Search Engine Optimization

  How to make your website get a better placement in the search engines - without making things difficult or confusing for your visitors.

  "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) is the commonly used phrase that refers to what a webmaster does to make the best possible impression to the search engine 'robots' that periodically 'spider' the website. It takes time and effort to generate results, but it's worth it.

  By doing it all carefully, a webmaster can get the best possible results without resorting to 'trickery', and make the website better for the visitors at the same time.

  There's one thing to keep in mind while you're optimizing your website: The search engines primary responsibility is to their users - and when they are building an index of your site they will be looking for only one thing - Good Content, related to the subject that people are searching for.

  "Good Content" to them simply means useful, timely information, in a usable format, and regularly updated. It does not mean cool graphics, fun interactive features, fancy fonts, interesting javascript doo-dads, etc. All that stuff just gets in the way, so use it sparingly.

  This section will give you some specific tips and resources for maximum SEO... it will not contain any questionable 'tricks' that are more likely to cause problems in the future.

  NOTE: If you want to pay somebody to do this for you, fine, but use caution! Many, perhaps even most, of those who offer these SEO services are rip-off artists. They promise top listings on Google, but can only do this for keywords hardly anybody ever searches for... PLUS, they may use techniques which might be successful now - but your site may be totally banned by the search engines later.

  How do you find a good SEO company? Start your search at the Search Engine Marketing professional Organization (SEMPO). www.sempo.org

  What you can do to improve your own Search Engine Rankings. You don't have to be a web guru to get top listings in the search engines. It does take time, but if you follow the tips below you will start to see a gradual improvement very soon.
  As your page rankings improve, your traffic becomes more targeted and your bottom line improves.

  First: What NOT to do: The following 'tricks' are guaranteed to get you penalized, and maybe even banned entirely, so don't do them.
  * 'Hiding' keywords on your page by making them the same color as the background.
  * 'Cloaking' - serving the search engines an optimized page and serving a different page to real visitors.
  * Using 'Doorway Pages' - one of those tricks that worked for a while, but can get you banned now.
  * Duplicate pages with different URLs & title/description tags.
  * Keyword 'Spamming' - The term commonly used for excessive repetitions of your keywords, keyword variations and misspellings.
  * Using keywords that do not relate to the content of the page.
  * 'Link spamming' - using link 'farms', FFA pages and the like.

Now, What to do:

  Optimizing your website for the search engines is a page-by-page process. Visitors sent from search engines can enter your website on any page, based on the search terms that they used in their search. You want to be listed in the search results for many different keyword searches, so write each page to emphasize different keywords.
 It may help if you think of each page as if it was a total and complete website all by itself and tackle the optimization project one page at a time.

  META tag "keywords" are not nearly as important as they were two years ago However, they still work for some search engines (like Yahoo!) so they're still important.
  Google and many others base much of their results on your content, page description and titles.... so you want to place keywords in the title, in the META description, and sprinkle them in the first 350 - 500 words of your page content.
  Put them in your headers, (<h1>, <h2>, etc) and use the <strong> and/or <em> tags to let the spiders know that those words are more 'important' then other words on the page.
  NOTE - when you are writing the page content, write it for your visitors, not for the search engines, and don't repeat the keyword(s) more than three or four times in the text. Use your keywords in a natural way, with normal sentences, and in logical sequences.

  Link your pages together using the keywords from the destination page in the anchor text on the sending page. Use text links, included in a natural manner, within paragraphs whenever possible. This is especially helpful when the pages are related.

  Use different keywords and titles for ALL of the major pages in your website. Some 'experts' suggest that you submit each individual page URL to get all of the different keywords and titles added to the search engines....
I feel that the search 'bots will find and index all of your pages anyway, (that is their job) and submitting every page of your website may irritate the search engine people. If you have a sitemap with text links to all of your major pages the search 'bot will do its job and index them.

  Use the image "ALT" tags. Every image on your webpage will have the ALT="description" element within the tag... use the description as an opportunity to place keywords where the search engines (and anyone who has images 'turned off' in their browser) can read them.
  BUT - don't just list a bunch of keywords as if it was a META tag - instead, treat it as if you were writing a headline to an advertisement - a short, natural sentence containing a few keywords appropriate for that page and that image.
  Mix up your keywords in the ALT tags to be sure they are not in the same sequence as the keywords used elsewhere (like content text or META tags)
  If you are using images for navigation be clear and concise in your ALT="description", for the same reasons as outlined above.

  Improve your "link popularity". This is just another way to say "link exchange" and it's a long-term task, something that you may want to devote a portion of each working day to.
  In essence, it is just getting a lot of other related websites to add a link on their website that points to your website. Generally, they are easy to get, but time-consuming. Easy, because most other webmasters are fully aware of the benefits. Time consuming because, while this task can be automated, it really shouldn't be.
  See the Successful Link Exchanges section for more help with that.

  Non-Reciprocal Linking. These are links that come to your website from others, without you linking to them in return. These are more difficult to get, but lately these type of links are getting more attention (and points) from search engines, so it's well worth pursuing.
  To get one-way links:
  * The best way is just to have a website that is full of useful or interesting content, or a service, that other webmasters will want to link to.
  * You can write articles and offer them as free content. Make them available in HTML (for easy copy/paste) and always include your contact and website links in the resource box at the end.
  * Have a free contest, offer free samples, or just about anything free - then tell the owners of freebie sites about it. My friend Abby at abbys-good-stuff.com is always on the lookout for new freebies, and there are hundreds of other freebie websites.
  * Offer some sort of service in exchange for a link... maybe offer a newsletter link in exchange for a website link.
  * Buy a text ad on other websites. This does not have to be expensive. Just find a few websites with good traffic and decent page rank and see if they offer text ad placement.
  * Place ads in the free classified ad websites. (Do NOT place ads on FFA pages or on Link Farms.)
  * Buy ads in online e-zines. Like website text ads, these don't have to be expensive.

  Submitting your website to search engines and directories. Here's something that most 'experts' won't tell you: You do not have to submit your site to search engines. Seriously. You should submit your website to human-edited directories, but search engines will find you from the links on other websites. That's their job.

  All you need to get listed in the google database is one link from a website that is already listed. The google 'bot follows that link, finds your website and gets all excited... the 'bot thinks: "YAY! Here's a whole new website that I can tell Daddy about!" So it indexes your website and runs home to tell google-daddy all about it... next thing you know, you're listed in the google search results.

  That's all it takes.

  That does not guarantee a top ten, or even a top thousand listing.... but getting into the database is not the big scary secret thing that some people try to make it out to be.

  Getting top ten rankings for your chosen keywords is what the whole search engine optimization process is designed to produce. Following the guidelines listed above and avoiding the questionable tactics that can get a website penalized will improve your rankings automatically.

    One last comment: Optimizing your website for top rankings in the search engines is one thing that never really ends. If you want to get into the top ten and stay there you will have to learn a lot more about how search engines work and you will need to watch what your competition is doing very closely.

  The average webmaster will do quite well just following the guidelines as I have briefly laid out on this page. If you are running a major corporate website I suggest that you employ a company, or hire a team, whose only purpose will be to optimize your pages and keep on top of all the industry changes.