, "http://www.fredjones.com/" or "http://members.aol.com/fredjones123/"?
  • You can change your webhosting service without messing up all of your search engine listings. I get emails every week from people saying "I'm moving from aol to msn, what will happen to my rankings?" If they had their own domain name, nothing, it's not a problem.

This is an absolute no-brainer. Get your own domain name!

We use Stargate.com for most of domain name registrations. Cheap fast and we know the system to help users finalize their Hosting setup.Don't get hyped about long domain names I've been getting a lot of questions about the new, longer domain names that are available. There is a lot of misinformation being passed around about them. The big lie is that if you have a domain name with lots of keywords in it (eg: add-url-register-website-promote-site-selfpromotion.com) you will get a higher ranking in the search engines. This is flat out not true. NONE of the major search engines will significantly boost your rankings based on keywords in your url. Not one. This is what they said when Danny Sullivan, editor of the highly recommended Search Engine Watch Newsletter asked them, and I've confirmed it by experiment. If the search engines look at them at all, they simply add the url text to the rest of the page, so the added benefit of keywords in the URL is totally insignificant. Don't waste your money. My advice is to try and go for a short, memorable domain name, either 1 word or 2 words combined, or with an i, e, i- or e- prefix. Make it easy to type, and easy to remember.  Maybe one of them will be just right for you. Let it be known you don't have the right to any domain anymore.  CyberSquatting is illegal.  There Anti-gun companies that own rifles.com shotguns.com pistols.com and if you want to go through the fight you can TAKE these domains.  Why would you do this? They receive no less than 5000 people a day. FOR FREEIf you insist on trying the keywords in URL, do it either using subdirectories (eg: http://www.gunmuse.com/search/) or subdomains (eg: http://freeguns.gunmuse.com/). You'll still be wasting your time, but at least you won't be wasting money! Avoid Search Engine Tricks Some "experts" advise trying to trick search engines by putting keyphrases in comments, putting them in text that is the same color as your background, and so on. I strongly advise that you not try these tricks. Bluntly, most of them don't work -- and the ones that do may stop working at any minute, as the search engines are constantly trying to detect and defeat them. GunMuse uses some tricks to get through a few doors but we NEVER try to trick a robot.  That penality will not ever go away.My philosophy is that you should try and help the search engines by making it as easy as possible to get a good idea of what your page is about. That way, as search engines get better and better at rating the contents of sites, your rankings will get better over time, with no effort from you. I know this is sort of repeating what I just said a couple of screens higher on this page, but it bears repeating. If you try and fool the search engines, in the long run, you'll be the fool. Got Links? Once you have your pages up and running, and chock full of useful content, it's a very good idea to try and get other people to link to them. It's not enough to just get them in the search engines. There are three very good reasons for doing this: First, many search engines are now using link popularity (how many other pages link to your page) as a ranking criteria -- they figure that if other sites link to your page, it might be useful. Second, it's recently been revealed that Inktomi applies a ranking penalty to any url submitted through their free "Add URL" system, but removes it if their spider also finds the page by following a link from another site (they do this in an attempt to find and penalize "doorway" pages). And third, you'll get traffic from the websites that link to you.   We pay for a 48 hour recrawl by Inktomi in order to allow you to use their Free system and links from us as a low-cost get started boost.Getting links isn't that hard. When you find a website that has content similar to yours, email the webmaster and ask for a link, pointing out why it would be appropriate. If he has content on his site useful to your visitors, link to him without even offering to trade links. Link to him, then email him and ask for a link back. A good site for learning the basics of getting links is Linking 101.   Linking is important but avoid Link Farms. These are the add one link to your site and 500 people will link back to you places. Search engines are wise and that is a hole you can't climb out of.The biggest search engine to use link popularity is Google (who came up with the idea), and the two sites that generate the most link "value" on Google are Yahoo and Open Directory. For many people, the true value of the $299 a year cost of a Yahoo listing isn't the clicks from Yahoo, but the boost in their rankings on Google.  You can get that same boost from us at GunMuse and our advertising is Guaranteed Yahoo's is not.  Open Directory doesn't cost anything, but getting in can be time consuming. Recently it has been impossible to get listed at Dmoz.org but try anyway this is the reason Gunmuse has its own search.  If you get into the Dmoz do yourself a future favor and put our search box on your site so that those 99% that don't buy have a warm place to search from.Flash is a plague upon the net Avoid using Flash in your website. Flash is a black box to the search engines, they can't see inside it. Anything presented by Flash is invisible to them. So that means it is invisible to people trying to find your product or service. Flash is almost never used appropriately on the net. One of the few examples of good flash use is HowStuffWorks, where it is used to present little explanatory animations. But time and time again, I see entire sites created in Flash. What's the point? Since the search engines can't see the Flash content, the chances are, these sites won't rank well for the searches they want to rank well. Which means they won't get traffic. Which means almost nobody will see the high-tech super-cool way-keen website that they paid a huge amount of money to a "web design expert" to create. My advice is simple. Death to Flash. If a consultant recommends that you use Flash in a website, run for the door. If you can trample him or her on the way out, consider that a bonus. Just in case I'm not being clear, let me put it another way. Anyone who recommends extensive use of Flash in a website ought to be taken out and shot. Javascript suffers from similar problems. It clutters websites, and doesn't work on all browsers. Use it only for absolutely essential functional activities. Never use it to create flashy effects.  Recently due to a lawsuit fight between Sun and Microsoft you will find that I.E. Browsers have had their Java capabilites removed.  Visit Sun.com to get them back on yours.A note about Framed sites Many "experts" also say that using frames to construct your website can hurt their rankings. My experience is that this is not so, as long as you construct your frames properly. The trick is this: make sure that your page has a proper title tag and meta tags. What this does is, when the page is loaded, if it finds that it is not in a frame, it redirects the browser to the proper frameset url, whatever that might be. A much more detailed explanation of how this can be done in various ways can be found in this excellent article. Sound complicated it is an while frames won't hurt you they will slow you down and make it necessary to have complicated advertising strategy.  We don't recommend them as it prevents "accidental growth". You place an article on your site in a frame an no robot will see it.  While if its coded properly they see,read and may link to that page.  MORE TRAFFIC.  So the experts are Right but then they are wrong.  Its all a matter of who you are and what you can do.

Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington, North Carolina?

If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the last 10 years, I've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home, apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me to be your guide. ... rest of your html Extra Credit! Now you've got a decent webpage, with good content and meta tags. You're ready to submit to the search engines. Or are you? What you've done so far are the basics. There's a lot more you can do, time and money permitting, to improve your odds of ranking highly. Here are some tips on what to do (and not to do), to get "extra credit" from the search engines. 
Author:   GunMuse       Date:   Thursday Sep 23 2004 10:13:11 am