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. 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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ENGINE INFORMATION RELEASED JULY 2005