articles

How to Get Higher Search Engine Rankings

February 2004 Volume 51, Issue 3.

In the early days of the Internet, you did not have to do much to drive a lot of traffic to your web site. Simply listing your site with search engines (and all were free back then) could yield a lot of traffic. When I listed one of my sites with Yahoo!, my site hits increased by 10,000 in just one week. Back then, ranking was more a game of TITLE and META tags than anything else. But in response to mammoth growth of the Internet and abuse of Meta tags by unscrupulous Web designers, search engine spiders have become more sophisticated: The game now focuses on optimizing Web page content. The top spots that search engine spiders browse to determine your site's relevance are your Title tag and your Web page content. So if you don't optimize your site content, you are wasting a really good shot at attaining good rankings.

The Power of Search Engine Optimization

More and more people are using search engines to find what they are looking for online. Americans conduct an estimated 790 million searches per week according to research from ComScore Media Metrix. And, when web developers don't employ organic organic search engine optimization (SEO), the results aren't favorable. Searchers select the top two organic listings on a search results page more than 50 percent of the time, whereas paid search placement receive about 2 percent of user clicks. Also the "free" listings resulting from organic SEO most often produce the highest conversion rate (the desired action from the consumer - such as purchasing a product or signing up for a newsletter) and return on investment. So start optimizing your site text!

The importance of site text

Search engine spiders use TITLE tags and web page content to determine your site's relevance are your Title tag and your web site content. (For more information see, Search Engine Optimization: Designing a Search-Friendly Site.") So add keywords/phrases to your site text and do that for EVERY page on your site! Once you do this, monitor your rankings. If you see your site moving up in the rankings, don't re-optimize it for at least six months! If you need to update your main page, include a What's New, but don't touch anything else.

There's a fine line between optimizing your site text and manipulating spiders unethically (calling spam or spamdexing). One employer asked me to add lines of text to a site that repeated significant keywords over and over - and match the color of text to the web page's background. Spiders can detect tactics like these and will penalize your site with lower rankings. If you continue to use such tactics, the search engine may ban your domain forever.

I'll discuss unethical SEO tactics in later article, but you should be aware that spiders are on to them, and that search engines will discipline spamdexers

Optimizing new site text

Here are some pointers for adding keywords to your site text effectively:

• Of the total number of keywords you wish to use, optimize a few per page. If you decide that twenty keywords/phrases will draw users to your site, you won't be able to optimize that many on every page. So divide up your total number of keywords/phrases. Try four to five keywords/phrases per page.
• Add keywords/phrases to Heading tags (H1, H2, H3) - Always opt for this tag as opposed to a larger font size when the text contains a keyword/phrase. Header content is considered more descriptive of what is actually on the page, thus spiders assign it more importance.
• When creating textual links, make the links a keyword/phrase. If your web site concerns SEO, for instance don't hyperlink the usual "Click here." Instead, try "Click here to learn more about search engine optimization."
• Add short keyword-rich text within ALT tags in your graphic links. Make certain, however, that the ALT text is descriptive of the link destination, and that you do not use the same word for your ALT text throughout the page.
• Be sure that the editor you use to build or maintain your site does not add your text as graphical elements. Search engine spiders cannot read graphics. And if you are using Flash, make sure you use real text and not a Flash presentation, which spiders read as graphics.
• Include about 250 - 300 words of keyword-rich text on every page on your site.

Optimizing existing text

You may have to rewrite your page text to include your keywords/phrases but you can try this easy option first: Look for places in your existing text to add your keywords/phrases.

When I optimized a feng shui site for a client, I had to look for ways to include the specific type of feng shui she practiced into the existing copy. Since the copy already term "feng shui" throughout, I just added "classical" and "traditional" in front "feng shui" to optimize for my primary keywords/ phrases. Here are some more examples:

Table 1. Examples showing how to optimize copy for search engines

Before	After
Check out my article series from my web column	Check out my search engine optimization and internet marketing article series from my web column
feng shui basics	traditional feng shui basics
feng shui consultations	traditional feng shui consultations
Tiles with Style specializes in custom tile	Tiles with Style is a decorative ceramic tile studio  that specializes in custom hand made tile

And yes, bolding your keywords will give them extra weight with the spiders but try not to overdo it. A lot of bolded text will turn off your users.

So while you should put keywords/phrases within code, like within your TITLE tag, don't forget about site text. Try 250 - 300 words of keyword-rich text. If you can't add that much to your page, say for a corporate web site, try a crawler page linking to pages where you can add text -- users cannot see crawler pages unless they type in the exact URLs. (For more information on crawler pages, see The Scoop on Search Engines.)

And don't try to fool the spiders -- stay within the bounds of an ethical and balanced approach, and you'll always win in the long run.

References:

Marckini, Frederick, "Maximize the ROI of Your Search Engine Marketing by Measuring Beyond Click-Through" WebTrends Report.
Bowman, J.K., "Caching In On Content" Spider Food.
Bowman, J.K., "Search Engine Spamming" Spider Food.

Return to top.