Make Your Site A Search Engine Magnet

How to Make Your Business Success

Make Your Site A Search Engine Magnet

Business Success - One of the most common questions I get from my clients is, What should I put on my home page? Where do I begin? Whether you are starting a new web site or redesigning your existing one, these are important questions to ask. If you dont get the answers right, you might as well not even have a web site. The Purpose of a Home Page The home page serves many functions, and they all must work together seamlessly. First of all, it must be designed to rank well in the search engines so that people who don't already know you can find you. Second, it's an introduction to your business and an invitation to new customers and clients. Third, it must have a clear and intuitive navigation system so that a visitor can immediately know the scope of your site and easily move around in it. This topic won't be covered here, but you can read more about this in my article about Designing the Perfect Web Menu (http://www.zmoon.com/articles/menu.html). Fourth, it must load quickly, even for people using a dialup modem for their internet access. And all this must be contained in an attractive package! To rank well in the search engines, you must either play by their rules, or buy your way in. Today we''ll do it the free way, but if you want to know more about paid options, see my article on Search Engines: Should You Pay? (http://www.zmoon.com/search.html) The Two Main Factors that Will Improve Your Ranking When ranking sites, the search engines consider two main factors. How many times does the search phrase occur on your page, and how many other quality sites link to your page? The first factor indicates how closely your page matches what the searcher is looking for. The second factor indicates the overall quality of your site, since other sites won�t send their customers to you unless you offer excellent content. How to cultivate a strong network of sites linking to your site is beyond the scope of this article, but will be covered in another edition. Create Your Keywords List Step one is to brainstorm a list of words and phrases you think someone would type into a search engine looking for a business like yours. If I had a landscaping business in Cheyenne, for instance, I might create this list: landscaping, tree trimming, lawn care, weed control, rock gardens, ponds, garden design, xeriscaping, flower beds, mulch, consultation, Cheyenne. I would include my city since I only work within 50 miles of home. Next, I would use the free tool at WordTracker (http://www.zmoon.com/cgi-bin/pl.pl?word) to get other words to add to my list, find out how often they were entered into the engines in the last 60 days, and how many competing sites also have them. I would probably buy a days worth of access to their complete service since it adds so much information and costs less than ten bucks. Place Your Keywords on the Page Make sure your highest-priority keywords are placed in the title tag of your code. Unless your business name is so well-known that thousands of people will type it into search engines looking for your site, leave it out of the title. Your logo will be prominent on the page, so they will see your name there. Many search engines also give more points to words in headlines, so place your keywords there as well as in the body of the text. Now, placing a key phrase once in the title and once on your page won't be enough to get you to the top of the charts. On the other hand, repeating it too often can get you banned from the engines. Ideally, each phrase you're trying to optimize your page for should make up 1-7% of the text on the page, which should contain 250-700 words. Use the free Keyword Density Analyzer (http://www.keyworddensity.com) to do the math for you. Moving from the Robots to the Humans OK, now, we've got the search engines covered and the visitors are pouring in. What do we have for them? In a word: Benefits. Your home page must entice your visitors to linger on your site for awhile. To make this happen, don't forget their favourite radio station: WII-FM, or What's in it for Me? The person in Cheyenne looking for a landscaper first wants to know how I can make his life easier while making his home more attractive. When he first arrives at my site he's not interested in me; he's only thinking of himself. I�d think he was selfish if I didn�t act the same way when I�m surfing the web! So, to write my home page, I�ll take my key phrases and put them into headlines. I�ll make sure they each scream out a benefit to my visitor. I know that he'll scan the headlines before he�ll read my text, and if his first impression is how many ways I can help him, I�ve got him hooked. Here�s a partial list of headlines I might use: Relax this summer--We�ve got Your Lawn Care Covered Save Water with a Beautiful Xeriscape Garden Your Flower Beds Can Be the Envy of Your Neighborhood Throw Away Your Ladder--Let Us Trim Your Trees Fall Asleep to the Soothing Sound of Your Pond�s Waterfalls Didn�t those sound good? And did you notice they each contain a key word or phrase? Next I�d write several short paragraphs under each one, using keywords to further explain how my services can benefit them. Now my home page is a grabber both for the search engines and my new customers. The absolute master at writing for the web is Dr. Ken Evoy. I strongly suggest you visit his site and download some of his excellent, free resources for Doing Business on the Web (http://www.zmoon.com/cgi-bin/pl.pl?site). The Next Step Now that I�ve optimized my home page, I�ll use similar tactics on each additional page. These will still feature the appropriate keywords in the title, headlines and text, but the content can move a bit away from the benefits and more toward solid information. I hooked my visitor on the home page, so now I need to reel him in with helpful free information, testimonials from satisfied neighbours, and a bit about my background and experience. Conclusion Your home page is arguably the most important in your site. First it has to be found by visitors using the search engines. Then it must show them enough personal benefits that they will click a link to go further into your site instead of clicking the back button. Follow the guidelines I�ve presented here and you should be off to a good start. Good luck! Les Goss may be contacted at http://www.zmoon.com les@zmoon.com. Les Goss educates his clients as he builds their web sites. ZebraMoon is a full service web development company that also publishes a bi-weekly newsletter of great interest to business owners with web sites.

Search Engine Optimization

How to Make Your Business Success

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization And The Magic Fairy Dust

by: Bill Platt 

There is only one thing that all webmasters agree upon... They all want to be at the top of the search engine results for search terms that will drive traffic and consumers to their website. The truth is that the search engines are like our childhood game of King Of The Hill. Only one person can be at the top of the hill and the top of the search results. Only ten websites can be on page one of the search results. When a new website moves into the top ten, another must be removed. For any given search term at any given time, there are only ten web pages on page one of the search results, and there are millions of web pages that did not make page one, who may or may not catch a few stragglers from the search engines. How Can A Website Break Into The Top Ten? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an industry that has sprung up around the concept of helping their clients improve their rankings in the search engine results. When you talk to SEO professionals, they generally point to a two-pronged approach to search ranking optimization. A website owner needs to optimize their on-site real estate for the search engines, and they need to build inbound links to their website. On-Site Search Optimization Challenges The trick with on-site search optimization is that you must cater to multiple audiences on your website. * You must provide simple navigation and an attractive interface to the human visitor; * You must provide good sales copy to your human visitors, for the purpose of converting them from shoppers to buyers; * You must provide text copy for the search engines to read; and * You must optimize your content to help the search engines know what topics and keywords they should pay attention, so that they can give their users the right web page for the right search terms. A web page that draws good search rankings is useless if the web page cannot convert the human visitor to a buyer. Many website owners get caught up in the process of optimizing a web page to get it to the top of the search results, and they forget that the human visitor knows where the Back Button is in his or her browser. Once your visitor has hit the Back Button, they will go to someone else's website and buy from them, instead of you. Most website owners have the alternate problem. They consistently convert a significant number of visitors to buyers, but they have to rely on various forms of paid advertising to get visitors to their websites, since they do not rank in the search engines. I recently spoke with an individual who spends ,000 per month on pay-per-click advertising to get targeted traffic to his website. He said he consistently earns back his money, but he was still looking for a better way to get ranked in the search engines, so he joined my client list. On-Site Search Engine Optimization Basics According to the search engine companies, there are more than one thousand calculations that determine how well a website will rank in their search engine result pages (SERPs). The Google engineers are fond of saying that if you build your website for human beings instead of search engines, then your website should rank well in their algorithms. To a certain degree, this is a good strategy. Think about how magazines are constructed: The Table Of Contents shows story titles, brief descriptions, and page numbers telling you where you can find a story. On the story page, the title will be in big, bold font. Sometimes, the magazine will include a brief blurb about the story, in italics or font that is a bit bigger than the story font. Pictures support the story with captions that further develop the story, by describing the picture. Major subsections of the story have their own subheadings. And, the primary body of the story is in regular plain text, with only an occasional bolded or italicized word or phrase. By analyzing the title and other large text on the page, a person who is flipping through the pages of a magazine can quickly assess the story content and make the decision as to whether they want to read the full story. In the most simplistic way, this is how the search engines analyze a websites' content to decide which web page will best serve their users' needs. Off-Site Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Basics Since the inception of Google, and with Yahoo and MSN recently, the number and quality of links pointing to a website play a significant role in determining how well a web page will rank in the search results. I have heard people suggest that as much as 75% of the value given to a web page in the search results is based solely on the number and quality of links pointing to a web page. I tend to believe a more conservative number (50.1%) will apply. Inbound Links Are More Important Than Page Content To prove this point, type "click here" without the quotes into Google, Yahoo and MSN and check the Adobe pages that come up in the search results: #1 in Google, #2 in Yahoo, and #1 in MSN. When you pull up those pages, search the page to find the individual words "click" or "here" in the text of those pages. They are not there. This has happened because millions of people have linked to these Adobe pages with the embedded anchor text, "click here". Next, let's analyze those specific web pages from the perspective of each of the search engines: * Google's #1 result - Google PageRank 8. (www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html) Links to this web page: according to Google (31); according to Yahoo (nearly 12 million); according to MSN (6,400). * Yahoo's #2 result - Google PageRank 10. (www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer) Links to this web page: Google (15,200); Yahoo (700 thousand); MSN (32). * MSN's #1 result - Google PageRank 8. (www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash) Links to this web page: Google (0); Yahoo (2.9 million); MSN (778). On Google's top result, they show 31 inbound links total for that web page. But, Yahoo claims that there are more than 12 million links to this page. That is a huge difference. On Yahoo's #2 result, MSN gives 32 links, Google gives 15,000 links, and Yahoo claims it has 700 thousand links! That is another huge difference between the link counts from the search engines. On MSN's #1 result, MSN shows a strong link count, but still nowhere near Yahoo's 2.9 million links. But, how does a web page with zero links in Google get a PageRank 8? What Do These Numbers Mean? Google has always said that they will never show us all of the links that we have pointing to our websites, because anything we can see in the public search results, our competitors can see also. So, for me it really is no surprise that we cannot see all of the links that point to Adobe pages, or to the links we have created that point to our clients and ourselves, by querying the search engines. Also, the sheer numbers of inbound links do not rule the roost. Google's #1 result (PR8) is actually shown in Google, before Yahoo's #2 (PR10) result. The Proof For Link Building Is In The Search Engine Rankings Recently, a fellow who works as a SEO "professional" told me that be believed my link building system was a sham. I showed him that on the top 51 keyword phrases we use to market our original commercial website, we had 11 number one results, 31 top five results, 34 top ten results, 47 top thirty results, and 51 top 100 results within the Google search results. Additionally, it was shown that only three of those results competed with fewer than one million search results according to Google, with the remaining 48 pages competing with one million to 533 million pages. Ole boy tore up Google trying to track how it was possible for me to have accomplished what I claimed. He finally concluded that since Google would not show HIM how I was able to rank so well in their search engine results, then I must have been lying. According to Yahoo, we have over 12,000 links from third-party websites. According to our site statistics, we received traffic from more than 16,000 unique web pages during 2006. And Google still swears that we only have 42 inbound links to our website! Magic Fairy Dust My nemesis concluded that since HE could not prove through Google how I was successful in getting good search rankings, then I could not have accomplished such results by the methods I claimed. Okay, I admit it. I used the exact same method that Adobe used to get to the top of Google's search engine rankings. I have a pocket full of magic fairy dust. Whenever, I do not like how my websites rank in the search engines, I sprinkle my magic fairy dust on my modem. If you don't like where you are ranked in the search engines, then I suggest you forego the search engine optimization companies altogether and instead run over to the corner store to get your own magic fairy dust. You might have to shop around a bit, but it is out there.