Webmasters
The webmasters Seven Steps of Search Engine Optimization
A common misconception of search engine marketing by practicing webmasters is that all you have to do is submit your Web site and then you're done. Industry veterans know better. Search engine marketing, and more specifically, search engine optimization is an ongoing process. While it certainly offers many rewards, it is not a silver-bullet, single click solution to bringing more traffic to your Web site. Anyone that makes such lofty promises probably also sells a magic elixir that will cure cancer and re-grow hair.
Like most things worthwhile, search engine optimization requires at least a modest investment in time to be truly successful. Fortunately, it's an investment that rewards you handsomely when you know the steps to doing it right.
Search engine optimization offers a higher return on investment (ROI) than most, if not all other forms of online advertising. Countless studies have placed search engine marketing at the top of the "most effective forms of online marketing" list.
After all, what lead could be more targeted, and more ready to make a purchase than one that is specifically searching for what you have to offer? Most other types of advertising are passive, hoping to catch the curiosity of a potential buyer at just the right moment. Conversely, searching is active. The prospect is pro-actively looking for a product, service, or information.
Webmasters take heed: With billions of searches being conducted daily, how does an online business tap into this incredible market potential? You must appear near the top of the results for search keywords that apply to your business. That means the search engine must find your Web site's content more relevant to a given search than the millions of other pages in its index.
Simply submitting your site and then hoping for the best is not an effective strategy. Instead, you must understand the process to achieving top rankings in the major search engines, and then do something about it. To industry insiders, this process is known as search engine optimization or SEO.
WEBMASTERS RULES: Generating free traffic for your Web site via search engine optimization requires the following seven steps:
Just as bad, choose keywords that are too competitive and you'll soon throw your hands up in frustration trying to rise to the top.
Furthermore, if you choose keywords that are not closely related to the type of buyer you cater to, then visitors will arrive at your site but never make a purchase.
The solution? Simply make a list of relevant keywords that balance both popularity and competition. WordTracker is the best-known service for helping you do this quickly and easily. It brainstorms keywords in seconds and then helps you narrow that list by ordering them based on both popularity and competition factors.
When I first started optimizing pages back in 1996, I had an employee take my keyword list and plug each keyword into a dozen search engines. He would then carefully sift through page after page of search results looking for our Web site. After that, he would record the ranking, the page, and the URL in a spreadsheet, and move to the next keyword, and then the next search engine. Needless to say, this process took many hours of precious time and had to be repeated at least monthly. That's when I came up with the idea for WebPosition , the first software product to report your rankings on the major search engines, and then to show you how to improve them.
What is Web page optimization? Simply put, your goal is to give the search engine what it wants to see. The easiest way to determine what its looking for is to study pages already ranking in the top 10 and to emulate key aspects of those pages on your own site. No, this does not mean plagiarizing text from your competition. Instead, it means emulating the basic statistical elements of the page such as keyword counts, link popularity, word counts, and other criteria.
Obviously, doing this by hand can be a daunting task even for a trained mathematician. That's why we developed the Page Critic module in WebPosition Gold to make the job accessible even to the novice. It analyzes the densities of keywords on your page and your competition's pages, does the math, and then makes specific recommendations for improvement. Help links are provided to explain each step. It also includes an extensive knowledge base of tips and strategies for achieving top ten placements. The tips will vary for each search engine based upon its particular preferences.
Besides using a tool like WebPosition, books and newsletters can also be a valuable resource for staying informed. Books are often less helpful, though, as it doesn't take long before they become out of date in this industry. In addition, both kinds of resources can only go so far in their advice, whereas a software product can analyze your specific page, engine, and keyword choice, making recommendations much more appropriate to your situation.
Submissions today can easily be done by hand or via a submission tool. In the case of WebPosition, it can help prevent you from making common mistakes like over submitting, submitting non-existent pages, losing track of what you have already submitted, and so forth. It also gives you estimates regarding how long it currently takes to get indexed at each engine, and when re-submission is recommended. Once you build some third-party links to your Web site, most engines like Google will re-spider your pages regularly without the need to re-submit.
SEO may seem like a daunting task at first glance. However, You'd be surprised at how much a tool like WebPosition Gold can organize and simplify the process for you.