Sometimes Web developers switch the attributes in the tag, putting the CON- TENT= first and then the NAME= , like this:
<META CONTENT=” your description goes here ”
NAME=” description ”>
Make sure that your tags do not switch the tag attributes. I don’t know if the order of the attributes causes a problem for Google or the other big search engines, but it does confuse some smaller systems. There’s no reason to do it, so don’t.
Giving search engines something to read
You don’t necessarily have to pick through the HTML code for your Web page to evaluate how search-engine-friendly it is. You can find out a lot just by looking at the Web page in the browser. Determine whether you have any text on the page. Page content — text that the search engines can read — is essen- tial, but many Web sites don’t have any page content on the front page and often have little or any on interior pages.
Here are some potential problems:
Having a (usually pointless) Flash intro on your site
Embedding much of the text on your site into images, rather than relying on readable text
Banking on flashy visuals to hide the fact that your site is light on content
Using the wrong keywords; blog 5 explains how to pick keywords
If you have these types of problems, they can often be time consuming to fix. (Sorry, you may run over the one-hour timetable by several weeks.) The next several sections detail ways you might overcome the problems.
Eliminating Flash
Huh? What’s Flash? You’ve seen those silly animations when you arrive at a Web site, with a little Skip Intro link hidden away in the page. Words and pic- tures appear and disappear, scroll across the pages, and so on. You create these animations with a product called Macromedia Flash.
I suggest that you kill the Flash intro on your site. I have very rarely seen a Flash intro that actually served any purpose. In most cases, they are nothing but an irritation to site visitors. (The majority of Flash intros are created because the Web designer likes playing with Flash.)
Replacing images with real text
If you have an image-heavy Web site, in which all or most of the text is embedded onto images, you need to get rid of the images and replace them with real text. If the search engine can’t read the text, it can’t index it.
It may not be immediately clear whether text on the page is real text or images. You can quickly figure it out a couple of ways:
Try to select the text in the browser with your mouse. If it’s real text, you can select it character by character. If it’s not real text, you simply can’t select it — you’ll probably end up selecting an image.
Use your browser’s View ➪ Source command to look at the HTML for the
page and then see if you can find the actual words in the text.
Using more keywords
The light-content issue can be a real problem. Some sites are designed to be light on content, and sometimes this approach is perfectly valid in terms of design and usability. However, search engines have a bias for content, for text they can read. (I discuss this issue in more depth in blog 9.) In general, the more text — with the right keywords — the better.
Using the right keywords in the right places
Suppose that you do have text, and plenty of it. But does the text have the right keywords? The ones uncovered at Yahoo! Search Marketing earlier in this blog? It should.
If the reference to Yahoo! Search Marketing doesn’t ring a bell, check out the “Picking Good Keywords” section, earlier in this blog.
Where keywords are placed and what they look like are also important. Search engines use position and format as clues to importance. Here are a few simple techniques you can use — but don’t overdo it!
Use particularly important keywords — those that people are using to search for your products and services — near the top of the page. Place keywords into <H> (heading) tags.
Use bold and italic keywords; search engines take note of this.
Put keywords into bulleted lists; search engines also take note of this. Use keywords multiple times on a page, but don’t use a keyword or key- word phrase too often. If a word makes up more than, say, 8 to 10 per- cent of all the words on the page, it may be too much.
Make sure that the links between pages within your site contain keywords. Think about all the sites you’ve visited recently. How many use links with no keywords in them? They use buttons, graphic navigation bars, short little links that you have to guess at, click here links, and so on. Big mistakes.
I don’t object to using the words click here in links. Some writers have sug- gested that you should never use click here because it sounds silly and because people know they’re supposed to click. I disagree, and research shows that using the words can sometimes increase the number of clicks on a link. The bottom line is that you should rarely, if ever, use a link with only the words click here in the link text; you should include keywords in the link.
When you create links, include keywords in the links wherever possible. If on your rodent-racing site you’re pointing to the scores page, don’t create a link that says To find the most recent rodent racing scores, click here or, perhaps, To find the most recent racing scores, go to the scores page. Instead, get a few more keywords into the links, like this: To find the most recent racing scores, go to the rodent racing scores page.
Getting Your Site Indexed
So your pages are ready, but you still have the indexing problem. Your pages are, to put in bluntly, just not in the search engine! How do you fix that problem?
For Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project, you have to go to those sites and register directly, but before doing that, you should read blog 12. With Google, Yahoo! Web Search, MSN, and Ask.com, the process is a little more time consuming and complicated.
The best way to get into the search engines is to have them find the pages by following links pointing to the site. In some cases, you can ask or pay the search engines to come to your site and pick up your pages, but you face two main problems with this:
If you ask search engines to index your site, they probably won’t do it. And if they do come and index your site, it may take weeks or months. Asking them to come to your site is unreliable.
If you pay search engines to index your site, you have to pay for every URL you submit. The problem with paying, of course, is that you have to pay.
If you want to submit your site to the search engines for indexing, read blog 11, where I provide all the details.
So how do you get indexed? The good news is that you can often get indexed by some of the search engines very quickly. I’m not talking about a full-blown link campaign here, with all the advantages I describe in blogs 14 and 15. You simply want to get search engines — particularly Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com — to pick up the site and index it.
Find another Web site to link to your site, right away. Call several friends, col- leagues, and relatives who own or control a Web site, and ask them to link to your site. Of course, you want sites that are already indexed by the search engines. The searchbots have to follow the links to your site.
When you ask friends, colleagues, and relatives to link to you, specify what you want the links to say. No click here or company name links for you. You want to place keywords into the link text. Something like Visit this site for all your r odent racing needs - mice, rats, stoats, gerbils, and all other kinds of r odent racing . Keywords in links are a powerful way to tell a search engine what your site is about.
After the sites have links pointing to yours, it can take from a few days to a few weeks to get into the search engines. With Google, if you place the links right before Googlebot indexes one of the sites, you may be in the index in a few days. I once placed some pages on a client’s Web site on a Tuesday and found them in Google on Friday. But Google can also take several weeks to index a site. The best way to increase your chances of getting into the search engines quickly is to get as many links as you can on as many sites as possible.
Planning Your Search-Engine Strategy
Avoiding problems with your Web designer Evaluating the competition Understanding the search tail The six search engine variables Planning your attack
here’s lot to discover about generating traffic from the search engines, and sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. As you discover in this blog, there’s page optimization and link strategies and index submissions and directory submissions and electronic press releases and blogs and this and that . . . it goes on and on. Before you jump right in, I need to discuss the big picture, to give you an idea of how all this fits together and help you decide what you should do when . . . to help you plan your strategy. In this blog I show you how a search-engine campaign works overall.
Don’t Trust Your Web Designer
Let me start with a warning: Don’t rely on your Web designer to manage your SEO project. In fact, I know that many of you are reading this blog because you did just that, and have realized the error of your ways.
Last week I consulted with the owner of a small e-commerce store. He’d just paid a Web-design firm $5,000 to build his site, and before beginning he had asked them to make sure the site was “search-engine friendly.” Unfortunately, that means different things to different people, and to the design firm it didn’t mean much. The site they built definitely was not optimized for the search engines. The owner asked the firm what it was planning to do about the search engines. They told him it would cost him $5,000.
This unusual case is more egregious than most, but the first part — that your Web-design firm says it will handle the search engines, then doesn’t — is very common. When I hire a Web designer to build a site for me, I explain exactly what I want. And you should do the same. (Thus, this blog can help you even if you never write a line of HTML code.)
The problem is twofold:
Web designers pretty much have to say they understand the search engines, because all of their competitors are saying it.
Many Web designers think they do understand, but typically it’s at a “add some meta tags and submit to the search engines” level. It won’t work.
Sorry, Web designers. I don’t want to be rude, but this is a simple fact, attested to by many, many site owners out there. I’ve seen it over and over again. Not trusting your Web designer or team is probably the first step in your search-engine strategy!
Understanding the Limitations
You’ve probably received spam e-mails guaranteeing top-ten positions for your Web site in the search engines. You’ve probably also seen claims that you’ll be ranked in hundreds or thousands of search engines. Most of this is nonsense — background noise that creates an entirely false picture. As one of my clients put it, “There’s a lot of snake oil out there!” Here are the facts.
Typically, getting a high position isn’t that easy. You try a couple of tech- niques, but they don’t seem to work. So you try something else, and maybe you achieve a little success. Then you try another thing. Search engine opti- mization can often be very labor intensive, and you may not see results for weeks, and more likely, months.
Big doesn’t always equal better
By the way, don’t imagine that if you’re working with a large Web-design team with extensive programming experience they understand the search engines either. In fact, it’s sometimes the more sophisticated design teams that get into the most trouble, building complex sites that simply won’t work well with the search engines.
I consult with companies big and small, so I’ve advised large design teams made up of very good programmers. I can assure you that large, sophisticated teams often know as little as the independent Web designer who’s been in busi- ness a few months.
Top two in four
Sometimes it’s easy to get a very high position in the search systems. But usually it isn’t. A client wanted to be positioned in Google for six impor- tant key phrases. I built some pages, ensured that Google knew where those pages were (find
out how to do this in blog 12), and waited. In just four days, the client didn’t just have a top- ten position or even just a number-one position, but the top two positions for five of the six key phrases. But this situation is very unusual.
The degree of work required depends on the competitiveness of the keywords you are going after. Some keywords are incredibly competitive: mortgage, insur- ance, attorney, real estate , and so on, are highly competitive, with millions of people wanting some of the action. Other phrases are very easy — phrases such as rodent racing , for instance. If you’re in the rodent-racing business, you’re in luck, because you can probably rank right at the top very easily!
Although the way that search engines function is based on science, search engine optimization is more art than science. Why? Because the search engines don’t want outside parties to know exactly how they rank sites. You have to just experiment. Ranking a site can be very difficult, and tremen- dously laborious. After all, why should it be easy? There is huge competition, so it can’t always be easy. If it were easy for your site, then it would be easy for your competitors’ sites, wouldn’t it? And, after all, there can only ever be one number one.
Eyeing the Competition
Some search terms are incredibly competitive. That is, many, many sites are competing for the top positions. Other search terms are far less competitive. How can you tell just how competitive your search terms are? Let me show you a few ways to figure it out:
Search for your terms. This is not a terribly good method, but so com- monly recommended I want to explain it. Go to Google and search for a few of your terms. (I discuss keywords in more detail in blog 5.) For instance, search for personal injury lawyer . You see a blue bar containing something like this:
Results 1 - 10 of about 16,300,000 for personal injury lawyer
This tells you that over 16M pages match the search terms in the Google index. Actually, most of these pages don’t match well. Most of the pages don’t actually have the term personal injury lawyer. Rather, as explained earlier, they have the words personal, injury, and lawyer scattered around the page.
Search for your terms using quotation marks. Type search terms in quotation marks, like this: “personal injury lawyer.” This time Google searches for the exact phrase, and comes back with a different number. When I searched, it came back with 3,200,000, because Google ignores all the pages with the words scattered around the page, and returns only pages with the exact phrase.
Here’s the problem with these two techniques: While they show you how commonly used the words are, they don’t show you how well the pages are optimized. Remember, you’re not competing against every page with these terms; you’re really competing with pages that were “optimized” for the search engines. There may be millions of pages with the term, but if none of them have been optimized, you can take your new-found SEO knowledge, create your own optimized pages, and have a good chance of ranking well.
So here’s another quick technique I like to use — a simple way to get a feel for competitiveness in a few seconds. Search for a term, then scan down the page looking for the number of
PPC ads on the page. As you look down the page, you see three PPC ads at the top of the page, then more ads all the way down the right side of the page. Lots of PPC ads indicate lots of interest in the phrase. If people are spending money on PPC ads, many are also proba- bly spending money on SEO.
Bold words on the page. You’ll also notice that Google bolds the words that you searched for; all the major search sites do this. Lots of bold words often mean well-optimized pages.
Bold words in the links (page titles). Bold words in each page result’s link indicate that someone has been optimizing the pages; the links are the page titles. The more bold text you see as you scan down, the more competitive the search terms are likely to be.
Complete phrases on the page. The more frequently you see the full phrase you searched for, the more competitive the terms are likely to be; if the search engine returns mostly pages with the words scattered around, it’s not very competitive.
Here’s another example. Search Google for rodent racing. What do you see?. First, notice almost no PPC ads (and the ad that does appear is not well matched to the search term). Next, notice very little bold text on the page, and none in the page titles (the links at the top of each search result). The matches in this case are all full phrases; but still, the other three factors suggest that this is not a very competitive term. You can see the difference between these two pages. The first search term, personal injury lawyer, is far more competitive than the second, rodent racing .
Get your rodent running
Here’s an example of how uncompetitive the phrase rodent racing actually is. These results are skewed somewhat, because I used the term rodent racing in the first edition of this blog. Results 1, 2, 5, and 8 point to sample blogs
Amazon.com blog page. (Ever wondered by Amazon has recently started dropping large numbers of keywords onto their product pages?) My blog has four entries out of the first ten, without even trying!
from the blog posted online, and to the
How important is competitiveness? When targeting search terms that are not very competitive, you may be able to create a few optimized pages and rank well. In very competitive areas, though, creating a few nicely optimized pages isn’t enough. You must have links pointing to the site (perhaps to many of them), and you may also need large numbers of pages. In some really compet- itive areas, it may take hundreds, if not thousands, of links.
By the way, I often have clients ask me why a competitor ranks so well. “Their pages aren’t better optimized than mine,” I often hear. “We have more pages, and more pages with the right keywords...why is his site ranked so well?”
Without understanding all the variables — which we discuss later in this blog, under “Controlling the Search-Engine Variables” — you can’t tell for sure why a site ranks well. Is it because the site has been around much longer than yours? Is it because it has more content? Because the content is better “optimized”? Because the site has more incoming links? In fact the last of these factors is often essential; when I do a link analysis (see blog 15) I often discover that a poorly optimized site has a huge number of incoming links, with just the right keywords.
Going Beyond Getting to #1
Everyone wants to rank #1 for the top keywords. Lawyers want to rank #1 for attorney or lawyer. Real estate agents want to rank #1 for real estate. Shoe stores want to rank #1 for shoes, and so on.
But what does being #1 achieve? You’re trying to get people to your Web site, not to get any particular position, right? Getting ranked in the search engines is merely a way to generate that traffic to your site. People often assume that to generate traffic, they have to get #1 positions for top keywords. That’s not the case. You can generate plenty of traffic to your site without ever getting to #1 for the most popular phrases. And in many cases, the traffic arriving at your site will be better — the visitors will be more appropriate for your site. There are two things to understand: highly targeted keyword phrases , and the search tail .
Highly targeted keyword phrases
If your keywords are very competitive, look for keywords that aren’t so sought after:
Go local. One common strategy is, of course, to focus on local key- words. If you’re a real estate agent, don’t target real estate . Instead, target real estate in your area: denver realtor, chicago real estate, dallas homes for sale, and so on.
Focus on more specialized search terms. A realtor might target traffic on keywords related to commercial real estate, or condos, for instance. Incorporate spelling mistakes. Some realtors target the very common misspelling realtor.
These specialized search terms are hidden away in the search “tail,” so now let’s look at that concept.
Understanding the search tail
The search tail is an important concept to understand. While the first few top keywords may get far more searches than any other search, when you look at the total number of searches, the top terms actually account for only a small percentage of the searches.
Wordtracker, is a great little tool that shows what search terms people are typing into the search engines. I searched for video games and Wordtracker returned 300 results containing that term. I don’t have room for 300, so I’ve shown the first few.
video games
music video games
adult video games
used video games
video games xbox
video games playstation 2
violent video games
online video games
sex video games
free video games
history of video games
xxx video games
video games game cube
trade video games
violence in video games
cheap video games
nude video games
video poker games
Page optimization
Content is just a start. Content has to be placed onto the pages in the correct way; the pages must be optimized to get the most out of the keywords. As you read in blogs 2 and 6, you must place the words onto the pages in the correct places and formats.
If a search engine finds the relevant keywords on your page, that’s good. If it finds the keywords in the right places on the page, that’s a really powerful thing that differentiates your page from your competitors’.
Submissions
In some ways submissions — submitting information to the search engines telling them where your pages can be found and asking them, in effect, to come to your site and index it — is not as important as many people imagine. Many businesses have, for a long time, promoted the idea that you have to submit your pages to the search engines, when in fact up until mid-2005 it really didn’t matter much. You could submit, but the search engines would quite likely ignore the submission; links are what really counted.
However, in 2005 Google, introduced a new concept, the sitemap , and was quickly followed by Yahoo! . This file is placed into your Web site’s root direc- tory containing a list of links to all your pages, so the search engines could more easily find them.
These days I recommend you assume that submitting to the search engines will not get you indexed — that the way to get indexed is by making sure the search engines find links to your site — but that you also Provide Google and Yahoo! sitemaps, so those search engines can use them if they decide to (they may not). You read more about this in blog 11.
Links
Links pointing to your Web site are incredibly important in a competitive key- word market. If you’re targeting rodent racing, you probably don’t need to worry too much about links (though every site needs at least some incoming links — links pointing to your site from other sites). But if you have lots of competition vying for your keywords, you won’t win without links.
Links are so important, in fact, that a page can rank in the first position in any of the three major search engines, even if the page does not have the keywords that have been searched for . . . as long as links pointing to the page have the keywords. I explain this in blog 14. The more competitive your area, the more important links become.
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