Search Engine Promotion

It’s not Rocket Science

URL Ranking Methodology and Promotion Tools

The objective of search engine optimisation is to increase website visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site. This relative ranking is often viewed as a struggle to best use a few keywords, instead of a struggle to out-do your competition. If you search on your target keywords, you will see the leading site in the rankings. All you need to do is to be better than that number one site.

This page suggests ways to optimise and improve search engine results with ranking and promotion advice, placement hints, tips, and clues to improve your search engine keywords relative to existing leaders. It is not a simple task however and before you under take this effort you should consider employing the services of a Search Engine Marketing company.

Contrary to popular belief Search Engine placement is not about simply adding META tags and submitting your site to a load of search engine indexes and directories despite what you will be told time and time again by the less scrupulous search engine ranking and optimisation companies.

The first promotion step in obtaining significant web visitor counts is to seek first or second page search engine results. An early step is to build a great site with appropriate content for the field you operate in. One of the last steps is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory. In the middle is a step that is VITAL if you want to obtain front-page results, and most sites skim past this step because it is forgotten or too complex, but without it you are destined to be search engine fodder. The following FREE advice describes how to design your keywords with search engine ranking and optimisation in mind.

There are no search engine optimisation secrets - just ranking and promotion methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high search engine promotion ranking for desired search keywords criteria. This site targets improving web site search engine result rankings by using a “follow the leader” approach to keyword selection and page wording. For a major search engine, your search position, placement optimisation, and web site promotion ranking are commonly controlled by META keywords and top of page text. Once you know what keywords worked for the “leaders”, you may be able “beat the leader” and do even better but be prepared for a huge amount of work!

Proper web ranking optimisation results requires that you beat your competitors, so knowing the keywords used by your competition is the most important first step.

Here we will try to help you get a suitable ranking for your site if you wish to manage this project entirely yourself. Please beware that this will take an awful lot of work and maintenance so be prepared for the long haul.

Before you start:

Read any advice you can on Search Engine Ranking and optimisation. Top 10 rankings with every single major search engine and directory can be obtained, although not so many sites can get there and the effort is too great for most people or budgets. Beware that the top rankings change on a weekly or even daily basis and you will need to constantly maintain your efforts or employ the services of a specialist SEO company.

Each search engine is different although many of the same optimisation principles will apply to each of them. There are however some minor changes that will increase your ranking on one engine whilst decreasing your ranking on another. Beware of this also.

We recommend that you install TWO toolbar tools:

The Google Toolbar - we use this constantly to check rankings and to investigate backward links to sites. You can also study the Google Page Rank which will give you an indication of the popularity of the site.

The Alexa Toolbar - we install this, then go to our browser VIEW - TOOLBARS and turn off the expansion of this toolbar. We use it less frequently, but it also reports Google rankings plus traffic statistics including daily history in a nice graphical presentation. Again checking the popularity of your site, you can see its Alexa ranking which you can then compare freely to your main competitor.

Step 1 - Identify Your Competition

Spend some time working out which of your competitors website’s are the most successful. Try typing various different key phrases that you would like to be found under and make a note of your competitors. Using Alexa.com type a competitors site URL and then press Go and Alexa will come back with info about the site including its page rank. Essentially a lower number is better and means the site is busier than a site with a higher number. This should give you a good idea of whose keywords work and whose don’t. You know which site/s to model your optimisation efforts on now.

Step 2 - Using Link Tracking, locate the links TO that URL

Backward Linking - Many of the search engines will increase your ranking if they see that lots of trusted and related sites already in their directory have links to your website. For example if you were a plumbing supplies store and you received a link from the number one ranked plumbing wholesale website on Google then Google would look at your site as a reputable website and rank you higher accordingly. You need to obtain as many links as is possible from any site in a related field to your service.

How do I find out what the trusted sites are and who is already linking to me?

Thanks to Google this is an easy bit. Once you have researched who has the top ranking for your chosen key words or phrases then the hard bit is how you get them to give you a linking on their site. That bit is down to you.

Anyway, to find out who is linking to you just type your url in to Google and then press the backward links button. This assumes that you have already installed the excellent Google Toolbar on your pc. To research links you should have on your pc type in a key phrases of a similar business in your field and then once you have the results click on the link of the number one ranked site and press the backward links button again and you will find who is worth tapping up to obtain a link to your site.

Use your charm and sales skills to persuade the owner of that site to put a link to your site and bobs your uncle and you will encourage Google to rank you more highly. Obviously it would be ideal to get the number one ranked site who is in direct competition to you to create a link to you but even with your most silky charm skills this isn’t likely to be of much success so trying getting a related company. Take the example of the plumbing wholesalers. Set up and account with the number one ranked site and then ask them to list you. Maybe, just maybe they will.

Its is vital to create links from other sites if you intend to be serious about increasing your ranking on the search engines. Remember though that it is not just about getting lots of links to your site otherwise this would be easy as everyone with a bit of cash would just register lots of sites and then link them to your site. It is important to get other quality and highly ranked website’s to link to you. For example getting a link from bbc.co.uk would get you much higher credibility than getting a link from ten personal homepages from your mates. Try doing something newsworthy and BBC might just publish a story with a link to your site!

Search engines actively track the number and quality of inbound links to your website. This link popularity is one of the key factors search engines use to determine how highly to rank your website’s pages.

Actively increasing the number and quality of inbound links to your website can significantly boost the ranking of your web pages in search engines increasing the number of visitors to your website from search engines as well as from the inbound links themselves.

All the major search engines use link popularity to a greater or lesser extent to determine how highly to rank your web pages in search results. And the more competitive the subject area the more important your website’s link popularity becomes.

Step 3 - Identify used keywords

Take a look at your competition. They are the best place to look at what key words work best. Take a note of them and use them in your site. Whilst it is true that many engines simply ignore keywords nowadays and look further, examining the page title and other clues on your site to see where you should be ranked it is still important to include all methods to get them to realise when spidering your site that it is worthy of ranking in their database.

Remember do not steal or borrow code from your competitors pages otherwise this can land you in a lot of hot water. Website content is copyright automatically so you need to be aware of this however there is nothing to stop you recreating the message that your competitors site contains and learn from their site on how it obtained its ranking.

It is important to make sure that your site includes all the keywords and phrases in the various combinations to allow the search engine a chance to rank your site according to its relevancy to what the search engine user is searching for.

Also try all sort of different combinations of your keywords to see who comes top. For example will the top site for plumbing wholesale be the same as the top site for wholesale plumbing. You may find that the number two ranked site features for both phrases whilst the number one ranked site only features for plumbing wholesale but not the other way around which means you could lose an awful lot of potential traffic if you model your website on the number one ranked website.

It is vital that you research your keywords to ensure that the phrases that you are wishing to promote are being searched for by your potential customers. For example it is absolutely pointless being ranking Number one on all the major search engines and directories for the phrase “bean counters” if only ten people a month search for this phrase. It would probably be better to be ranked 50th for a phrase that was searched hundreds of thousands of times each month. There is a balance here however as being to far down the rankings can mean your ranking is pretty pointless anyway.

How do you find out which key phrases or key words are being searched on and in what quantity.

Use a tool called wordtracker which records all the searches from most of the major engines on a monthly basis and allows you to research each phrase. It can take a lot of effort to come up with suitable key phrases or key words but the effort can be worth it. Also you must pay for a subscription to the Word WordTracker service.

Step 4 - Create your page using your keywords and description

Warning: When adding your key words and key phrases to your web site do not overuse the words. If you do you may find that the search engines consider your efforts as an attempt to spam the engines.

The string “widgets, widgets suppliers, widgets ” would be considered spamming. Try using a keyword density analysis tool to analyse whether you are using an appropriate level of keywords in your website. If you are over or under using keywords then a good tool will tell you and you can make the appropriate changes.

For best results, the following Web marketing techniques should be avoided:

Remove any keywords that are not likely to be searched on. Use Web Tracker to check your phrases against their database and if a phrase or keyword is not used much then take it out. It wont do you any good and it makes the search engines job even harder to decide where to rank your site. Use the Image Alt Tags to repeat your keywords, phrases or descriptions but make sure you put them in a different order to how they are listed elsewhere in page.

Also, repeating your keywords in the content, as long as it is within a reasonable sentence construct and has appropriate context, will not be considered spamming. A search engine usually cares about spamming outside of the standard sentence construct when reviewing content instead of sentence spamming issues. Using exotic “hidden” text techniques will usually have you eliminated, so avoid them at any cost.

Step 6 - Add the common words to/from your Home Page

It is important that your TITLE be as descriptive as possible of what you do and that it contain your top keyword, but generally fewer than 14 words. Listings that include the search term in the META TITLE and META description tags have a higher click through rate (often more than double the traffic) than those that do not! Use these keywords to make up your search engine registration lists. Also, review your content to add these keywords, especially two/three-word phrases, into the content without losing the message. This is vital for a search engine that does not reference META tags.

You want to use these phrases time and again without spamming a search engine. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta description fields. Such a search engine will exclude some appropriate keywords unless you use them throughout your content. And try to keep the title and description fields as short as possible to prevent you from diluting the keyword impact.

Step 7 - Check your search engine placement

One of the simple tools for checking your ranking and to see how effective your optimisation has been is Google Analytics and Web CEO.

Once you have these ranking results, you can easily identify where you need to go back and resubmit your site and fine-tune your keywords. Hopefully you will be placed at or near the top of your search results page.

Step 8 - Refine and expand search engine keywords

Go To Step 1 again and again. We will be adding steps and additional tools (some as subscriptions) to this page in the future. You will want to visit this site EVERY TWO WEEKS or so just to make sure that you remain ranked where you need to be.

Search Engine optimisation and ranking, although great, is not enough. There are many that are too new to the web and do not know how to find a search engine, let alone how to use it. To many, the Internet is email, and nothing more. You still need to consider the other forms of promotion as discussed on our Web Site Promotion Steps page.

We suggest that you pace yourself, adding only up to five URL’s per day as a maximum, and not submitting more than two or three times per month. As a result, performing the above add requests as scheduled will allow you to remain within the acceptable range for most search engines.

This site contains advice that you need to design for higher keywords ranking results, although there are many wonderful promotion reference sites available.