At least once or twice every week, I’ll be at my desk (or at the dining room table) with my Franklin Covey planner open and a stack of laminated checklists in hand.

“What are you doing, honey?” she calls, already knowing the answer.

“I’m planning”, I reply with a smile.

She laughs and I get back to work.

She laughs because she swears I spend half of my time “planning”. But, if you ask me how I’m able to get as much work done as I do in only 3 hours a day, I’ll point to a black Franklin Covey planner with about a dozen laminated checklists inside.

Building an Internet business is easy. Seriously. I’m not saying that it’s not complicated, because it is. I’m just saying that it’s easy to accomplish if you just have a system in place.

There’s very little in this world that can’t be accomplished with the right set of action steps in front of you.

Today, I’m going to give you such a system for building your Internet business. There are only 4 steps…

1. Decide What You Want To Do. Do you want to run an eBay(R) business? Be an affiliate marketer? Buy and sell reprint rights? Get involved in niche marketing? While all of those things will likely find their way into your plan in time, you gotta begin with one thing at a time.

My recommendation: Choose a “broad” topic you are interested in and begin building a list of folks interested in that topic.

2. Determine A Weekly Action Plan. After you decide what you want to do, it’s time to determine how to get it done. What I do is this: I create a weekly set of action steps. That is, I have a set of things I do on Monday, on Tuesday, and so forth. Decide how many hours (as little as ONE) you want to work each day and schedule yourself a reasonable amount of things to get done in that time frame. Repeat this process week after week.

My recommendation: Begin writing ezine articles to promote your list … and affiliate programs. It’s the easiest way to get free traffic and build your list at the same time.

3. Devote Yourself To Staying On Schedule. The important thing here is to stick to it. The easiest way that I know of to make certain you develop discipline in your schedule is to NOT set unrealistic expectations. Give yourself ample time to do each day’s action step - don’t overschedule. Look for progress along the way to celebrate. Reward yourself when you’ve reached a milestone. And, remember, you’re GROWING a business. Just like physical growth, it takes time … it WILL happen if you remain committed.

My recommendation: Weave in simple activities related to the following categories - List building (ezine articles), product creation(conduct interviews or hire ghostwriters), site development (making your site convert more visitors into buyers),and education (continuing to learn new ways to grow your business).

And for more ideas on how to work more effectively and deliver your planned projects, read through the resources mentioned at http://www.topreports.com/effectiveness/

4. Develop Additional Shortcuts. As you get better and better at working with your lists, creating products and tweaking your site, you’ll want to continue to improve your business with new ideas, strategies, tools, and resources. The key is simple: never stop learning!

Visit forums. Read articles. Download reports. Identify sites and resources that CONTRIBUTE to your success in educating you. You want faster results, bigger increases, automated processes, and other ways to get more accomplished and more profit, with less work involved.

Everything depends on your developing a plan and sticking to it.

And that is the REAL secret to building a high-profit Internet business!

Jimmy D. Brown is the publisher of “List And Traffic” Video Newsletter, teaching thousands of internet business owners specific things they can do every week to multiply profits. For video training and printable checklist “systems” for growing your business, drop by http://www.topreports.com/listandtraffic/

Search Engine Optimization ? "SEO"

Search engine optimization, or "seo" as it is better known, is the definitive long term Internet marketing strategy. So, what is it? Seo simply refers to taking steps to make sure your site appears high in non-paid search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The reason seo is considered a long term strategy is?well, it takes a long time. If your marketing is focusing on highly competitive keywords, such as "Europe travel", there is so much competition that you could be looking at two or three years before getting top rankings. The time period is really a factor of how fast you can build links. Sometimes you can move up within 6 months, but sometimes it takes a few years.

Is it worth it to wait for 2 years to get into the top five for "Europe travel"? There are over 2,000,000 searches a month for the keyword phrase. What do you think? If you offer a service or product related to traveling in Europe, how much money would you make if even 1 million people visited your site each month? Think about that.

The Big Three

There are three, and only three, search engines that matter when it comes to seo ? Google, Yahoo and MSN. What about Alta Vista, etc.? They simply don’t have enough traffic to make them worth pursuing.

There are four keys to seo. First, you must research the amount of traffic various keywords are receiving. Second, you must modify your site to include the exact keywords phrases in the meta tagging and text. Third, you must add and add and add content to your site. The more content, the more the big three will like your site. Finally, you must trade links with other sites that have content related to your site.

The keys to pursuing a seo marketing strategy are discipline and patience. Let’s take a quick look at each.

You must have the discipline to stick with your seo effort when you are seeing no results. The desire to throw one’s arms in the air in frustration is going to be strong. Just remember that every step you take today will pay off down the road.

Patience balances feelings of frustration and you are going to have a lot of those. Look, it is going to take a long time, so resist the urge to whine. Stick a sign up over your desk counting off the months or have a regular exercise routine. If nothing else, you can day dream about all of the free traffic you are going to get one day.

Search engine optimization is not for the weak of mind or impatient. If you can stick with it, this long term marketing strategy always pays off.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego, California.

No matter what topic you choose, if your goal is to create an unending stream of income, generated by your Blog site, through promoting products, sites, and opportunities to visitors such as yourself. This book will help you attain your goal.

An alternative to the news filled Blog, which includes entries on a regular, or daily basis, is the Informational Blog. An Informational Blog is a site where information is presented on the one page format, along with any advertising you wish to include, and the content is so intense that it draws people back time and time again to reuse the site. Informational Blogs can be as long or short as you wish. Informational advertising links run down either side of the page, promoting topics similar to the one you are writing about.

These Blogs are chock full of information, links, ads, and ideas that promote the content or purpose of the Blog. A Blog of this type will run on "Auto-Pilot" for many weeks at a time, just earning you money, while you go out and play with the kidlets, take a vacation, or build a "real" business on the side.

Have a desire to communicate and something important to say, Blogging can get your point across. Concentrating your knowledge on one topic brings a specific traffic to your site. Jan Verhoeff is an expert at making affiliate links work. Contact her at eBiz Brand Performance.

So why should I bother having any non-relevant links?
Well you need many links pointing to you to build a good internet presence. If you try tools such as Marketleap’s link popularity check which can give you a detailed report on number of links to your website found in all major search engines, you’ll see that quantity of links does matter in terms of internet presence.

Page ranking goes up with number of links, but if the liks come from the websites with relevant content that page rank goes up higher.

So how do I build a good, relevant link directory?
Building a link directory is relatively easy but unless your server supports server side programming like PHP or ASP, maintaining it can be very time consuming. If your server has PHP support there are many link exchange scripts can be downloaded for free. Try searching hotscripts.com or scripts.com.

Some of the free scripts may be hard to install or customize, but if you have some programming knowledge it may be easy to do. There are also very affordable scripts out there like BeSeen ? Automated Link Exchange which automates the whole link exchange process and also includes install file and detailed instructions on how to customize it.

Find out what approach to link exchange works best for you, because link exchange does affect our internet presence and page ranking and it will continue to do so for a while.

bewebmaster.com

 by: John Sylvester

It is now two months since we started to regroup our efforts in contemporary SEO strategies. A real estate start-up was taken as the guinea pig for the exploration of our new SEO techniques - and with staggering early results. As one can imagine, a huge uplift in the site hits of a property company is worth a awful lot of money.

The site is still only four months old and therefore in the pending tray of Google’s, and to some extent Yahoo’s ’sandbox’. Still, the strategies we have employed this year has seen site traffic quintupled, after taking advice garnered from a raft of sources, especially SitePro News and ProBlogger.

The days of organic submissions are still with us but those of reciprocals, unless of specific benefit, are moribund - thankfully. Our latest methods have been passed on to our partners in the UK, Strategy Consulting, and they have been integrated into their new year’s marketing efforts.

What we did was to install WordPress as a seamless addition to the website, fill it with highly relevant copy, with Technorati trackbacks, register all of its pages with Google Sitemap and ping a hundred or more news aggregators. Blogcrawler now dominates the referrers list.

Alongside the on-site blogs, we saw that a certain blogspot was appearing above many of the established estate agents in Bangkok. We therefore researched (via Overture) all the property-related keywords and set up blogs with Blogspot for each, slightly amending the on-site copy - so as not to get blacklisted - and optimised the selected keywords, linked them all together with them all pointing to the website. Now, when searching for ‘tenancy management bangkok’ the site completely dominates the stage: the website plus blogs are #1-14 on MSN. As the site does not reciprocate, they now have twenty quality inbounds, helping the site’s real keywords to succeed.

Another helpful addition is article writing for sites having high PR. They seem to burn and fade very quickly from the search engine’s perspective, but very still a valuable part of our strategy.

So, in 2006, we can now offer our clients a five-pronged assault on the majors: quality, well-researched SEO on url, title, metas, alts, content and outbounds; relevant one-way, high PR link building; on-site blogging, thus elevating PR, building relevant content and auto-pinging RSS feeds; intelligent registration of keywords on Blogspot with specifically-crafted copy, with headline and alt tagging key phrases, linking them all together with links into the main site; last but not least, writing atricles for sites such as this to get feedback from experts to further enhance the strength of these strategies.

Now, we can also offer small companies templated but effective CMS solutions through WordPress for $250.

But how to relate this information to clients outside of demonstrating results?

About The Author John Sylvester - Media Director of V9 Design & Build (www.v9designbuild.com), providing both local and outsourcing web and SEO services: we provide both brochureware and custom-designed websites, with tasteful design and branding, professional design and build, proven and successful SEO and e-marketing, e- commerce-driven database integration and content management systems. sales@v9designbuild.com

]]> http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/website-promotion/SEO-Paradigm-For-2006/feed/ http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/website-promotion/Has-Your-Business-Hit-a-Wall-What-to-Do-When-Business-Slows-Down/ http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/website-promotion/Has-Your-Business-Hit-a-Wall-What-to-Do-When-Business-Slows-Down/#comments Sat, 09 Sep 2006 06:00:00 +0000 admin Website Promotion I doubt that anyone reading this article hasn’t at one time or another found his or her business dropping off significantly. For some unknown reason, and without any warning, everything seems to stop. The phone stops ringing, your e-mail box has nothing but advertisements and it appears as if your business has come to an end. What happened and even more important what should you do when it appears as if your business has hit a wall?

Whatever We Focus Our Attention On Expands!

Usually, our first reaction to a drop in business is to panic putting all of our attention on what isn’t working. We immediately start worrying and complaining, commiserating with others who may be experiencing a similar situation. Although it’s a natural reaction, it’s actually the worst thing you can do. Why? Because there is a powerful premise that says: “Whatever we focus our attention on expands.” Ponder that for just a moment. Have you noticed that every time you pay strict attention to what isn’t working, it just seems to get bigger? Whether you believe it or not, the fact remains that when we put our attention on what isn’t working, it seems that things get worse. Yet when we put our attention on what is working, it seems that things quickly improve. Changing your state of mind alters the circumstances.

The Tide Comes in and the Tide Goes Out!

One of the important lessons I’ve learned through the years is that predictably business will have its ups and downs. The tide comes in and the tide goes out. As a person who enjoys my work immeasurably, when I first began my writing business, I would become terrified if the phone stopped ringing. I couldn’t figure out what happened and thought I needed to do something quickly to alter the situation. But once I learned that the ebbs and flows are natural, I made it a point to choose a different approach. Instead of staring at the pot of water waiting for it to boil, I started learning how to release the situation and put my mind on something else. As soon as I was really able to let go, things shifted. Either a new idea occurred to me, past clients contacted me out of the blue, new clients appeared or I simply decided it was time for a rest.

Prime the Pump!

Now whenever those quiet times occur, which are less and less frequent, I simply do my best to relax. By changing my focus and remembering all of the above, new ideas bubble up and I start to feel more creative. In fact during a recent quiet period I was inspired to donate my writing of a bio to a charity. Just as we need to prime the pump by adding a little water to it, I realized that giving some of my services away as a gift was a good way to get things moving again. It immediately changed the energy around my situation.

Taking Action!

But if you’re like most of the online entrepreneurs who prefer to take action while waiting for things to shift, I suggest doing some simple things that don’t put any pressure on you but give you a sense of accomplishment. The following few ideas can easily be applied during the down times.

1. Write an article and submit it to a popular publication. Nothing will give you quite the same sense of achievement as seeing an article you’ve written in print plus it’s one of the more positive things to do when you aren’t very busy. Just about everyone has something they’ve learned through their experiences that others would love to know about. Share it in an article and you’ll be amazed at how quickly the tide turns.

2. Write a press release and distribute it through one of the free press release distribution services. Often smaller companies think a press release is only for the big guys and hold back from using the media. But press releases are for everyone. Several of my clients have put out a press release and had overwhelming results they never expected.

3. Narrow your focus. When one of my clients found her business slowing down, she decided it was time to try a new tactic. She had been spending a lot of money on advertisements that weren’t working for her, plus her site wasn’t getting the amount of traffic she expected. Instead of focusing her attention on trying to reach everyone, she started putting attention only in places that were associated with her particular industry. She found that once she began focusing specifically on her arena many more people started visiting her site and business started picking up.

4. Try networking. We often forget that there are a lot of people who would be delighted to join forces with us by linking to our sites or referring us to someone they know. Recently, I made a connection with someone who aligned perfectly with my business. After communicating with him via e-mail I found that his site and services were very complimentary to my services. I then suggested to him that we add each other to our sites, which is exactly what we’ve done. The added exposure that we can provide each other has been extremely beneficial

5. Update your web site. Although your web site presentation has appeared online for quite a while, and you have realized a degree of success, perhaps it’s possible that your site needs some refreshing or revamping. Try looking at your web site from an objective viewpoint, almost as if you’re seeing it for the very first time. Review it carefully and notice if it still appeals to your eye and your ear. If not, add a new article, change the verbiage or add some new pictures. Figure out a way to optimize your site by adding search engine friendly content so that more people will find you. You don’t necessarily have to change your site, but simply update it while you’re waiting.

6. Visit past successes. Now may be a good time to stop by and say hello to clients from the past. They may have forgotten your e-mail address and might be in need of your services again. Or if someone has been happy with your services, ask if they would be willing to recommend you and suggest that you will pay them a small finder’s fee for anyone who becomes a paid referral. Maintaining good relationships with your past clients and customers is a great way of keeping your business flowing.

Just because you aren’t busy for the moment doesn’t mean that all of your hard work has come to an end. In fact this may very well be a great time for contemplation. Instead of scrambling to quickly drum up more business or fretting about the lack of income, perhaps this is the time to be still as you consider some new strategies. Before making a judgment about your quiet time, why not use it as an opportunity for expansion and growth?

Copyright2005

Charlene Rashkow brings 15 years of experience as a Writing Stylist/Consultant to her creative efforts as a freelance writer. She has successfully helped companies and individuals reach their objectives by writing exceptional web site content, press releases, bios, and articles of interest, business plans and all other forms of marketing material. You may visit Charlene at http://www.allyourwritingneeds.com

 by: Todd Levi

This article examines the basics behind quality site promotion.

Let us take a good look at acronyms in the industry! Search Engine Optimization(SEO), is a term thrown around a million times a day online. So many sites use old techniques that will get there rankings hurt or reversed with there hap-hazard web designs it frustrates me. I don’t want you to be one of them. In fact this article is aimed for creating SEEN web design projects. If you don’t use this anti-SEO (i.e. cloaking and doorway pages) and follow the following rules you can expect decent results with your web design. The basics for SEO are simple and should be used by all web designers and web design services (although that doesn’t mean they are always used):

1. Optimize your site with a high percentage of text relevant to the search terms you intend to go after.

2. Make sure all alt (alternate image tags) and title tags have relative descriptions including keywords.

3. Make sure your site meets current online standards and can be equally viewed among all browsers and operating machines. Even though some pages may still display correctly with incorrect HTML, it can hinder the way search engines will look at them, bringing the overall optimization of the page down.

4. Make sure all pages are under 800K (recommended for fast loading pages).

5. Submit (manually, by hand) to all major search engines, an automatically to lesser engines through (at least) a free search engine submission service or program.

Keeping these five rules in mind will help, however a serious look at other aspects will help even more in SEO. I will go into these aspects in more detail with articles to come at http://SEO-Marketing.LeviSolutions.com but this is a good start.

PPC, otherwise known as Pay Per Click advertising is found on numerous search engines and smaller ones alike. The two major players are Google and Overture (now own by Yahoo), however there are some other PPC engines that use a multiple of lesser engines and quality websites to offer there services. Some will give you a top ten ranking within your keyword searches while others have you bid for placement among there engines. A few simple rules to follow:

1. The content of your site must match the keywords bid on.

2. SELL! SELL! SELL! While traditional SEO focuses on how the search engines will view your page, this is your chance to engage the human customer! Traditional sales techniques work best here.

3. Will visits to your web pages convert into quality leads or actual sales? Make sure the cost of bidding will be recovered, plus some.

4. The more popular the search terms = the more expensive it will be. Keep this in mind and target populated terms with financial efficiency.

5. All of your keywords stand no chance whatsoever of being listed in the top ten positions on the major search engines. Organic top ten placements can be very expensive so this is your chance of competing with terms you don’t rank well with.

Make sure to have a relevant page for your search term. This is critical as we all know from browsing; if a site doesn’t fit the bill in the first three seconds we are more than happy to click that back button.

SEM = Structural Equation Modeling? NOPE! SEM = Search Engine Marketing? NOPE! SEM = Standard Error of Mean? Nope! While all of these are acronyms for SEM, there not the ones we care to discuss here in our brief overview of Search Engine Mechanics. Anything I say in this column may be outdated with the next big search engine “patch” so what I mean by SEM is simple: Keep Up! That’s right, by simply going by what you know, or an article written 8 months ago you will get lost or penalized in your attempts for effective online marketing. Search Engine mechanics is the mathematical art behind the algorithms of the popular, well producing engine online. To find out that a “Jagger Update” relinquishes all reciprocal links to your website in the eyes of the 75%+ that currently engage Google is huge. The mechanics of the currently used search engines is something to keep your eye on. While HTML doesn’t change much each year (comparatively), search engines do. Simply put: make sure you know what to do to get ranked in this ever evolving market!

-One last note: make sure you know what pages are visited and where users are spending there time. If you have a well visited page (found through your web stats) that isn’t receiving much time spent: GUESS WHERE YOU NEED A REWRITE!

This is meant to be, and should be a good start to all wanting high search engine ranking within there web design realm.

About The Author Todd Levi has prided himself in expertise knowledge of Web Design and Search Engine Optimization throughout the past few years. Please visit his work at http://www.LeviSolutions.com.

]]> http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/website-promotion/SEO-PPC-SEM-ASAP/feed/ http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/search-engine-optimization/New-Site-and-Sandbox-How-to-Get-Rid-of-It/ http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/search-engine-optimization/New-Site-and-Sandbox-How-to-Get-Rid-of-It/#comments Sat, 09 Sep 2006 05:00:00 +0000 admin Search Engine Optimization You have put lot of sweat in making your site. Now you want it to engender revenues and only source of traffic is search engines. You have completed your seo optimization well but there is no precursor of any traffic. Yes Google places new sites in “Sandbox” and this means that your site would not rank well for high traffic keywords for a certain period. This phenomenon is called as “Sandbox”. What if your site is in “Sandbox” or on hold? Should you hang around or is there any way out. Lets look at few of them:

Have a slow and sturdy link campaign (taking Google new patent into consideration)

Google’s new patent indicates some of the point clearly why many sites are thrown into sandbox for long. By keeping below points into consideration, you could shorten the time span of sandbox for your site.

# Go for everlasting link exchange. Don’t buy links, which will evaporate once you stop payments.

# Have a slow and steady enlargement of links. Don’t do it fast.

# Have a permanent anchor text in your links. Think well before you make use of one.

# Use multiple anchor text

# Have links from the pages, which are updated regularly

Start a PPC campaign

Get traffic from PPC campaign starting from Google Adwords and you could get instant traffic from the day you launched your site. You could work on your budget and come up with a figure where you could make some money after spending on Pay per click. In the mean time, you could make the list of keywords, which works, for you in the Adwords campaign and incorporate them into your site.

Add new pages

Get into habit of adding minimum of 1 content rich page to your site every day. This will not only prepare your site for higher traffic but also get your site crawled by search engines regularly. This could bring your site out of sandbox faster.

Amitabh Shukla, Personal blog for the author is at Seo Expert India

 by: Shrinivas Vaidya

Dear friends, ranking high at the search engines for a keyword

which has high demand is every marketers dream. No matter what

your website about, a fully loaded super store or a hobby site,

you need traffic and search engines have a capacity to provide

an unending supply of thousands of visitors (if your niche has

that much demand) at zero cost.

Actually it would be wrong if we say that search engines send traffic

at zero cost. There is a price you need to pay to rank high

and that’s TIME. Yes, it takes time to reach there. (especially

at Google)

there are many factors that undergo a normal Search Engine

Optimization exercise and building “inbound links” is considered

one of the most challenging tasks involved today. To understand

better why search engines look for inbound links, let’s take

a real life example.

For a moment forget the Internet, forget you website/search engines

anything that has to do “ranking high”, just read this small

story.

There was a young boy Jim, about 21 years old. He was a fantastic

painter. He painted in water colors on canvas. His favorite

subjects were landscapes, natural beauty, mountains, etc…He

could spend hours painting and playing with colors. Colors were

his passion, his life.

He lived in a small village that was away from a major metro city.

With a small population, no one really visited this village very

often. Jim was very happy with his passion of painting.

One day Jim’s uncle visited his home on a Sunday. When he saw Jim’s

paintings he thought Jim has got an inborn talent of colors, of

looking towards the surrounding beauty that he was able to capture

on canvas. His was a special skill that very few people have.

So he suggested Jim to move to the city to display his work to

people out there. Jim assured him that whenever he gets the

opportunity he would definitely make the best of it.

Then the golden day arrived. Jim was listening to a radio station,

when he heard the announcement of an exhibiting of paintings to be

held in the metro city. Jim thought this is what I was looking for an

quickly rushed to the city at his Uncle’s place to arrange for the

formalities.

Five of Jim’s paintings got selected and displayed at the metro city

exhibition. He got a tons of post and is still getting from his

fans and now the best part is he is making thousands of bucks just

from a single painting. He is happy and wealthy too. His passion

is keeping satisfied and now he is famous guy. The villagers are

proud of having him in their village.

OK… now what’s this story got to do with SEO..you ask..

A lot…If you read the story again you will discover that Jim is

already happy when he is in his village, spending most of his

time with paints and brushes. But when he displays his work out

to public, his work is admired by more and more people. It has

to do with “numbers”. Again when no one knew about his talents,

he still was a great painter, but now because now thousands of

people say that “Jim is a great painter” his value becomes

magnified thousands of times.

Now if Jim launches his website on water color paintings where do

you think it must rank.. You see, it’s a numbers game. Of course

it’s also important that who recommends Jim as a great painter.

But Jim doesn’t care, he’s already taken all the care for years

polishing his painting skills. All he knows is producing great

quality paintings for his customers which are ready to pay him

truckloads of money.

There is a simple exercise to do. Put yourself in Google’s shoes,

imagine that you are Google.com [:-)] and then look at Jim’s new

website. If I am a regular Google user I will take all the care

to see that my search results for the keyword “water color paintings”

show up results that are best and most importantly recognized by

experts in the art industry.

This is true for every search engine out there, including Yahoo! and

MSN, because they want to retain their users.

Here “inbounds links” come into picture. The number and the quality

of inbound links is the only way for the search engines to

recognize the quality of the website it is supposed to rank. Of

course as I mentioned there are many factors that a search engine

will look for, but inbound links can have a major impact on your

rankings.

Again if Jim wants his website to rank well for many years to come,

he will have to keep on producing quality work just the way he is

doing now. Most people think that search engines are money

machines, just build a website, get is indexed and forget about it.

But it is getting a long term goal now a days to rank high at the

search engines. As I said it comes at the cost of TIME. If you

are ready to go for it, creating traffic through search engines

will be one of the most profitable skills you will ever learn

in this lifetime.

I hope this article was useful….

Copyright 2005 Shrinivas Vaidya

About The Author Shrinivas Vaidya Do you think that inbound links matter a lot to rank high at the search engines? Visit Shrinivas Vaidya’s blog on how to suggest link and skyrocket your rank at the search engines. smvpune@yahoo.com

]]> http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/website-promotion/Why-Do-Search-Engines-Look-For-Inbound-Links-For-Ranking-Websites/feed/ http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/search-engine-optimization/SEO-Expert-Guide-Page-Optimization-part-510/ http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/search-engine-optimization/SEO-Expert-Guide-Page-Optimization-part-510/#comments Sat, 09 Sep 2006 03:00:00 +0000 admin Search Engine Optimization In parts 1 - 4 you learnt how to develop your online business proposition, generate a list of key words and optimize at a site level. You were also introduced to our mythical Doug (who sells antique doors, door handles, knockers, door bells or pulls and fitting services) in Windsor in the UK.

Now it is time to focus on optimizing each individual page. My key message is keep each page brief! You shoul only be covering one key product, service or key piece of information per page. If you find yourself covering more, split the content and create more pages!

Keyword density is a key concept in page optmization and be defined as “The number of times a keyword is used on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page. Expressed as a percentage”. Another key term is keyword relevancy, which is defined as “the frequency with which key words that are related to each other appear on the page”.

(a) Metadata Optimization

Experts disagree on the importance of metadata. In the good old days, metadata was heavily used by search engines to rank sites. Now, as a result of abuse by webmasters, the main engines largely ignore metadata in ranking sites. However, metadata is still used by search engines to compile site descriptions in search engine results and (for that reason alone) is work investing a little time in!

The META-Description tag is one of the few META tags that can be considered important, as it is used by some search engines as the description to your site. You should keep it to less than 180 characters (so that it is not truncated by the engines) and make sure (i) it reads well, (ii) includes keyords in reasonable density, (iii) attracts browsers to click and (iv) describes the target page accurately (using words repeated in the page title, first heading and first paragraph of the page content). Doug (for his home page) opts for the following:

“Antique doors and door fitting from Doug Chalmers of Middlesex, UK. Old door knockers, door bells and other door hardware in brass and iron, shipped worldwide.”

The META-Keyword tag is today almost useless, so I would not spend too much time on it. Simply put your A-list of keywords for each page between the tags (remembering that four of the ten should be common to each page on your site and six specific to the page in question). Use spaces, not commas, to separate keywords. On his door knocker page, Doug opts for:

“antique door brass hardware knocker iron decorative engraved old knobs”

Just about every other tag is pretty useless to be honest. I would avoid altogether the generator, copyright and author tags (they just clutter up your code) and only use the Content-Type, Content-Style-Type and Content-Language tags where your site is not in english.

The only other tags I would consider are the ICRA rating tag (which can draw traffic from a number of new family-friendly search engines) and a geo-locational tag (e.g. ICBM tags). Both these tags could become more widely used in the future, so are worth at least considering.

(b) Title and Heading Optimization

The title tag is not a meta tag but is absolutely vital to search engine optimization. Title tags are (i) displayed in the top of a browser window, (ii) typically used by search engines to generate the link that appears to your page in the result listings, and (iii) used as bookmark titles for your page. For all these reasons, it is vital to get them right.

They should be descriptive and short (ideally under 100 characters) and should make good use of your keywords. Overuse of keywords can be considered abuse by search engines, but this will not happen if you write the title as a breadcrumb trail (which is the approach I recommend). As an example, consider Doug’s door knocker page:

“antique-door-knockers.com > Door Hardware > Brass Door Knockers - decorative, engraved old knockers and knobs”

The title summarises the page well, whilst also positioning it within the overall site structure. Hardly anyone uses this sort of approach - which is all the more reason why you should. It is by far the best way to differentiate yourself and climb up the rankings.

Search engines pay attention to heading tags, which is why I am often surprised to find webmasters not using them. Some avoid heading tags because they haven’t learnt how to control their appearance, using style sheets or their web authoring software - but this is a lazy and costly mistake! Doug uses the following headers to structure his door knockers page:

Heading 1
- Heading 2

Decorative knockers
- Lion Knockers or Knobs
- Pinapple Knockers or Knobs
Plain knockers
- Round knocker

Generally, I would avoid going down to sub-sub-headings (heading 3) as search engines will attach less importance to each level down in the nesting and dilute the value of the higher levels. If you find yourself needing heading 3, I suggest splitting the content onto separate pages.

(c) Page Structure Optimization

We talked earlier in the guide about the importance of the top-left of your page. On your home page, this area should be a site map of the whole of the rest of the site. On your money pages, this area should contain your first heading(s) and first paragraph.

Some search engines will only measure keyword density and relevancy over the first few lines, rather than the whole page. As such, pay particular attention to how you start each page. Here is an example from Doug’s door knockers page:

Decorative knockers (heading one)

Lion knockers or knobs (heading two)

At antique-door-knockers.com, we have the very best Victorian and Georgian door hardware. Our brass door knockers are very popular; particularly our decorative or engraved old knockers and knobs. In addition to our rare classics and collectables, we stock reproduction lion knockers, including the Regal Lion Head Door Knocker and the Georgian Lion Door Knocker, both available in polished brass or cast iron.

You will notice a few things here. Firstly, the liberal use of internal linking (to home page, category page and product page level). Secondly, the use of B-list key words (like Victorian and Edwardian) and, in particular, related key words (like old, classic and collectible). Thirdly, the bolding of the keyword combination lion knockers (not overdone and perfectly understandable in this paragraph).

The rest of the page should continue in a similar vein (although you can be a bit more relaxed and focus on the more tedious but important details more making a sale, like dimensions, prices, etc.) On money pages, the very bottom of the page should be where you put your formal navigation to the rest of the site.

(d) Page Text Optimization

You may have gathered some of the key points already. Use bold or italics sparingly to strike out key words (but only when justifiably in context). Use your two-and-three word keyword chains we identified in part 3 (keyword analysis). Above all, however, aim for no more than 450-600 words in total on each page (and ideally near the lower end of that range).

Opinions differ on ideal keyword density. Much depends on how competitive your key words are and how many you are targeting seriously. For your top four (and sitewide) key words, I would aim for a density of 20% for each word individually in sector one (where sector one is defined as title + headings + bold text + italicised text + alt text).

The general density for regular page text content (sector two) - should be 2-4% for your page specific (and most important) keywords, 0.8% - 1.5% for your two/three keyword chains and 0.2%-0.5% for related key words (but with plenty of them).

Like Doug, you should use the Spannerworks Keyword Density Analyser to measure the density of your copy and keep on refining it until you are happy with the results.

(e) Page Image Optimization

I mentioned alt text in sector one above. Generally, I would keep images to an absolute minimum in your site (and only to make the site visually appealing). Where you do use images, however, I would make sure that you have descriptive alt text for each image which (i) helps the disabled user to uderstand the image and (ii) is dense with key words. For example, Doug uses the following alt text for an image of a knocker:

Reproduction Regal Lion Head Door Knocker (in polished brass, also available in cast iron)

Note there is no need to say “image of” at the start of your description (in fact this will only tend to annoy disabled users who make use of screenreaders, as their software will tell them it is an image before reading to them the alt text).

Next we turn our attention to the promotion of your site…

Navigate the guide

Previous : SEO Expert Guide - Sitewide Optimization (part 4/10)

Next: SEO Expert Guide - Free Site Promotion (PR) (part 6/10)

About the author:

David Viney (david@viney.com) is the author of the Intranet Portal Guide; 31 pages of advice, tools and downloads covering the period before, during and after an Intranet Portal implementation.

Read the guide at http://www.viney.com/DFV/intranet_portal_guide or the Intranet Watch Blog at http://www.viney.com/intranet_watch.
]]> http://www.web-promotion-articles.com/search-engine-optimization/SEO-Expert-Guide-Page-Optimization-part-510/feed/