A Guide To Search Engine OptimizationHow To Boost The Rankings Of Your Websites |
9. How to Boost the Rankings of Your PagesHow To Boost The Rankings Of Your Pages Tips to Increase Ranking and Website Traffic It is worth cataloguing the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings. • Create a site with valuable content, products or services. • Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document. • Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers. • Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc. • Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services. • Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service. • Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing. • Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc. • Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you. • Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc. • Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field. • When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy. • When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits. • Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness. Experts feel that web pages have to be search engine friendly in order to improve search engine rankings. Having a well designed and relevant web copy is crucial. This will help search engines easily index your web pages and rank them high. Besides internal page factors including frequency and positioning of relevant keyword phrases, the leading search engines now suggest the importance of off the page factors, particularly links from other domains. Google ranks individual URLs based on which other URLs link to them, which URLs link to those, and so on. Thus the steps you have to take are: Choose the terms that you wish to include as the most productive search terms for your site, terms that you associate with the correct target visitors to your site. Put those in the search engines and find what pages rank near the top for them. These top-ranking sites/pages would be on the top of your list, if you needed to plant links to your site on other pages. Once you have found the top ranked pages/sites for your chosen search term(s), you should check what sites or pages link to that site. If you get links from any of these sites to your target pages, you may be able to dramatically improve your ranking on Google and other crawler based Search Engines. If a website has a lot of interlinked pages, then even an obscure page from that site could be a reasonably effective candidate for having a link to your site. It is not essential that the link should be on the home page or prominent page of a popular site. Creating fake domains and letting those domains point to your site is a trick thought to be effective for improving page ranking at Google. However Google claims that this is not true and they are able to spot duplicate domains and domain scams. Your "link popularity" is simply a count of the number of web pages that are linked to you. Improving your website’s link popularity is absolutely vital for improving the visibility of your website with regard to Search Engines. You may want to know your link popularity for two reasons. The first is that your link popularity will improve your ranking on all crawler search engines. As discussed earlier, all crawler-based search engines have a component called the spider, which crawls from one webpage to another through links. Hence, more the websites linking to your website, the better are your chances of getting listed through a search engine. The second reason is that you might want to know which websites are linked to you and potentially referring traffic. Search engines give sites with good inbound and outbound links a higher ranking. The logic goes that if you provide outbound links to other material you are providing a valuable service: and, if other sites link to you then you must have content of value. The best way to discover how people are finding your web site is to analyze your site's activity logs. If you are unable to analyze their logs can instead use search engines to track down referral links. In particular, this method gives you an idea of how "popular" a search engine believes your site to be. Be aware that "popularity" is only one part of the link analysis systems that search engines such as Google use to rank web pages. The quality and context of links is also taken into account, rather than sheer numbers. You can use link:’site URL’ feature of many search engines to list all the pages that link to the selected site, and that too in order of Page Rank. For Google, North Light and AltaVista, use link:xxyyzz.com to find the listing of pages that link to the web site www.xxyyzz.com For Alltheweb use link.all instead of link and for Inktomi use ‘linkdomain’ instead of ‘link’ in the above example. The results would be a list of all pages (if indexed by the search engine) that link to your target site, listed in the order of popularity. If you need to find the link to specific pages instead of to an entire site, then the above link: feature will not work. Use the Advanced search features offered by HotBot and MSN Search, enter the full URL of the target page including http:// and use the option “links to URL” or similar. Some sites offer to run comparison of the links to a chosen site vis-à-vis three other chosen sites. http://linkpop.marketleap.com and http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com are two such sites where you could submit your target URL and three other URLs that you wish to have a comparison done. www.linkpopularity.com is a site that will analyze the link popularity of a chosen URL in three prominent search engines. Link analysis is somewhat different than measuring link popularity. While link popularity is generally used to measure the number of pages that link to a particular site, link analysis will go beyond this and analyze the popularity of the pages that link to your pages. In a way link analysis is a chain analysis system that accords weighting to every page that links to the target site, with weights determined by the popularity of those pages. Search engines use link analysis in their page-ranking algorithm. Search engines also try to determine the context of those links, in other words, how closely those links relate to the search string. For example if the search string was “toys”, and if there were links from other sites that either had the word toys within the link or in close proximity of the link, the ranking algorithm determines that this a higher priority link and ranks the page, that this is linked to, higher. As a site owner, you want to seek links from good pages that are related to the terms you want to be found for. Linking strategy is not a trick as many get rich quick merchants would have you believe. Links for the sake of links have no value whatsoever. Indeed, they can damage your rankings. So forget about link farms and other such nonsense. A small number of inbound links from great, relevant sites will be much more valuable than many links from low-traffic, irrelevant sites. However, you should not become obsessed by link popularity alone. Treat linking as one important aspect of your Search Engine Optimization strategy. Decide how much time and effort you are prepared to invest in relation to your other activities and be disciplined about your approach. Monitor your results and adapt your strategy as necessary. Once you have found the candidate sites that have high link popularity and link quality as seen through link analysis, the next step is to choose those that you believe may agree to reciprocal linking. Your competitors obviously would not, but in respect of others, you must try. Several sites have a page where they list useful links or relevant links, as a service to their site visitors. You can locate the email of the company or of the person who handles link requests for such list pages. When you make a request for reciprocal linking, approach the target site owner or webmaster or link request handler by providing your URL and a short description and explain how providing this link would be a valuable and useful addition for the benefit of their audience. The description is important as often that would be what appears in their links page. Offer them reciprocal linking from your site’s links and resources page. Better still tell them that you have already provided a reciprocal link to their site. Build a good links and resources page on your website. Present the links in an organized manner so that this is useful to your site visitors too. Of course, you do not want this links page to be amongst the first pages accessed by your visitor, as this may induce the person to leave your site. Some webmasters try to build a standalone links page that is totally isolated from all other pages on their site. This would perhaps provide an URL to the reciprocal link provider, but in reality it is not a genuine link page at all. Avoid these tactics; they will not work in the long run. Finally, not all sites are equal and therefore not all links are equal. A link from a high traffic industry portal is worth infinitely more that a link from a low-traffic free-for-all site. Concentrate of giving the search engines what they really want - great content, well-organized, well-published and linked to other relevant material. Concentrate on that and you will be rewarded. Like reciprocal linking, inward links to your website can be an effective strategy to increase your website’s visibility to Search Engines. Inward links are links pointing to your websites from other websites without providing a reciprocal link from your website. There are many techniques to improve inward linking. Many of these have enjoyed success with Search Engines. The most proven technique for inward linking is through Ebooks. You can offer interesting and educative Ebooks for free to other websites and they could install them on their sites. The Ebook you create would have a link to your website. This will allow a spider to crawl through that link and visit you website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have a link to your website that would increase the probability of your website being listed with a crawler based Search Engine. Other techniques include posting newsletters, white papers, news stories and press releases to other websites, particularly industry specific and general portals. The newsletters and press releases would contain a link pointing to your website, thus, increase its visibility to crawlers. Affiliate programs also help in improving inward linking. In affiliate schemes, you provide incentives (usually a commission on the sale of your product or service) for other websites to become affiliates (i.e. carriers). These affiliates then generate you direct traffic; the added bonus comes in the form of those inward links to your site. Affiliate Programs create powerful alliances between your web site and your various "affiliate" web sites. Providing affiliate links to your website would improve your website’s search engine ranking. It makes your website more visible to crawlers. While Meta tags are not the complete answer to the question of "How do I improve my search engine ranking?” they can help with some search engines. Since there are millions of pages with Meta tags, you can add all the pages you want and still not control a sizeable percentage of the pages on the World Wide Web. What are Meta tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag, information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, Meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. Meta tags may help you with some search engines, so you’ll want to consider adding them to every page you create. On the other hand, you can find many highly ranked web pages without Meta tags. For example, Meta tags have no effect on how humans will view your pages and enter your information into directories like Yahoo. Titles Use Keywords In Page Titles It is recommended to use keywords in page titles itself. This title tag is different from a Meta tag, but it's worth considering it in relation to them. Whatever text one places in the title tag (between the The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings. If you have designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site. The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page. The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking. So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing. Dedicating first three positions for keywords in title avoiding the stop words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and the like is crucial in search engine optimization. The TITLE tag is an important one for search engines like Google, as that is often the first one indexed and it is given higher weighting in the relevance rankings. You have to pay attention to this tag. Keep it short (lower than 40 characters) and let the tag have material relevant to the keywords used during search. As an example, if you had stuffed your Company Name as the TITLE tag, it would not help. The visitor that you want to attract is unlikely to be looking for your Company name in the search string. Think creatively as to what keywords people would use if they were looking for goods or services that your site offers. Keywords and Description Two Meta tags that are important are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION. You have to be very careful about how these are developed and positioned. Frequency and location of the keyword that is being searched are important criteria that determine relevance and hence page ranking. The search engine would generally consider the page more relevant if the keyword that is being sought is in the TITLE tag or is in the KEYWORDS tag near the top of the page. Similarly if the sought after keyword is found being repeated in the page, it may give the impression that this is a more relevant page and improve ranking. There is a caveat, though. The above is only a general rule that has been often followed by many search engines, but then there are many variants to it. Several players in the SEO industry have tried to proclaim that this is the gospel truth and hence it has spawned a large number of experts that suggest and resort to keyword stuffing and spamming (repeating long strings of keywords). The result can often be just the opposite. Some search engines penalize pages that have keyword spamming. Some will just ignore these pages. Some engines also do not read Meta tags. The intelligent method today is to stay away from spamming and to use tags judiciously. Blend your technique to attain the right frequency and location, but stay away from any excess or spamming. You can provide an in-depth list of words and phrases in the KEYWORD Meta tag. These words should have some relevance to the specific page or, at least, to your website. While you can vary the case of the keywords, you’ll want to concentrate on the lower case because over 90% of the searches either use lower case or are conducted on search engines that are not case sensitive. These keywords should contain variations on the same theme. If your site was about gardening, you could use garden, gardening, home and garden, home gardening, vegetable garden, and herb garden. These are all words that might be used in searches for information that your site might provide. The keywords Meta tag is not intended to replace the actual text on your website. This tag is simply to aid the spider in collecting accurate information about your web pages. The DESCRIPTION tag is used by search engines like Inktomi for the page summary that is displayed on the results page. This summary is what the visitor will read and decide whether he/she wishes to enter your site. If the description is just full of repeated keywords, it won’t do you any good, even if your page is ranked high. You still do not have a visitor. May be you have put off a visitor. Meta Robots Tag This is probably the only other prominent Meta tag. This is a very peculiar tag in the sense that it indicates what web pages should not be indexed by Search Engines. The Robots tag is inserted in between the header tags. An example of the Robots Tag is given below: By default, a crawler will try to index all your web pages and will try to follow links from one page to another. This can be prevented by using the Robots Tag. Most major search engines support the Meta robots tag. The Meta robots tag also has some extensions offered by particular search engines to prevent indexing of multimedia content. There are other Meta tags apart from the ones explored above but most of them are simply ignored by almost all search engines. To sum up, some search engines will give you a boost if you have Meta tags. But don't expect that to necessarily be enough to put you in the top ten. Meta tags are mainly a design element you can tap into, a crutch for helping information-poor pages better be acknowledged by the search engines. Some other Keyword Research Tools One need to choose those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand, but not being already used by many other websites and competitors, and thus has low competition. There are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them. Apart from the Wordtracker which was already discussed in an other article, we have some more equally important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam. Overture's http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesn't tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type ‘Computer’, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘Computer’ was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly 'computer game' was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month. Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include, • Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position. • Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once. • Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page. • More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases. Guidebeam http://www.guidebeam.com/ is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers generated against each phrase are Guidebeam's estimation of how relevant that phrase is. These softwares are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site. This is an important step in the SEO exercise. What keywords do you need to emphasize and include? How do you choose the most relevant keywords that will be used by your target audience? Pose yourself the question: What would my target visitor be looking for and for which queries I would like to lure him/her to my site? Imagine those queries, as many of them as you can think. Apply this to all categories of visitors that you are targeting. Then list those queries and formulate your keywords from those. Let your creativity develop grammar and synonym variants of these keywords. The same would apply to descriptions; however while keywords have to match closely with search strings, descriptions should be drafted to allure the visitor after he has seen your listing. It should tell the visitor that your site is indeed offering him best information or outcome for what he is looking. Select phrases (at least two words), rather than single words, as there would be too many contenders for single word searches. You are much better off focusing on specific search keywords and using longer phrases. Keyword Density Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places. If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site. Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page. Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5% The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it. Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%. Simple steps to check the density: • Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect. • Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page. • Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text. • When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page. • Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density. The location of keywords on your website is vital. You may have placed keywords at only a few locations but if they are inserted at important positions, your search engine ranking may be boosted. The most important position is the Title of the page. Ensure that your keyword is placed in the Title. Another proven strategy is to place keywords towards the beginning of the web page. For instance, inserting keywords in page headlines, other sub-titles, and introductory paragraphs would certainly help rankings. Avoid using images or tables at the beginning of the page. This will only shove keywords down on the web page, and in turn harm your search engine rankings. Amongst other strategies, “stemming” is another important technique for placing keywords. This is discussed in detail later in this chapter. Positioning Meta tags and keywords into web pages for better ranking should not be confused with spamming. Whatever you do, avoid spamming and keyword stuffing. Search Engines have mechanisms that can spot spamming and as a result ignore such web pages. The key is to insert just “enough” keywords into the web page so as to make the content relevant. Keywords have to be consistent with the entire content of the web page. In other words, do not insert non – relevant keywords just for the sake of improving page rankings. Many webmasters believe that adding more graphics to a web page would make it more attractive. This is a misconception. A web page should be rich with HTML text rather than graphics. This makes the site more relevant as Search Engines can easily scan text. Search engines often look for variants of words from a stem and this is referred to as stemming. Thus ‘play’ can also lead to a search for ‘plays’ or ‘playing’ or ‘players’. Similarly singular and plural forms of words and case can lead to different results for some search engines. Some advisers suggest that Capitalization is a better bet in choosing keywords. However, the wiser counsel is that these variants do not make that great a difference and one should prefer lowercase. Most searches are made in lowercase. Moreover, many search engines are not case-sensitive. You may like to know what are the most popular search words and strings, so that you could choose top keywords related to your own site. Some resources that help in this are discussed here. Place your subject term in Overture’s free Search Term Suggestion Tool. The result will be a list of all search terms related to the word you inserted that were most popular at Overture. The list is in the order of popularity. Thus you know what most people are looking for. Wordtracker has a fee-based service that lets you do the same based on Meta search engines such as Dogpile and Meta Crawler. Supplement this effort through the Related Searches feature that is seen in many search engines. Sites such as AltaVista, Yahoo, HotBot and others have this feature. Place your subject or one of the target keywords in the search string on these. From the results page go to the section: “Others searched for” or “Related searches” that is available on many search engines and you will find the other related terms listed there.
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Browse Site2. the Different Between Se & Directory 3. Algorithms, Crawling & More 4. Submitting Your Url to Google 7. How Does Inktomi Rank Web Pages 9. How to Boost the Rankings of Your Pages 10. Must Have Features Your Web Site 11. Bonus Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic 12. Web Hosting Services and Domain Names |
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