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articles
How to Get Higher Search Engine Rankings
By Theresa Wilkinson, W-edge design
Reprinted with permission from the STC Intercom magazine - 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.
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"Theresa - I just wanted to let you know how much my business has increased since you took over my website. What I am delighted about is that I am
receiving good, solid business leads from my target audience. How do you do that?" Sylvia Watson, President, Healing Environments with Feng Shui |
"I wanted to let you know that our rankings on Google are now in the top 3, on almost every search we've conducted (most of them are in 1st place)—without using quotes to call out specific phrases.
This is in searches that result in over 20,000 pages per search. We're backlogged with orders until late June, possibly July. You ROCK!” Diana Holycross, Tiles with Style."
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