Step 3 - Site Preparation

Step 3 - Site Preparation

Introduction

Before starting your search engine optimization project there are several key factors you must consider prior to even selecting the first keywords. You need to confirm your website’s readiness in terms of overall structure and navigation. Your search engine optimization efforts have to begin with an easily navigable and logically laid out website structure.

If your home page has any graphics or flash animations you may have to reorganize your web pages to make them search engine friendly. This is done by (1) creating static HTML web pages in place of those hard to index pages or (2) by using other optimization methods. As a rule of thumb, you should not have more than 10% of text in images or flash based objects, and it’s absolutely important that your internal site navigation is based on static text links. We will discuss this further in Chapter 4, Page Optimization and why it is so important.

Search engine optimization works best with statically linked websites. Although the Search Engine spiders have improved a great deal since the days of their initial appearance, some spiders still cannot reliably index dynamically linked pages such ASP, PHP and Java script with “?” or session IDs embedded in them.

Creating a better site for the search engines and your visitors

The purpose of any site preparation is to get your website ready for the search engines and your visitors. Although it may seem these two goals entail different tasks, what’s good for the search engines is also good for your visitors. Usability case studies prove paying careful attention to your users’ experience on your site pays big dividends down the road.

Let’s examine the reasons why we want to create a structurally sound website with great user usability.

• Pay attention to your users’ experience, get your friends or colleagues to test drive the site and ask for their feedback. A great user experience will ensure the hard work you put into your site to attain a top ranking will pay off in higher page views and better conversion. Your efforts won’t go to waste by turning visitors away with a bad website design.

• The major search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN are “crawler based” This means they regularly visit your site and “import” your newly created pages and any updates into their index. It’s your job to ensure that nothing restricts the search engines from discovering every page on your site that you want your visitors to find on the engines. Since the search engines follow links from your home page to every other page on your site, you need to create an optimal linking structure.

What should you watch for?

Each of these key elements below can have a substantial effect on your overall search optimization goals and search engine ranking so please pay careful attention.

• Internal link navigation based on static text links works best as internal linking with keywords embedded in anchor text create a powerful combination of page relevancy.

• Frames should be avoided wherever possible otherwise it will stop search engines in tracks and your web pages will be left out of their search engine index. As of today many engines are able to follow links within framesets, but it’s best not to take any chances.

• Flash should be limited to important concept illustrations or special affects, but don’t build a flash only website if you want to achieve high search engine ranking. The biggest problem with a Flash based websites is the formatting used in regular content can’t be replicated. For example we can’t bold, italicize keywords or add bullets and headings to add emphasis to help the search engines understand our pages better.

• Images should be only used for illustrations and not for navigation or embedded text. Search engines can’t read text embedded in image objects. Unfortunately a lot of menu systems use a combination of JavaScript and rollover images. If you suspect your site uses this type of menu system, change it right away to either completely static link system or DHTML without the use of JavaScript.

• Dynamic content and e-commerce website should ensure their product and category page URLs are not simply a number or some cryptic code, but a well formed URL re-written code. There is a built in URL re-writing engine in Linux based servers and there are many third party tools available for URL re-writing on IIS servers. The URLs can be reformatted so they contain the target keywords pertaining to the page.

• Dynamic navigation using JavaScript is a big no-no, but DHTML based menu systems are ok. Check carefully the documentation of the menu system you consider buying for search engine friendliness. Unless you are using JavaScript to open pop-up type of windows for the user to open and close the use of JavaScript for navigation is strongly discouraged.

• Page size and loading speed is not as much of a concern as it used to be in the early days of the Internet, but overloading your pages with heavy graphics or flash is still not a good idea. Think of your users and their time. If you notice your site’s bounce rate is very high it may be due to visitors getting impatient and leave before the pages load.

• HTML code errors are most often not seen by your visitors and the search engines are very forgiving when it comes to sloppy source code, but you should aim for nearly perfectly validated HTML pages. You can use many freely available online and desktop tools to help you validate your HTML pages. Here is the most popular HTML code validator Validator.w3.org.

• The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is strongly recommended to substantially reduce the size of your HTML pages. Wherever possible use CSS classes to make your HTML source code more readable and to reduce the ratio between text and HTML codes.

• Broken links to pages and images are not only embarrassing, but also can send a signal to the search  engines about the quality of your website. Use a freely available link checker called Xenu to check your links regularly.

• Image maps are not search engine friendly. Search engines generally can’t follow links associated with parts of an image. An image map designates different sections of an image as clickable links and allows one image to serve as a hyperlink to target multiple URLs. Keep in mind the search engines are blind when it comes to image maps.

• Add a site map to your site once your main pages are uploaded. This should be one of the last steps in the page optimization process, but we decided to mention it here as it uniquely relates to usability and search engine friendly web design. A site map is a catalog of important links on a designated page. The link to each page ideally will have descriptive text. The number of links on a site map should not exceed 50 on a single page. If your site has more than 50 pages, you need to create additional site map pages within a new category.

• Add a site search tool to your website. Installing a site search tool on your website is great way to increase your site’s usability and at the same time you can get into the minds of your visitors by seeing what they are searching for. The search keywords used in a site search could also be a warning sign that certain information on your site is not easily accessible. By regularly reviewing your website’s search log, you can uncover potential usability problems. Our favorite website search tool is the  Zoom Site Indexer. This tools is MS Windows based and can easily index hundreds of web pages in minutes.

• Reliable hosting is a key essential for well indexed website. If your site is down for even one day, you can expect the search engine to remove some of your page and in some cases the complete website. We can recommend two hosing companies we have used for years now. For Windows hosting please check out Alentus.com and for Linux based hosting we recommend Dreamhost.com.

Conclusion

Site preparation and search engine friendly website design can not become an after thought in your website promotion campaign. Seemingly minor obstacles for search engine spiders to access your website’s web pages can turn into major headaches later if they are not addressed properly. Search engines can only rank web pages that make it into their index. It’s your job, as a webmaster to ensure every web page that is important to your site gets crawled by the search engines. This may mean website re-design for established websites with low search engine traffic. Look for the obvious signs of search engine spider obstacles such as frames, JavaScript navigation, or long URLs with session IDs. Once you have cleared the way for the search engine crawlers to reach every page on your site, focus your efforts on improving your site’s usability.

Step 2 - Competition Research

Introduction

The top competitors on the search results leave a trail of evidence behind them that tells the well trained SEO eyes what got them to the top of the results. The hard part for novice SEOs is to truly understand what goes on behind the scenes that drives the search engines rankings. The confusion is understandable. We would all like to know how the search engines work out their ranking scores to place one website ahead of the other, but we can guarantee you, they will never reveal top secret information to us. Instead, we have to rely on experience, good analytical skills and tools to figure what really makes a site rise to the top.

This practical hands on guide will show you step-by-step how to reverse engineer your top competitors’ websites. Also, well lay the foundation of an optimization and link building road map for you to follow that will guarantee your websites success.

How can we define our competition?

There are some handy search commands provided by Google which allow you to assess your competition fairly accurately.

The format of these commands is very simple:
command:keyword phrase

• Finding the Anchor link text used by competitors. In the Keyword Research lesson we discussed how we can use a simple query with our keyword phrase in quotation marks to asses the number of other pages competing for that exact keyword term(s). Now we will take this concept a step further and use Google’s built in search commands, the “allinanchor”, and “allintitle” commands.
  
  The Google “allinanchor” command will find all the websites using the specified keyword phrase in internal or external link text (anchor text). The anchor text is the visible part of a link.
  
  For example a link to our own site www.trendmx.com would look like this:
  
  SEO Software
  
  The HTML code would be formatted this way.

   
  <a href=”http://www.trendmx.com”>SEO Software</a>

The keyword “SEO Software” is the anchor text in this case linking to our site highlighted in blue.

You can include the keyword phrase in the “allinanchor” command with or without quotation marks. The internal and external link text is an important ranking factor on all the major search engines and the “allinanchor” command helps us find all those sites that have a solid internal and external linking strategy. Ranking high with the “allinanchor” command usually means a high natural search engine ranking as well.

• Finding the Title tag used by competitors: The “allintitle” command works similarly to the “allinanchor” command, but instead it searches the title tag of web pages for the keyword phrase entered. The title tag is used to describe a web page’s content in 60-90 characters and it’s one of the most important on-page optimization element for you to master. Most of the top ranking competitors have well optimized title tags and the “allintitle” command helps you find those top ranking competitors who have the most relevant title tags.

Let’s do a search for “allinanchor:second mortgage” with the “allinanchor” special Google query operator. Google reports over 90 thousand web pages using the keyword term “second mortgage” in their internal and external link text. Although the number of results returned may not mean much to you just yet, but the “allinanchor” and “allintitle” Google commands are the most important to measure your competitors’ strength.

The Google search results returned for the “allinanchor” keyword phrase “second mortgage”, over 90 thousand results reported.

How much competition is too much?

You may be surprised by this answer, but it depends on where your website currently ranks for related keyword phrases. Let us illustrate this point with a real life example. In the world of competitive cycling it’s unimaginable for someone untrained to even finish the Tour De France 2,000 mile track in 3 weeks, let alone win it.

The same rule applies to achieving high search engine ranking. A website that has been online for only a week has little chance of competing with websites who are in top positions for very competitive keyword terms year after year.

Let’s use our previous example again, targeting the phrase “second mortgage. A brand new website would be better off targeting more specific keywords phrases based on the previously discussed Overture results. Some of these keywords would be “second mortgage loan, “second mortgage home loan, “second mortgage rate” or “second mortgage lender. We can also create a location for keyword selection based on a specific geographical area, such as “second mortgage Dallas, “second mortgage Florida” or “second mortgage Toronto” if you sell products or services locally.

Assessing the competition on Google

You can use this simple table below to find out how competitive your keywords are. Based on our experience with keyword optimization for different levels of competitiveness, we have created a list of very competitive, moderately competitive, and less competitive keyword terms. The number of search results returned by Google indicates how tough the competition is for different keyword phrases.

Please use this information only as a guide. In the world of search engine optimization there are always exceptions to the rules. Keep in mind that when we collected this data it was a point of time in Google’s index, and the number of results returned can change from month to month.

Competition

Search Method

Number of Search Results

Very Competitive

Exact Search:
“dvd burner”
“second mortgage”
“life insurance quote”

Over 200,000 Results

Google Allinanchor:
allinanchor:”dvd burner”
allinanchor:”second mortgage”
allinanchor:”life insurance quote”

Over 20,000 Results

Google Allintitle:
allintitle:”dvd burner”
allintitle:”second mortgage”
allintitle:”life insurance quote”

Over 20,000 Results

Moderately Competitive

Exact Search:
“free conference call”
“debt management uk”
“multiple domain web hosting”

Between 100,000 to 200,000

Google Allinanchor:
allinanchor:”free conference call”
allinanchor:”debt management uk”
allinanchor:”multiple domain web hosting”

Between 1,000 to 20,000

Google Allintitle:
allintitle:”free conference
allintitle:”debt management uk” allintitle:”multiple domain web hosting”

Between 1,000 to 20,000

Less Competitive

Exact Search:
“buy paintballs”
“swimming pool chemicals”
“glow in the dark paint”

Between 1,000 to 100,000

Google Allinanchor:
allinanchor:”buy paintballs”
allinanchor:“swimming pool chemicals”
allinanchor:”glow in the dark paint”

Between 1 to 1,000

Google Allintitle:
allintitle:”buy paintballs”
allintitle:”swimming pool chemicals”
allintitle:”glow in the dark paint”

Between 1 to 1,000

Keyword effectiveness index (KEI)

For years now, Wordtracker has been displaying the KEI next to the keyword phrases as a measure of a keyword’s competitiveness. According to Wordtracker, “the KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.”

The Wordtracker KEI algorithm is simple and works like this:

“Let P denote the popularity of the keyword and C the competitiveness.
The formula that we have chosen is KEI = (P^2/C), i.e. KEI is the square of the popularity of the keyword and divided by its competitiveness.”
Source Wordtracker KEI help

We can simplify this by saying, dividing the demand (popularity) by the number of exact search results (competitiveness) we arrive at the keyword’s effectiveness. A KEI value of 40 or higher considered very good and indicates a less competitive keyword phrase.

A word of caution about KEI

Although the KEI may be a considered a good guide for a keyword’s competitiveness by many SEO professionals, we tend not to use this statistic as it comes with many inherent flaws. For one, it does not take into consideration, link popularity, PageRank, and a number of other “off-page” factors which contribute to high search engine ranking. Relying strictly on the KEI alone could greatly under or overestimate the competitiveness of a keyword. A much better and more accurate competition assessment tool is the Google “allinanchor, and “allintitle” commands.

Other methods to find your online competitors

Our competition research would not be complete without using some very powerful competition spying tools.
Here is the list of competitor spying tools we have been using regularly:

• Find related sites using Google’s related command. The search engines know better than anyone what the most closely related websites are in a specific keyword genre. Type the “related” command into Google like this: related:www.yoursite.com. This command will return a list of pages that Google thinks are related to your site. Now try the command with a competitor’s site, as you can see there are endless possibilities to find as many related sites as possible.

• Use Google’s “define” search command. If you want Google to tell you which sites are considered an “authority” on specific keyword phrases, simply enter this command: define:keyword. Google will show you all the websites that are considered valuable resources on those subject matters. Try to enter some of your own keywords to see which sites come up in the search results. You may notice by clicking through some of the results that most of the pages are glossary of term type of pages. This is something to keep in mind for later when building content for your website. Adding a glossary page containing your industry specific keyword terms and their definitions is a great idea.

• Spyfu is a free research tool for discovering the keywords and ads your competitors are using on Google. You can enter a keyword phrase or a competitor’s domain to gain access to their target keywords, current organic ranking, related keyword phrases, and other Adwords advertisers bidding on the same keywords. You have to keep in mind the Spyfu tool is very experimental; nonetheless, a great way to get some estimate of the total number of clicks your competitors are receiving and their average ad position.

• Google Alerts will send you email alerts based on your keywords. Every time there is some new development related to your specified keyword phrases on Google search, blog, news, or groups, it will send you an email alert. The keywords you specify can include your own website URL or your competitors web address. This is a great way to find out what’s being said about you and your competitors.

On-page and off-page competition analysis

In our introduction, we briefly discussed how the search ranking factors are broken into “on” and “off” page factors. Now we’ll apply this information in our competition research when we put their websites under our microscope. In essence we can create a check list of what they are doing right or wrong as we dissect each on-page ranking factor.

In Step 6 we’ll complete our off-page analysis of our competitors and uncover some of the most important link popularity factors as well.

On page ranking factor checklist

On-Page Factors (20%-30% Ranking Score)

How to find out?

1.

Are there optimized, unique Title tags on every page with no more than 90 characters in the Title?

Use the Keyword Analyzer tool and retrieve the internal links.
Check individual pages for Title tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.

2.

Does the Body text contain at least 250 words per page?

Check individual pages for Body tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.

3.

Are headings used H1/H2/H3 effectively?

Check individual pages for Heading tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.

4.

Are the internal links text based or Flash or Image based and do they contain the target keywords?

Note:Image based links are the worst type of internal links you can use since the search engines can’t read the text inside them.

Check individual pages for Image tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer and also check the source code for Image and Flash based navigation.

5.

Are the keywords inserted in the file names, folder or the domain name?

Use the Keyword Analyzer tool to retrieve the internal links.
Check individual pages for Filename/URL optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.

6.

Are related keywords found in the Body text to increase the lexical correlation between keywords?

Check individual pages for Body tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer and pay careful attention to the 1, 2 and 3 word phrase list.

7.

Are the keyword repetition, proximity, and prominence appropriate in the Title and Body text?

Check individual pages for Body and Title tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer. The closer to the beginning the keywords appear the better optimized the page is.

8.

Are there ALT tag attributes in images and links?

Check individual pages for the ALT image tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.

9.

Is the page size and code to text ratio appropriate?

Use the Keyword Analyzer tool to retrieve the internal links and compare the HTML page size to the number of words found in the body. Large page size and low word count indicates too many HTML tags without the use of CSS which can help to reduce HTML code clutter and size.

10.

Are the website pages search engine friendly with no frames in the body or session IDs in the URLs?

Check individual pages for Frames and the URL by running the Keyword Analyzer.

11.

Did the search engines index all the pages?

Run the Links Plus+ tool, and use the Check Indexed pages function to compare the number of retrieved pages.

12.

Do the website main pages show recent updates?

Use the Keyword Analyzer tool to retrieve the internal links that show the last modified date. The more recent the modified dates are the fresher the website appears to the engines.

13.

How many outgoing links can be found, and how closely related are they to the site?

Navigate to the site’s resource or link page in your browser and check the outgoing links. Too many links on a single page may be considered a link farm by the engines.

14.

Is there a site map on the site?

Check the site manually for the presence of a site map. Cataloging a website’s most important pages is a great way to help the search engines to crawl your website.

15.

What is the top level domain of the site (.edu/.org/.com/.ca/.co.uk.etc)?

Check the URL, .edu domains have an advantage over .com and other TLDs. Country level domains can compete better for geographically related keyword terms.

“On-page” analysis example

Now we are ready to put into practice our “on-page factors checklist” For a better illustration of the on “page” analysis steps, we are going to use an on-line car parts website http://www.thepartsbin.com as an example.

1. Open the Keyword Analyzer

Enter the website address into the URL text box as shown on the screen shot below.

The Keyword Analyzer Configuration Screen in SEO Studio

Click on the Get Links button to retrieve the internal links from the main page and pay careful attention to the website Title and URLs in the links display windows. You can see this site does a fantastic job at inserting keyword into both the page URLs and the Title tags, which are both very important elements from an on-page optimization perspective. Also note, every page has a unique Title tag. Don’t make the mistake of putting the same Title tag on every page.

The Keyword Analyzer displaying the links and their page titles from the Thepartsbin.com site.

2. Analyzing the competition’s individual pages

After running the Keyword Analyzer using http://www.thepartsbin.com you will see the following result for the keyword “import car parts. The keyword highlighting tool really helps to put the spot light on keyword placement and repetition within each HTML element. Although the Title tag on thepartsbin.com site is too long, Google cuts the Title tag at approximately 60 characters and Yahoo! at 90, they have managed to place the most important keywords at the beginning of the Title.

The Keyword Analyzer analysis results of HTML page elements from the home page of Thepartsbin.com.

3. Analyzing your competitors’ pages to build your keyword list

If you are looking for proven keywords, look no further. Your top ranking competitors pages are loaded with keywords you probably never even thought of. SEO Studio can extract the most frequently used keywords from any web page easily and accurately. It goes beyond just extracting META keywords. It can harvest keywords from any HTML tag that can be found in the HTML source code of the web page.

You can see in the illustration below thepartsbin.com website’s keywords in plain view for any SEO Studio user to copy and paste or to extract to a file. You can do the same with your own competitors’ pages and watch how fast you can make your own keyword list grow.

The Keyword Analyzer extracted all the 1 2, and 3 word phrases from the Thepartsbin.com site.

Conclusion

Your competitors have spent a considerable amount of time and effort coming up with their keyword selection and the optimization of their sites. You can take advantage of their efforts to expand or refine your own keyword list and learn about their on-page optimization techniques. The search engines and other online tools give us a great deal of insight into our competitor’s online campaigns. Before jumping head first into the optimization of our sites, we should thoroughly understand what our competitors are doing online. At the same time, you should not overestimate your competitors ability to find the best suited keywords. You should practice due diligence and verify your competitors’ keyword selection with the methods we have outlined in the Keyword Research lesson.

Step 1 - Keyword Research

Step 1 - Keyword Research

Introduction

What is a keyword? It’s simple to explain, but hard for new webmasters to grasp and research. Anything people type into a search engine is a keyword. A search query could be made up of one word or several keyword phrases joined together. Every person uses their own method of searching, and that makes it difficult for the webmaster to find those keywords that will connect their websites with the right visitors. Keyword research starts with the understanding that finding lots of related keywords that deliver targeted traffic is the ultimate goal of any keyword research.

It’s no use to send thousands of visitors to a site who will not even wait for the home page to load. That is just wasted effort and doesn’t do any good for your business, not to mention all the visitors you disappoint. In essence, we want to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to our website.

We are asked this question several times, “Is it better to rank for one very popular search term or attain top ranking for more keywords with less searches. Which is the better route”? This depends entirely on your website’s theme and how many different search terms visitors can use to find the same information. Some sites can be described in a query in thousands of different ways, while many others may have less than a dozen well targeted terms that would be best suited.

If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes. In this lessons we’ll also introduce you to a new SEO phrase called “long tail keywords” to target less competitive, but very well targeted keywords for your site.

Thinking like your customers

Thinking like your customers is easier said than done. Part of the problem is actually you, the website owner. You know your business and market too well. The industry jargons and slang are in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have a very narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.

Here is an example: when people search for getting their site ranked higher on the search engines, they may look for anything from “web promotion” to “web ranking,” or even “web traffic.” “SEO software” could be the last thing on their mind, but yet we would bet our business on “SEO software” being the best keyword for our site to target. Here is another example: what is the most popular search term, “cheap flights,” “cheap seats,” “low fares” or “discount fares”? As you can see it’s not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it?

The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part intuition, and imagination. Since we can’t get into the heads of every possible potential visitor to your site who may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on keyword research tools to tell us what people actually search for and how often. There are a handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is mind boggling.

Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor’s website. We are talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords on the web pages. This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily the SEO Studio Keyword Analyzer tool can dig up keywords from your competitor’s sites in a snap.  We’ll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research project.

Keyword research is like a job interview process

In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find the perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to cast a wide net first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man. Even then, it’s almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the original research only a few weeks earlier. What this tells us is the keyword selection and refinement process never ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the number of visitors you are receiving to your site.

Where and how to look for keywords

In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a variety of resources. Some of these resources may include:

• Brainstorming: Getting your brain to go on a magic carpet ride is one of the best ways to find relevant keywords for your website. Don’t just settle for asking the obvious question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: “What is this product made up of?” or “Who is using my services?,”or “What problems my products solve?”

• Paid keyword research tools: These include Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Keywords Analyzer, and Wordze. They give you the crucial keyword popularity data that is necessary for any keyword research. . All of these are very powerful keyword research tools, but they can be very expensive unless you do keyword research for a number of websites and you get paid for the work. We would recommend trying the free editions of the Free Wordtracker, and the Free Keyword Discovery tool before putting some serious money down for their paid editions. If you do decide to sign up for the paid version, you will most likely not need more than a month long membership. Finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less than a month for even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research has ended forever, but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be done with the free keyword research tools if your budget is tight.

• Free keyword research tools: You can gain access to the powerful and free Google external keyword tool to expand your keyword list. Unfortunately the Google external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search numbers. Another very valuable feature in Google external keyword tool is the “Site-Related Keywords” finder. By simply entering the website URL of your competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web pages. Another free keyword research tool available without creating an account is the Overture keyword inventory. As of now, August 2007 this tool only shows the January 2007 search volumes as it’s being phased out, but Yahoo! is promising a replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain access to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.

• Use pay per click (PPC) advertising: This will assist you in finding and selecting the best performing keywords based on the click through rate (CTR) and conversion rates. This is one of the fastest and most effective ways to select relevant keywords since your target audience is already casting their votes in the forms of clicks for your site. Testing new keywords with PPC is a very effective and low cost method to validate new keywords before incorporating them into your web page.

• Ask your friends and colleagues: Although you may be the expert in your field and perfectly capable of describing your products and services, you may also have a narrow focus when it comes to selecting the best keywords for your website. People who know much less about your business can give you important clues as to how they would look for your products or services.

• Related search terms suggestion tools: One of the fastest ways you can find hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools. Creating a large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is essential to effective keyword research. Discovering related phrases that are not simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent indexing. Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words as well. For example a computer shopper typing “apple” into the Google search box expects to see Apple computer in the results, but someone interested in finding information on the fruit apple, expects to find information on different varieties of apples and apple growers. It’s the semantic latent indexing that helps connect documents to the correct meaning of the search results and it’s believed to be widely used by Google.

• Some of the search engines provide a related search command list in their search results. Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the “clusters” side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by playing with different combination of keywords. You can also visit Technorati a well known blog aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain and generate new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the “Related tags” section directly under the search results.

• Visitor statistic reports: These can be generated from web server log files or from script based visitor statistic programs. This can help you uncover new keywords for your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the search engines to find your websites. In some cases, you’ll find keywords you didn’t expect to come up for in the search results. You should further research those keywords and uncover new keyword niches.

• Regional keywords and dialects: This can increase your website relevancy to visitors by using keywords as geographical filters. There can be variations of keywords from country to county even in the English speaking world. For example, in North America, we may use the term “search engine optimization” but in the UK and Australia most web searchers will be using “search engine optmisation”

• Misspellings, hyphenated and plural: These keywords can give you a multitude of additional keywords to target. Search engines can suggest the correctly spelled or hyphenated keywords in response to your query request, but they can not change what people actually search for. For this reason, focusing on even a few misspelled keywords or plural keyword variations can bring a few hundred extra visitors to your website every month.

• Site search engines: This can be a great source of new keywords and a potential data mining source. As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords, keyword length and other important keyword metrics.

• Spy on top ranking competitors: These websites are already well optimized and contain keyword rich web pages. Why not leverage their efforts and harvest the best keywords for your own website? With the help of the SEO Studio keyword analyzer you can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and HTML page content in seconds. There are two other very powerful free online tools available to dig up the keywords used by your competitors. The first one is SEOdigger.com. A great tool that lets you enter your competitors’ URLs and within seconds you’ll have hundreds of keywords in front of you with sortable Wordtracker and Overture keyword popularity data. The other competition spying tool is Spyfu.com, which helps to identify PPC competitors and the keyword they use to advertise. SpyFu tells you which keywords each website buys and you can even track it to the individual pages.

A few examples of good keywords selection practices

Selecting the best keyword takes experience and little know how, but it’s always helpful to see how the pros do it, so here are few basic steps for keyword selection.

• Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or the Keywords Analyzer, type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might otherwise be overlooked.

• Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60%-80% of all searches, it follows you can expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if the search term is well targeted for your business.

• At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in your basket.

• Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition. Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes.
  
  It’s very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword competitiveness is around “100,000” websites. Anything above a hundred thousand results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.

The Google search results for the exact keyword phrase “second mortgage” over 1 million results reported

Grouping keywords

Managing and optimizing a large number of keywords can be a daunting challenge and it requires grouping for logical mapping to specific web pages once our initial keyword research is completed.
Every website has at least 5-10 “main keywords” which can answer this question: “What is this website about?” The rest of the keywords are called secondary keyword and will be some variation of those main keywords whether lexically related or directly stemmed from the main keywords.

Types of keywords:

• Main keywords: These are usually one-two words in length, and all the other keywords either stem from them directly or are lexically related phrases, misspelled, or plural forms. A few examples of main keywords phrases are: “loan,”“real estate,”“lawyer,” “DVD,”“cell phone” etc. Although trying to get high ranking for these terms would be a futile attempt, nonetheless they are still required to be inserted into a website’s title, body text and many other potential HTML tags for effective optimization.

• Secondary keywords: These are the keyword we really try to get top ranking for on the search engines; therefore, they require the most amount of research and filtering. The secondary search phrases are either stemming from the main terms or semantically related in singular and plural forms. The secondary phrases are usually 2-3 words in length, but they can be as long as 6 words in some cases. A few good examples of secondary keyword phrases are: “home equity loans,” “low down payment loan mobile home,” “best refinance home mortgage loan rate,” “prepaid us sim cards,” “international sim cards.”

Every website needs a keyword theme

When we think of a keyword theme, we should think of our target audience. We should clearly define their needs. This will help us come up with a much better keyword theme, rather than if we simply took paper and pencil and started to write down random keyword phrases.

Let’s try this with a practical example. We are trying to establish a keyword theme for a website selling furniture with a location in New Jersey. Since this company sells a large variety of different furniture from living room sets to dining room furniture we need to come up with an overall theme and specific keyword segments as well.

Who is the target audience?

What products or services do we offer to satisfy their needs?

What are the most relevant target keyword phrases?

kitchen furniture buyers

kitchen table, kitchen chairs, kitchen accessories, dining room sets

new jersey kitchen furniture, new jersey kitchen tables,
new jersey kitchen chairs,
new jersey dining room furniture

office furniture buyers

office desks, office chairs, computer desks

new jersey office desks,
new jersey office chairs,
new jersey computer desks

living room furniture buyers

sofas, couches, recliners, loveseats

new jersey living room furniture,
new jersey sofas,
new jersey couches,
new jersey loveseats

Creating a keyword themed website with keyword mapping

One of the greatest misconceptions about keywords is their relation to the pages where they will be inserted. The most common question from new web masters is: “Do I optimize my home page for 20-30 keywords?” The answer is no. Too many keywords on the same page would dilute the focus and effectiveness of all keywords on the target page. he search engines will give a higher ranking to those sites and pages that are the closest related to the user’s query. In addition, you will learn in the lesson Page Optimization, the Title tag is limited in size and it’s physically impossible to fit 20 keywords into the 60 to 70 character limit.

Unless you have a one page website, which we don’t recommend, you need to target 3-4 keywords per individual page. The home page should target the most popular key phrases, while the sub pages should target the less competitive secondary keywords. Let’s use our fictional New Jersey furniture company again to demonstrate. The home page will be optimized for the keyword term “New Jersey Furniture” and a few other closely related main phrases. The rest of the pages will be broken down into categories of different furniture types, like office furniture, kitchen furniture, and living room furniture.

For those of you who would like to see how this website would be visually laid out after the optimization of specific pages, please take a look at the illustration below. The important principle to remember in organizing a site topically is to start with an in-depth look at your target audience and create your keyword list based on their needs and your product offerings emphasizing its benefits.

Keyword optimization based on website theme “furniture”

Long tail keywords

If you had your choice of visitor traffic originating from the search engines, which scenario would your choose?

• One thousand visitors from one keyword?
  
  or

• One thousands visitors from one thousand keywords?

If you can’t easily decide, you are not alone. The SEO community seems to be split on this issues as well. It’s hard to decide, given the fact that targeting a few very popular keywords could bring to your site thousands of visitors a day, but at the same time you would be facing some very stiff competition. The more popular a keyword phrase is, the more optimization and link building effort is needed to achieve top ranking. So there is a trade off between choosing less competitive phrases with lower traffic vs. more popular keywords with higher difficulty levels to attain top ranking.

Some SEOs prefer to target a few very popular keywords to get the greatest bulk of their traffic while others prefer to focus on many low competition keywords for an almost guaranteed top ranking. Also most SEOs recommend webmasters new to search engine optimization to target Long Tail keywords because it’s easier to rank well in a short period of time.

So lets examine first what the Long Tail keyword phrases are all about and how they can drive targeted visitors to your site. Webmasters with a single focus on a dozen popular keywords may miss a very big chuck of traffic from obscure low competition phrases. The Long Tail keywords may be only searched a few times a month, but given a few hundred of these keywords, they can deliver a decent amount of highly targeted traffic. The main advantage of Long Tail keywords is that it’s very easy to attain high ranking for them. When you are just starting out it can be a great confidence booster to see the first few visitors trickle in from the search engines using Long Tail keywords.

The Long Tail phrases have a very tight focus, which makes them more targeted than highly popular broad keyword phrases and usually convert better. For example the keyword “golf shoes” might bring in thousands of visitors a day to a website specializing in golf shoes, but if someone searching for a specific brand and model like “men’s air accel classic golf shoes” there is a higher chance of sale resulting from the search.

How do you discover Long Tail keyword phrases for your own site?

Most of the mainstream keyword research tools such as the free Google external keyword tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Keywords Analyzer, and Wordze are a good place to start, but you also have to find some other not so obvious ways to search for Long Tail keywords. The SEOdigger.com keyword spying tool is definitely a must have tool. You can also try Google suggest. This free Google tool tries to guess what your searching for and gives you suggestions in the form of an auto-complete search box.
Another great way to discover Long Tail keywords is to collect site search query data directly from your visitors. A site search tool consists of a web form and a small database of all the site URLs and their content. When the user types a query into the search box the program saves the query in the database. This is a true gold mine of Long Tail keyword phrases coming directly from your website visitors. We have been using the Zoom Site Indexer, a very inexpensive MS Windows based site indexing and search tool on our own site and several SEO client sites, it works really well.

Conclusion

Selecting the best search terms is the first and most important step in optimizing your website. The keyword selection process could be defined as the art of expanding and the science of narrowing your keyword list down to the most relevant keyword terms that bring targeted visitors to your site. If you want to grow the number of visitors to your site month after month, you need to continue searching for new keywords within your website’s topic relentlessly. Once you have exhausted the conventional keyword research tools and ideas online, start looking at magazines, newspapers, trade publications, consumer advocacy publications and even your junk mail folder.

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

If you think META tags still rule, you need to read this manual

Some not so honest webmaster that came before you in the 1990s used META tag spamming and other web page manipulation techniques to get higher rankings. The search engines got the message loud and clear, and answered back with a set of algorithm changes that are still evolving today. The Meta tags were slowly phased out as reliable ways to determine the relevancy of a web page by the major search engines by the late 1990s. Currently, the META description tags only real value is for website owners to succinctly describe their sites in the search results. It no longer has any ranking relevance at all.

So now the search engines have the upper hand, and dishonest webmaster have a much harder time manipulating the search results. Of course there are still a lot of people out there who can game the search engines for at least a few weeks or months until their sites are penalized by the engines. At that point, they simply register a new domain and start over with a new link farm, blog spamming, or a new hot off the press “black hat” SEO technique the search engines haven’t discovered yet.

Avoiding the bad apples of SEO

We hope you are here because you want your website to do well on the search engines for a long time and not just for a day or two. The search engines continue to challenge even seasoned SEO professionals, but by no means is search engine optimization an “elite” skill only a handful of people in the world can master. Although a lot of Internet marketers are pushing some new secret formulas for gaming the search engines, the fact is there are none if you want to ensure your site’s long term success. In every market we can find snake oil sales men who are peddling the next miracle cure to your problems, and the Internet marketing world is no exception.

Just take a look at this typical claim below.

The sales pitch is always the same. They say you are missing a key ingredient in your web promotion campaign and only they know what it is. Or they flaunt in front of you affiliate checks or Clickbank earnings reports to convince you they know the next big SEO secret that helped them earn a pile of money. Did you ever notice, there is also a sense of urgency in these offers. If you don’t buy their e-book or spam generator gizmo today you are going to miss the boat.
SEO is not a secret, but a discipline that can be learned by anyone with patience and practice. Yes, that includes even you.

How can I master SEO?

• Dedicate sufficient time to learn the fundamentals of SEO and search engine guidelines. If you don’t have the budget to hire a SEO to do the work for you, you will need to have a fair amount of time on your hands to understand the most basic SEO techniques. This manual could take only a few hours to read, but we guarantee it will take a few weeks to really sink in even after a few re-reads.

• Master keyword research techniques. Imagine if you were the owner of a retail store on a busy street, and your store didn’t have a sign. You would probably get a lot of people who come into your store just out of curiosity, but would they find what they are looking for? Most likely not. It’s the same with the search engines and keywords. If you optimize your site for the wrong keywords, you will get a lot of lookers and no buyers.

• Understand web design and HTML at a very basic level and learn a WYSIWYG HTML editor such as Dreamweaver. If you can’t make changes to your web pages and upload them, there is no chance of improving its relevance through keyword optimization. You don’t need to have complete control over the website, as you may work with a template based CMS (Content Management System), but you need to be able to make modifications to the Title tags, META description and the body content. If you have a web designer who makes the changes for you, that’s perfectly fine as well.

• Learn to write and inject keywords into web content and HTML elements. You don’t need to be an expert writer to create well optimized keyword rich content. As long as you understand you potential visitors’ needs and wants, writing search engine optimized web copy can be learned by anyone. The important thing to remember is to always write for your web audience first, and then tweak your copy to incorporate your target keywords.

• Dedicate enough time to grow their website content by a few pages a week. Most small business websites stop expanding their web content after 45 pages, which also include some not so relevant pages like privacy policies, contact us page, etc. Websites with more relevant informational pages do better on the search engines. So commit to writing at least one new page per week on a topic that answers some common questions your visitors may have. Begin with “how to tips, “top 10 lists, and “did you know articles” to start your creative juices flowing.

• Grasp the concepts of links and execute a link building plan. If you were a hiring manager for a large company, would you hire someone without checking their references? The references provide some tangible way to validate the candidate’s skills. Links are the equivalent to references on the web. The search engines use links as validation of another website’s value and quality on a specific search topic. The more “citations” the search engines find from reputable websites linking to another site, the higher they rank them. It’s important to develop a sharp “eye” for valuable links from the beginning that can push your site past your competitors.

• Remain patient even in the face of sudden ranking drops and continue to learn more about SEO each day.  Overreacting to ranking changes and undoing all the previous work is the single most reason new webmasters fail at SEO. If your site is only a few months old, you need to give yourself and your site at least a year to attain reasonable ranking. As long as you follow the safe optimization and “white hat SEO” link building techniques we describe in the following chapters, any ranking fluctuation will be only temporary and there is no reason to change course. Educate yourself daily by subscribing to SEO blog feeds, read SEO forum posts and expert articles. You can find some of the most popular SEO resources at the bottom of this page.

What’s so secretive about search engines?

“SEO”

“Keywords”

“SERP”

“Page Rank”

“Back Links”

What do all these terms mean? Well, that depends on when you first realized your website needs search engine traffic in order to attract visitors to grow your business. The terms above are common knowledge to most webmasters who have at least visited a few top search engine marketing portals, SEO forums, or read at least one e-book on SEO. If you are unfamiliar with these terms, don’t despair. We understand the confusion about the search engine optimization process, and we are here to guide you with an easy to follow road map.

Search engines are still very much misunderstood by most webmasters because the search engines don’t publish the exact methods they use to rank websites.

If you are serious about your website’s visibility, you owe it to yourself to learn as much as you can about the most effective and safe methods to get top ranking on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. What you have to realize is search engines actually need your website for their survival and profitability.

The commercial aspect of the Internet has created an entirely different set of problems for the search engines. Search engines existed long before Google came along in libraries, research institutions, and government facilities. In those early days, the document retrieval process consisted of mainly looking at the content of the documents without any external influences and links. The Internet explosion has single-handedly created the race to invent the “smartest” search engine that is able to find the “diamonds in the rough. The diamonds being the truly valuable web content that is relevant to user queries, and the rough being the junky low quality deceptive web pages that try to mislead the search engines. Organizing the billions of web pages and its content into meaningful, relevant well sorted search results is an immense task even for Google.

Think of search engines as the editorial watch dog of all content on the web. As chief editors, it’s the search engines job to retrieve the most suitable web pages in response to a user query. The search engines make money by displaying ads next to the natural search results returned. This is why their search relevancy is the key to their survival. The more relevant the search results are, the more people will make them their favorite search tools. Since about 2001, Google has been doing a fantastic job at returning the most relevant results and has been rewarded with hoards of advertisers bidding on keywords making them a pile of money year after year. In order to keep their search results relevant, the search engines have to ensure there is a level playing field among websites. They do this by frequently tweaking their algorithms to find bad apples that don’t play by the rules.

This short tutorial will try to take you through the necessary steps to build a site the search engines will love and reward you with high ranking(s). And finally, this tutorial would not be complete if we also didn’t warn you about the inherent risks of trying to trick or game the search engines with different spamming techniques to get ahead of the pack.

The paid keyword advertising alternatives

The natural search results are ranked by the search engine’s algorithm while others are simply paid advertisements from companies willing to buy their way to the top using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. When performing a search for almost any conceivable keyword on Google, Yahoo! or MSN, you’ll likely see a set of results labeled as Sponsored Links or Sponsor Results.

Some sponsored results may appear in the same format as the natural search results, while others are listed within colored text boxes along the side of the page. Please see the illustrations below.

Sing up for Google Adwords

Sing up for Yahoo! Marketing Solutions

Sign up for MSN adCenter

An illustration of the “sponsored” and natural results on Google, Yahoo! and MSN

The pros and cons of PPC

Long gone are the days of ranking well for competitive keyword phrases within weeks of putting a site online. As a matter of fact, new sites can rarely rank well within their first year of existence. This is where the pay-per-click advertising alternatives comes to the rescue.  As long as you have a valid credit card handy you can start getting visitors to your site immediately once you sign up with Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter pay-per-click advertising. The greatest benefit of PPC is the immediate traffic you get to your site, but the downside is the on-going cost of bidding on keywords month after month.

Who uses Pay-Per-Click advertising?

• Advertisers who are either not ready to commit a budget or time for improving their natural search engine ranking. Small and mid size business often face a dilemma when it comes to SEO. Hiring a SEO company, or doing in-house SEO both require financial resources and time commitment. In most cases small e-commerce companies choose the easier PPC route at first, but often they quickly realize without proper investment in the advice of a pay-per-click specialist and conversion tracking tools they can loose a lot of money very quickly.

• High profile companies who’s websites can’t be optimized using traditional SEO techniques. Corporate websites are often an untouchable property for SEOs. Key executives rarely give the go ahead to redesign a corporate website to achieve higher search engine ranking. In these cases PPC is the only way to gain visibility on the search engines.

• PPC advertisers who want to be in the top results for thousands of keywords. These companies view the cost of PPC as any other off-line promotion method and hey usually heavily invested in visitor analytic tools to accurately report their break even points and profitability for every keyword they bid on.

• Webmasters who want to test the performance of keywords quickly so they can build an expanded keyword list for organic ranking. Smart webmasters know that to properly test a keyword’s relevance and suitability can be quickly achieved with PPC. It takes only a few minutes to setup a pay-per-click campaign with thousands of keywords and with the use of the free Google Analytics it can take less than a few days to find the best performing keywords.  

• Advertisers who have a recognizable brand names, but want to have their ads on top of the search results, when other competitors are also allowed to bid on their brand name keywords. A perfect example of this is the airline industry. Online travel agencies are regularly bidding on airline company brand keywords such as “american arilines”, “soutwest” etc.

It’s not uncommon to hear of advertisers who spend tens of thousands of dollars on a monthly basis for immediate visibility on Google. Also many advertisers have new websites that are either too young to rank well or may have been penalized for spammy SEO techniques. The point we are trying to make is, PPC is a great alternative to get your site in front of millions of search engine users quickly providing (1) you have allocated a monthly budget, (2) researched your keywords thoroughly, (3) and set up a proper visitor and conversion metrics reporting tool. We can’t emphasize enough the need for visitor and conversion measurement tools prior to engaging in any PPC campaign. Google Analytics is great free choice for webmaster to track their keywords and conversions that can be tied back to their Google Adwords campaign keywords.

PPC can also come very handy to find suitable keywords for your site by testing a large number of keywords at once and measuring the conversion results closely. This process can help you weed out the poor performing keywords and find the true gems. The key is to set up proper visitor tracking prior to starting any large scale PPC campaigns.

What is the main advantage of search engine optimization?

One of the main advantages of high natural search ranking is your site can get visitors from the search engines 365 days a year without any cost to you other than your own hosting costs. It’s like getting a full page add in the Yellow Pages under the category of your choice indefinitely. Do you know any better advertising alternatives that are completely free?

We don’t, that’s why we think you should follow this guide closely and refer back to it as often as you like during the optimization of your website. Although getting free visitor traffic from the search engines is a very cost effective way to drive targeted traffic to your site, it’s not without a steep learning curve. The complexity and difficulty of learning SEO can be directly traced back to the search engines themselves. How is that so, you may wonder? The search engines are in the difficult position of trying to reveal as little as possible about the inner workings of their technology to the public, yet they need webmasters like you and me to provide them with the website’s that provide the search result in response to the millions of search queries.

Why your website doesn’t already rank well?

If your site had been online for a few days only, we can assure you, you are asking for the moon. Longevity on the web is gold, and the search engines reward websites that have a few years under their belts. It’s not to say your website has no chance of ranking well if it’s only a few months old, but older websites have the staying power many younger competitors just can’t match, especially on Google.

Beside the age factor, we could list at least a dozen or more search engine ranking factors that your website probably hasn’t incorporated into its pages. There are also a number of other external influences (hint: links) that are in your “SEO blind spot” right now. We promise that by following our SEO guide you will be well equipped to uncover the secrets to your own website’s ranking.

Is your website’s focus global or local?

There is a huge difference in time and effort needed to climb to the top of the search results, and it all depends on the keyword phrases you want your visitors to find you by. Attaining top ranking on the search engines depends on the competitiveness of the keyword terms you are targeting. Meaning, the fewer web pages competing for the same terms the higher your chances are of succeeding.

Let’s say you are the webmaster of a small local real estate firm in Ajax, Ontario Canada with a population of about 80,000. Your job would be fairly simple and straightforward to get a top ranking for “ajax real estate” or “homes in ajax. In this case, the webmaster could probably get a top ranking just by creating unique title tags for the website with the keywords in the title tag and “sprinkle” the same keywords in the body text. The home page title tag for our real estate site in Ajax could look something like this <TITLE>Ajax Ontario Real Estate Agent : Ajax Home Realtors</TITLE>

On the other hand if you wanted to rank in New York or Los Angeles for real estate related terms, your chances of succeeding would be severely tested. You may already know the reason why. That’s right, a bigger population means more real estate offices with websites that have the same keyword terms somewhere on their web pages. The end results is a bigger optimization and link building effort, and most likely more time needed to get the same results as our friendly Ajax realtors. Since there are many more sites competing for the New York and Los Angeles real estate terms, naturally the New York or Los Angeles based real estate webmasters would have to go beyond title tag optimization. They would have to do some serious content writing, optimization, and link building to get a number one ranking.

However, this should not discourage you because the search engines rankings are not written in stone, and even the number one website can be unseated with persistent effort and patience.

Website owners who sell products or distribute their content worldwide are in a tougher situation when it comes to SEO. It’s easy to see why. Once we remove the local geographical terms and do a search for “real estate” only, we are presented with over 370 million results from Google: Results 1 10 of about 370,000,000 for real estate. Unless the keyword phrase is fairly unique, competing globally for popular keywords terms will take more time and careful link building. In some cases, it can take as much as one year of search engine optimization to achieve a top 10 ranking for a very popular term.

Your website’s age and the Google “Sandbox”

You may not know this, but how long your website’s has been online is a key factor in how much work it will take to achieve a decent search engine ranking. We are not talking about the domain’s original registration date, but the actual time elapsed between the site’s going online and now. The longer the site has been online without any significant down time the better. Sites under the one year mark will have a very difficult time, especially on Google due to factors which even Google doesn’t disclose publicly. There is overwhelming evidence a new site needs to be online for a minimum of six moths to one year before it can reach top 10 results for even moderately competitive keyword terms. This artificially imposed ranking ceiling on new websites is referred to as the Google “Sandbox” in SEO.

The Google “Sandbox” is a phenomenon that was first observed in 2003 and ever since we can see evidence of new sites with commercial focus competing for highly popular keyword phrases are ranked artificially low for a period of between 6-12 month depending on the market segment and specific keywords. The theory behind the Google “Sandbox” is Google’s attempt to control newly build spam websites and link farms from rising to the top of the search results in a short amount of time. Unfortunately Google never openly acknowledged the existence of such a filter or algorithm, so we have no official confirmation from Google, but we can assure you it does exists.

The only sites we have seen escaping the Google “Sandbox” are educational or government domains, or subdomains of well established older websites. Another group of sites that may escape the “Sandbox” is sites targeting low competition keyword phrases with local geographical focus. For example a new site that competes for the keyword phrase “toronto handyman”, or “toronto carpenter” may be able to rise to the top of the results in less than 4 months. On the other hand a new site targeting the keyword phrase “las vegas real estate” will face the same Google “Sandbox” just like other commercially focused sites in popular niches and may take over a year to achieve reasonable results.

Achieving high natural search engine ranking is dependent on two main factors

Here is some good news; search engine rankings are dependent on two main factors; on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

• On-page optimization can be described as the tweaking and tuning of web pages and the website as a whole to achieve a unified keyword theme and an easy to navigate structure. On-page factors can be improved by incorporating keywords into the title tags, body content, and internal navigational links. The actual content of the site falls into the on-page optimization category, and although the on-page factors may contribute less to the overall ranking score, the content will make or break the off-page factors since high quality content will always attract more external links.

• Off-page ranking factors are commonly known as link popularity which means, how many links are pointing to your site. While optimizing your web pages is an important step, today’s modern search engine algorithms mostly rely on external ranking factors such inbound links pointing to a website. These external links are counted as votes for your websites popularity and quality. You can improve your websites link popularity by acquiring relevant high quality links from many different sources. Some of these source include links from blogs, reciprocal link partners, one-way links, e-zine article links, directory links, government, or trade associations links. Links from press releases or industry news articles are also excellent sources of links.

The search engines recently started to count links in their ranking algorithms  community driven sites such as Technorati, YouTube, Delicious, Stumble Upon and Bloglines. Links from these social websites are given a fair amount of weight because the personal preference of users participating in a particular community is a good indication of a site’s value which simply can’t be determined by a computer based algorithm. The term often used to describe the propagation of news about a site’s value on social websites is called Viral Marketing. Viral marketing is the new traffic generation source for webmasters and we’ll be covering it in the Web 2.0 Link Building and Viral Marketing lesson. We’ll be revealing all the ins and outs of getting your site in front of thousands of social site users in a very short amount of time.

The search engines are also extremely good at figuring out relatedness between websites. This means when all other factors are equal the quality of links wins over the quantity of links.
In the step-by-step lessons following this introduction, we will reveal how your website can achieve high search engine ranking with the right balance of on and off-page optimization techniques and viral marketing.

What is the secret to getting high ranking in 2008?

Every year search engine algorithms evolve and change. In some cases, there is a noticeable change in the ranking order of even well established sites. As SEOs we have to adapt to what the search engines are looking for in site optimization and link popularity metrics. The problem is, the search engines don’t publish a new checklist at the beginning of the year to tell us what to watch out for in the upcoming year. It would be very nice, but don’t hold your breath.

Short of a precise list of search engine ranking factors, we have to keep on going back to the top 1020 results on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN to gain some insights into how those sites got there. We look for any fluctuations in the search results for target phrases. We also look at the sites’ layout, keyword placement, link popularity, and a slew of other factors. In some cases, there are no changes in the ranking results for months, and than all of a sudden we may see some new websites reaching the top 10 results. When there is a massive number of changes in the top ranking results, it’s a clear sign of algorithm changes.

So what are the ranking “secrets” for 2008?

• Old well established domains still dominate the top results. If you don’t already own a domain that has been online for a few years you can always find one. You would be amazed how many people are willing to sell their 4-5 year old domains for next to nothing. But don’t go to domain brokers to find good deals on old domains. You need to do your own research the old fashioned way. Page through the search results using your target keywords starting at the 4th or 5th page or maybe even higher. Install the SEO Firefox extension and enable the website’s age information. When you find a site that is at least two years old and the information looks a little dated, look up the contact info and send an email to make an offer.

• Links from topically relevant high Google PageRank sites can give a huge boost to your sites’ ranking. These are types of links Google don’t want you to buy, but in reality without putting some money down you will very rarely get a PR 7 or 8 link without some serious cash changing hands. Let’s face it, if your site brand new and commercial in nature, nobody will do you a favor and give you something for nothing. You have to get used to the idea that you either need cash or time and talent to build links to your site.

• Link exchanges, article and directory submissions are not the silver bullet to building links. . Just like all link building techniques, once they become main stream they lose their effectiveness. If the search engines find 80% to 90% of your inbound links are coming from exchanged links, or article and directory submissions sites, their conclusion about your site is simple: you are manufacturing links in order to rank higher because your site has no value to offer. Your site needs some other sources of inbound links, whether it is editorial links from your peers in your industry or links to a great new tool you have put on your site. The bottom line is one-way inbound links from relevant sites wins the day.

• Social media is gaining ground, so you better be sociable too. A link from Bloglines, Technorati, Delicious, Blogpulse, IceRocket or Stumble Upon is the web community’s way of saying your site is worth checking out. In recent years the search engines started to rely on the collective opinion of social community websites to supplement and aid the relevancy of their machine based search algorithms. This trend will most likely continue and gain even more momentum in the up coming years.

Do you want to learn more about search engine marketing?

In the world of SEO, changes happen fast. Keeping up-to-date on the latest search marketing developments is essential to your website’s success. We have compiled a list of fantastic resources below to help you learn more about the latest news and buzz in the SEO world

SEO Blogs

[Technorati] Tag results for Google 301 Powered :: Seo News 5 Star Affiliate Blogs, Internet Marketing Blog, SEO, Google News ABAKUS Search Engine Marketing SEO Blog Alan Meckler All About Content Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim Ask Jeeves Blog Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog Blog Business World Bluehat SEO Blog SEO Brad Fallon Charlene Li’s Blog ClickZ Experts ClickZ News ClickZ News Blog CNET News.com - Media 2.0 Developedtraffic.com Digg eWEEK Technology News Fathom SEO Search Engine Optimization Blog Geeking with Greg Getting Granular: The DigitalGrit Blog Google Blogoscoped Google, Inc. - Topix.net Googling Google Graywolf’s SEO Blog Greg Boser - Search Engine Marketing Consultant -aka WebGuerrilla Jeremy Zawodny’s blog Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog John Battelle Search Blog Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog Justia Legal Marketing Blog Justilien.com Link Building Blog Local Search … Is your business ready? MarketingVOX - The Voice of Online Marketing Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO Mike Grehan says… MSN Search’s WebLog News.blog: Google (CNET News.com) Official Google Blog Oilman Online Marketing Blog Pandia Search Engine News Personal Tech Pipeline Red Herring Rev2.org Robin Good’s Latest News SageRock Scott Fish SEO News and Blog Search Engine Guide Blog Search Engine Journal Search Engine Roundtable Search Engine Watch Search Engine Watch Blog Search Engines - Topix.net Search Enngine World SEO and affiliate marketing blog SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO Blog SEO Book.com SEO Bytes SEO Chat - Search Engine Optimization How-tos And Information SEO Scoop SEO Speedwagon SEO tips=better search engine ranking SEOmoz.org SEOshed - Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Group Seth’s Blog SiliconBeat Slashdot Small Business Brief Smart SEO Posts Street Smart SEO Stuntdubl Search Engine Marketing Consulting Textlinkbrokers.com Blog The Other Bloke’s Blog The Register The Search Engine Marketing Weblog The SEO Blog The Unofficial Google Weblog Threadwatch.org - Marketing and Technology Discussed Traffick Trendmx SEO Blog Usability, SEO and Web Design WebmasterWorld Wired News Yahoo! News: Technology News Yahoo! Search blog ZillionBits

Conclusion

Search engine marketing can take your website to the next level of success providing you do your homework and spend the necessary time learning as much as you can about safe and effective SEO techniques. Search engine optimization is not hard, but it’s very detailed. A great deal of knowledge about achieving top ranking is still based on too many “experts” giving bad advice to novice SEOs. Hopefully, this tutorial will help to clear up any misconception you may have about your website’s potential and the work that lies ahead of you.

We know it’s no small task getting a website ranking at the top of the search engines for new webmasters, but we are here to help you every step of the way.

Cuocthiseo - Most important Seo services ?

Saturday, 6. December 2008, 16:50:39  Source: O.PE

SEO contest
To encourage you to learn about CUOCTHISEO, O.PE owner would like to sponsor a contest small. This is a chance for you to prove and test the ability tho their CUOCTHISEO.

Objects involved

* You are interested in SEO and the Viet Nam

Regulations contest

* From the course of the contest is (note the keyword is in line to write the same way as below): CUOCTHISEO
Tag this he did not appear on Google up to today, to ensure fairness of the competition and ensure that the contest was not to pollute the search results Google.
* On the end: 12 noon Viet Nam, dated 7/2/2009 (3 months from today). 3 months time is believed that a short time of the Google sandbox, and ensure the creation of the new site you are ranked fair. It is also the time needed to we will be able to carry out all procedures of their SEO.
* Website to check the results: Google http://www.google.com International (your attention is not Google http://www.google.com.vn Viet Nam. To be gooogle.com without google.com.vn to redirect, you go to the URL in http://www.google.com/ncr)
* To ensure fairness, you avoid using the old example, with PR and available to rank high in the contest, all of the sites participating in the contest your will must be placed in your own domain name . com and must be generated after the opening contest (today). This can be checked by email / nick address, Member since schools must be equal to or later than Dec 2008. At the same time, on the end of the competition, on this page are required to have at least your email to contact us if you’re winning.
* 1 prize of the contest for the highest ranking sites in search results for sites qualify as an Apple Ipod Nano 8GB Chromatic (generation 4)
* 1 second prize for sites eligible to stand as a 2nd mouse Logitec V150 Laser
* 1 site for the three standing 3 is a USB Flash Drive 4GB of Kingston
* Prizes will be sent to you via mail.

9th Dec 2008: The Organizer has been change the time of due to 7th Marth 2009. and give extension for Prize : Monthly prize for top 1 keyword : USB Kingston 4GB (same with first runner up and second runner up prize of final prize)

CUOCTHISEO OFFICIAL LAUNCH by O.PE

Cuocthiseo Rule (Vietnamese)

Để khuyến khích các bạn tìm hiểu về SEO, OPE xin tài trợ một cuộc thi nhỏ. Đây là dịp để các bạn chứng tỏ và thi thố khả năng SEO của mình.

Đối tượng tham gia

• Các bạn quan tâm đến SEO và là người Việt Nam

Thể lệ cuộc thi

• Bạn chỉ cần tạo một website, tối ưu hóa sao cho một trang nào đó trên site của bạn có vị trí cao nhất trên Google cho từ khóa của cuộc thi vào ngày kết thúc cuộc thi.
• Từ khóa của cuộc thi là (các bạn chú ý là từ khóa phải viết liền đúng như bên dưới):
  ( CUOCTHISEO ) Từ khóa này chưa hề xuất hiện trên Google tính đến ngày hôm nay, bảo đảm tính công bằng của cuộc thi và bảo đảm rằng cuộc thi này không làm ô nhiễm kết quả search của Google.
• Ngày kết thúc cuộc thi: 12 giờ trưa Việt Nam, ngày 7/2/2009 (3 tháng kể từ ngày hôm nay). Thời gian 3 tháng được tin rằng là thời gian ngắn nhất của Google sandbox, bảo đảm các website mới tạo của các bạn được xếp hạng công bằng. Đây cũng là thời gian cần thiết để các bạn có thể thực hiện mọi thủ thuật SEO của mình.
• Website kiểm tra kết quả cuộc thi: Google quốc tế http://www.google.com (các bạn chú ý là không phải Google Việt Nam http://www.google.com.vn. Để đến được gooogle.com mà không bị redirect sang google.com.vn, bạn hãy vào bằng URL http://www.google.com/ncr )
• Website của bạn có thể đặt ở bất kỳ đâu (wordpress.com, Y360 blog, blogger.com…) hoặc domain của chính bạn. Các bạn đã đặt ở My Opera vẫn có thể tiếp tục đặt ở đó, nếu bạn muốn chuyển sang chỗ khác vẫn có thể tận dụng bằng cách link từ my.opera sang. Tuy nhiên các bạn không thể sử dụng những diễn đàn public (như post 1 bài trên DDTH và coi đó là trang dự thi của bạn). Ngoài ra, tất cả các bạn tham gia cuộc thi phải link đến trang tham gia dự thi của mình ở topic này, và ghi rõ username của bạn trên DDTH trên trang tham gia dự thi (để tránh trường hợp tranh chấp website). Đồng thời, vào ngày kết thúc cuộc thi, trên trang này bắt buộc phải có tối thiểu email của bạn để chúng tôi liên lạc nếu bạn đoạt giải.
• 1 giải nhất của cuộc thi cho website đứng cao nhất trong kết quả tìm kiếm trong các website đủ điều kiện là một Apple Ipod Nano Chromatic 8GB (thế hệ 4)
• 1 giải nhì cho website đủ điều kiện đứng thứ 2 là một chuột Logitec V150 Laser
• 1 giải ba cho website đứng thứ 3 là một USB Flash drive 4GB của Kingston
• Giải thưởng sẽ được gửi đên các bạn qua đường bưu điện.
• Ngoài ra tôi sẽ cố gắng tìm nhà tài trợ thêm giải thưởng cho cuộc thi.

========================= ADDED 7/12/2008 =============================

Chỉ sau 1 ngày tổ chức đã có rất nhiều bạn hưởng ứng và tham gia. Từ 0 kết quả trên Google, hôm nay đã có 43 kết quả cho “cuocthiseo”.
Tuy nhiên có một vấn đề là tất cả các site trên my.opera.com đều được Google coi là 1 site. Mặc dù điều này không ảnh hưởng đến kết quả hiện giờ của cuộc thi (vì các trang trong 1 website vẫn được xếp theo internal rank), điều này làm cho nhiều bạn confused và làm cho cuộc thi mất vui.

Vì vậy, tôi xin thay đổi một chút điều kiện, ngoài my.opera.com, website của bạn có thể đặt ở bất kỳ đâu (wordpress.com, Y360 blog, blogger.com…) hoặc domain của chính bạn. Các bạn đã đặt ở My Opera vẫn có thể tiếp tục đặt ở đó, nếu bạn muốn chuyển sang chỗ khác vẫn có thể tận dụng bằng cách link từ my.opera sang. Tuy nhiên các bạn không thể sử dụng những diễn đàn public (như post 1 bài trên DDTH và coi đó là trang dự thi của bạn).

Ngoài ra, tất cả các bạn tham gia cuộc thi phải link đến trang tham gia dự thi của mình ở topic này, và ghi rõ username của bạn trên DDTH trên trang tham gia dự thi (để tránh trường hợp tranh chấp website).
Source: O.PE