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search engine ranking; submission urls, link popularity, reciprocal links, pay-per-clicks, best keywords. how-to information for beginner webmasters -- do-it-yourself website design, development, promotion & maintenance at little or no cost. last revised 10/27/06 | ||
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Search Engine Optimization "Optimizing" for search engines - search engine optimization - means having the right things in the right places so that spidering programs (also known as "robots") get the information and impressions about your site that you want them to get. Basically this means
Graphics can be lovely looking but they will have no meaning to search engines or their spidering programs, with the exception of text in the a) "ALT=" tags and the b) "TITLE=" tags where you might place words among the image code. When opitimizing for search engines, you must think in terms of what the search engines can see. It can help to have keywords in both ALT and TITLE tags. ( For example, if you had a used motorcycle sales site and place an image of a motorcycle: <IMG SRC="motorcycle.jpg" width="120" height="100" alt="picture of used motorcyle for sale" title="used motorcycles and parts sales"> ) metatags The first thing search engines will look at are the metatags. These are invisible to surfers and located in the code at the top of your webpages after the <BODY,> <HEAD> and <TITLE></TITLE> tags and before the </HEAD> tag. The description metatag gives search engines the description for the site's listing. The keywords metatag lists the keywords the webmaster thinks are most representative of the site -- the words he or she hopes will be used by search engines to send surfers to their site. (The title metatag, by the way, should be the first tag in the <HEAD> section.) Other metatags are used to instruct search engines on whether you want them to spider through your site at all, when to revisit and re-spider and a number of other choices, etc. There are several sources of good information about meta tags.
keywords The metatag keywords list has less meaning to search engines but if they use it, they may not read past the first 200 characters. To be safe, have your most powerful keywords listed in the first 150 characters. Separate keywords or keywords phrases with commas. A good rule of thumb is not to use the same keywords more than three times -- twice to be conservative (i.e., "web, web site, web master, web design, web site development" in the keyword list might get the word "web" rejected altogether).
Now, this is an area for thought. If you chose keywords that millions search for AND if you believe you have a shot at getting into the top ratings on search engines, you should be picking very searched for keywords. If you chose keywords that are not popular with your competitors' sites but that are searched by search engine users, you can rank high on search engines more easily. If, for example, you have a page like this one you are reading, and you are determined to get a lot of traffic and determined to do whatever you need to do to get a lot of traffic (late hours, paid ads, etc.)...: You might think "optimizing" would be a good key word. However, if you check Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool (available to Overture users in the Modify Listings > Add Key Words section or via a link at add-url.net), you find that "optimizing" was searched by Overture searchers only 122 times in 2/02. On the other hand, that same tool would tell you that "search engine optimization" was searched for 78,250 times in 2/02. Thus it would be better, under those circumstances as layed out above, to have the phrase "search engine optimization" as a keyword and it would be better to use the phrase in the text instead of "optimizing for search engines" or "optimizing."] Another keyword search frequency tool is available on BrainFox.com's site. On the other hand, if you feel that you may be limited in the amount of traffic you can shoot for, then picking "search engine optimization" would be unlikely to do much for you because it is likely that most popular sites use this popular term. The highest rankings you could hope for might be little better than your site not being listed at all. In this case you need some keywords that are not used by more popular competitor sites. These keywords, though less searched, are likely to be easier to achieve high rankings for on the search engines. Number one on a search term that is searched only 100 times each month is likely to bring more traffic than being the seventeen hundredth on a search term that hundreds of thousands search for every day. For my own sites, I'm now trying to assure a mix of keywords that are likely to be less used by competitors and thus easier to get ranking on and keywords that are likely to be helpful only if I can be very competitive somehow, with the most popular competitors. My goal is to end up someday perhaps high on the search engines for all of them, but initially I need to be strong on some keywords that will help me get noticed by more surfers -- and then hopefully become more referred to by other sites. Coming up with keywords to try. A nifty way to come up with keywords to start researching is to go to a search engine you like, put in your best idea of your best keyword, and see what sites come up in the top few positions. Then check their keyword list (once the page is loaded, go to the menu along the top of your browser, click on View and then click on Page Source or Source. This can be helpful in helping you generate more keywords you haven't thought of, which you should then get some frequencies on before you decide which to try to use most often. Services available. Another strategy to find the best keywords and optimize for search engines is to utilize some of the services available on the internet.  WordTracker is a cool service that offers several aids -- some for a small fee and some free. A nifty free service they offer is an emailed weekly list of the top 500 keywords used on the search engines. This is handy to see what kind of words and what kind of phrases are most commonly used by surfers. They offer, for a small fee, to help you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service -- many of which you might never have considered -- and to show you how popular these keywords really are. They'll also show you the chances of making it into the top 10 rankings on the major search engines.
There are also computer programs that can help generate keywords by checking the web. Some of these are available on-line. So far, I haven't found one these that seemed helpful enough to remember, much less suggest or recommend. SearchEngineWatch What People Search For Mall-net.com Getting To Zero Competition |
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Focused Content Focus. Search engines look for the focus of a site. If you have a lot of things thrown together, you're going to baffle search engines as to what your keywords should be. If you are putting together a site about dealing with anxiety, and if you have all sorts of discussion, articles and links to resources about anxiety, your site is focused. If you have a lot of links, articles and discussion about gardening, leather crafting and the relative merits of plastic, you're site is not focused and you may find yourself without listings for any of your subjects. Content. Content refers to what you have to offer in the way of information, ideas and resources. A site with a bunch of graphics is not considered to have content unless there is text -- words in sentences -- that is explaining the graphics. Focused content is king with regard to search engines -- as well as return visitors and people recommending your site. search engine optimization resources Accusubmit - how search engines rank Brief list of criteria used by some of the major search engines for deciding how to rank sites. Search-Engines-Web.com A page of esoteric information about different tags and metatags and their effects on search engine indexing and ranking. SiteSoutions.comSearch engine optimization service. Focused on building traffic via optimization of keywords, metatags, search engine -specific coding. Several free tools to try (website analysis, keyword popularity tool, link checker, metatag generator). Free Site AnalysisFree Search Engine Checker Free Meta Tag Generator Free Search Engine Submissions Aardvark Web Site Promotion Search engine optimization company. Web site promotion techniques can help you build up your web site traffic and boost those search engine placements while reducing your headaches for a fee. Search Engine Warriors Search engine optimization company. Web site promotion techniques can help you build up your web site traffic and boost those search engine placements while reducing your headaches for a fee. Several articles on website optimization and search engine issues. Solution-Shelf Focused on FrontPage add-ins and tweaks, this site has several articles about optimizing for search engines that I have decided to employ in my search engine optimization. Check it out. robots.txt You may want to have some pages or subdirectories left un-spidered. You accomplish this by having a robots.txt file in your root directory on the server. The file needs to be in ascii and follows simple guidelines. See: WebPr.co.uk, tardis.ed.ac.uk check. search engine optimization analyses The following are a variety of search engine optimization analyses that operate on different parameters and do their analyses on the basis of differing guidelines for optimizing. The variations in their guidelines reflect the degree to which search engines frequently change and work to keep mysterious their rules and guidelies in order to purposefully try to keep the challenge of search engine optimization baffling. Suggestion: run each and be conservative in applying their suggestions. (For example, one analysis may tell you that your keywords can use and should use up to 1000 characters while another says that you should keep keywords under 200 characters. A tactic might then be to make sure you have your best keywords in the first 200 characters if you do intend to have more than 200.) Dr. Watson FluxCenter.com FreeURL.com SiteSolutions.com
WebLocman meta tag analyzer search engine submission To be known at all to the search engines you must tell them you are on the net -- or you need to wait until they discover a link to you somewhere on another site (another site that the search engines already knew about). Each search engine has its own procedure. Once submitted or otherwise discovered, the spider (and maybe a human) goes there and gets your keywords and a gist of your site to include in their search engine listings for retrieval when someone asks about one of your keywords. There are basically two ways to submit to search engines:
manual search engine submission (recommended) Manual search engine submission -- you do it yourself -- is a little tedious but widely advised. You personally submit your site and its individual pages by going to the search engine's home page and finding the link that says something like "Add a Site" or "Submit URL" (it's usually very tiny and at the top or the bottom of the page or you can click here for a list of search engines' submission page urls. Criteria for listing: no adult? no free sites? You might glance at the search engine's criteria for submission, too, if you have anything that might be considered "iffy" on your site (adult only content, colorful language, bomb-making instructions, etc.) -- or if you have a site on a free website server. Many search engines don't want anything off color or they want to list it very carefully. Some search engines don't want to list websites on free website servers. Don't just submit the home page. You should submit each substantial page of your site as if it were a site by itself unless otherwise indicated by the search engine's submission page. This way each page becomes a potential doorway for surfers to enter your site from the search engines. But beware -- the accepted wisdom is that some search engines will think you're up to something crooked if you submit more than 5 pages from your site in any given day and may not list you at all or may put you on a list of sites to check out more carefully before inclusion. Option: Pay for quick spidering? If you like quick, most search engines will recommend to you that you pay to have your site spidered and processed and included in their data banks within a few weeks. You can hand over two or three hundred dollars to many of the sites for this fast inclusion in their lists. Or, you can submit your site free via what their sorry-about-the-slowness, maybe-it-will-take-about-6-months option. If you have the money to pay, you're probably way out of my league and are dealing with issues and opportunities that I can't even guess at -- and you shouldn't be bothering with this (the Wannabe Webster) website of information. Hire a consultant. Free works fine. For those who can't throw down several hundreds of dollars to get listed, the cheaper option really does work fine. You may find one that insists on a big charge and has no freebee option. My reaction was to completely skip the one I came across and I later found my site listed there anyway. |
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Googliscious Practices Google is the current leader of the pack when it comes to search engines. When Google talks, people listen. Optimizing for Google will help you get the best rankings on the currently most popular, most powerful search engine. Google has several helpful little pages on practices and policies that help webmasters get the best of rankings. These are accessible through links that they have on the Google results pages and around the search entry box. (Click on the link entitled "About Google" and then click on Webmaster Info and then click on Webmaster Guidelines and then click on What are Google's design and technical guidelines? and then read, read, read. |
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Option: Pay a service to submit your site You can also pay a service to submit you to multiple search engines. You will find all manner of ads for submission services popping up when you submit your site and you may get all sorts of email ads offering such services, too. Some promise to submit you to hundreds of search engines around the world. Most of the search engines they are referring to are simply web pages that have a "search this page" program and most of them want your submission to turn around and use your email address. Many of the search engine services promise to submit you monthly, saying many search engines drop you after 30 days -- which is probably true but far less important than you might think. No search engine that cares if anyone uses it could survive if it dropped its listings every 30 days. The search engines that drop you after 30 days were likely trading listings of 30 days duration for email addresses or some other reward they could glean. If, however, you want those extra hundreds (some services say) or thousands (other services say) of links out there in cyberspace and can afford to pay to have them renewed monthly, then maybe its worth it to you to pay a service to do that. Search engines, it is widely rumored, don't like automated submissions and try to foil them. They prefer that you submit manually, but I don't think I've heard of anyone being penalized for using such services -- other than the possibility that your submission may not make it past the search engines' anti-automation procedures or your email address may suddenly be very popular with junk email (spam) advertisers. "Submitted monthly to thousands of search engines." Many of the search engine submission services brag that they will submit your site to hundreds, if not thousands, of search engines -- and that they'll do it monthly. First, there are not thousands or hundreds of search engines. There are only a few dozen big ones and maybe a few hundred little focused search engines. What the submit-to-thousands services are really offering to do is sumbit to the major search engines, many little search engines and hundreds of websites that will list your site for a week or two and then bump you off for more listings. The fact that they bump you off on these little websites is why you need to be submitted every month. You don't need to be submitted monthly to the well known search engines -- or even ever again after you're listed -- unless your site goes down for some period of days or months (long enough for the spiders to find you are closed). Verica -:- One Million SubmitI manually submit my pages when I add one to the site. I also use Verica. Verica submits my site to a reasonably impressive list of sites and sends me an email report of successes and problems with any particular search engine site.
Submission Resources submit to search engines urls A page of search engine submission page urls you can use to go to individual search engines yourself and manually submit your url. (I'd be happy to include more submission urls -- or sites with really good info -- if anyone has any suggestions.) searchenginewatch.com - all sorts of search engine info Two pages of search engine submission information that I found very helpful in getting a little understanding of all this. "popularity" "Popularity" is generally determined by how many times search engines find links to you out there as they spider the World Wide Web. The highest popularity rankings are achieved when the spiders find links to you on sites like yours out there. There are two ways to get people linking to you One way is to have your site looking so good and so full of reasons for visits that vistors that come across your site actually want to recommend your site on theirs. The other way is to reach out to other webmasters and ask for reciprocal links. Content Content is the stuff you might have on your site that would make it worth while for visitors with websites to take the time to link to you for their own benefit or for the benefit of their visitors. Having a lot of good information, having cool, helpful articles, having good links collections, etc. - things that you yourself would want to keep a link to. Reciprocal links Reciprocal links are a very potent strategy for getting rankings up. Reciprocal links are exchanges of links with other websites -- each puts the other's url on his links page. (I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine -- I make you a little more "popular"-looking, and in return you make me look more "popular"-looking.) Soliciting reciprocal links amounts to visiting other sites and asking their webmasters if they would like an exchange. Start by going to other pages like yours or in some way pertinent to your site's topic. Look for their links page and see what's there. You can pretty much tell if it seems they there is a likelihood that an email offering to exchange links might be worthwhile. Many sites include only a few links -- all to mega-site resources that are unlikely to bother with reciprocating links. Many more sites include a lengthy list of other sites -- some only have links to sites focused on a specific topic -- others have links to sites focused on a wide variety of themes. Often there will be a statement somewhere on the site briefly offering reciprocal links. Each one of these sites that have such links pages are obviously interested in reciprocal links. Further, it is likely that all these sites will have links pages full of urls to sites that are interested in reciprocal links. Then visit each site, find the webmaster's email address and send an email a) asking if they would like to exchange links, b) giving them your url, title and description and c) asking them to let you know when they get your link up by sending you their url, title and description. Surfing the web, soliciting reciprocal links often seems like mining. You find a vein and work it till you have all the gold and then move on to further prospecting. It is a lot of work but it goes well with tv watching. Do reciprocal links bring in surfers? Yes, they do, though I've never seen research data. The percentage of surfers that go to sites from other sites' links pages is probably quite small compared to the percentage of search engine referrals. For reciprocal links to work as a referral source, you need to find a lot of sites that compliment yours and vice versa and the links need to be presented in a very prominent, attractive, engaging manner. Links' descriptions are important. Links pages can be portals to your site if they have a lot of your keywords in their descriptions. Also, links pages with a lot of your keywords in their descriptions reinforce the apparent focus of your site.Your link description, on the other hand -- used on the sites that link to you -- reinforce to the spiders that those sites are like your site. Beware of gimmicky gimmicks. You should be aware that there are a lot of services and programs that say they'll help you put together hundreds of reciprocal links. These are sometimes called "farms" and many function like pyramid schemes. You place your name on their list and promise to post a page of other peoples' links on your website in return for others posting a page of links that includes yours. BEWARE! I keep running across articles expressing concern that some search engines are beginning to think that if you use a a flaky links strategy for reciprocal links, your site might be banned from their search engine altogether or at least be given lower ratings -- so use discretion. Programs, services & resources that aid in gathering reciprocal links. Below are some programs and services that seem to be well thought of in some circles. These are likely to save a great deal of time (as compared to the way I've been doing it), but, again, be mindful that search engines don't appreciate slick strategies for reciprocal links (see paragraph above). Of the paid services, be mindful of free sites, big promises and agreements and if they maintain your links for you, be sure you understand what that means.
Mining opportunities (other than randomly finding and using other sites' reciprocal links pages). Personally, I do not use automated reciprocal link gathering programs like the Zeus program. I do use the Zeus results. Here's a great head-start on getting reciprocal links -- a mountain range in cyberspace with ample veins of gold. Go to Zeus (http://www.zeuscollective.com/index.zeus) and put in one of your main keywords and you'll get a long page of sites that are 1) focused on your keyword and 2) interested in reciprocal links -- and 3) each site will have lists of other sights in their links directories that ALSO want reciprocal links in your area of focus, AND 4) each of those sites will have lists of other sites in their links directories to other sites that may want reciprocal links. [Note: Not all the links listed in the Zeus directories are to sites that want reciprocal links. Reciprocators are listed first with a big star to indicate they are a "link partner." Sites in smaller font are the ones the Zeus robot found and sent emails to asking for, but not getting, reciprocation.] Again, as described above, you visit each site, find the webmaster's email address and send an email a) asking if they would like to exchange links, b) giving them your url, title and description and c) asking them to let you know when they get your link up by sending you their url, title and description. How many links do you have out there in cyberspace? Some search engines let you query them for how many links are linked to you and there is at least one service that will reach out and check for you. You usually get this information by doing a search for "link:http://www.mysitename.com". MarketPosition Link Popularity Check Check how many how many pages at MSN, AltaVista, Lycos and HotBot have links to your site. How do you rank on the search engines out there in cyberspace? You wear your fingers to the bone on your keyboard and stretch your brain and energy levels to the limit and you want to see how you did. You can go to each search engine and search your keywords and see what happens. Or, you might try some software. Agent Web Ranking is free software that you install on your computer. It's very user-friendly, seems to work hard, offers a lot of helpful webmaster-oriented links, and does a very complete job of finding out how you rank on many search engines. RankPilot will check the search engines online for you for free. This is a quick and dirty little service and it is VERY likely to UNDERestimate your rankings -- but for free, it's worth the price.
articles to ezines = another type of popularity Pay-per-click is a somewhat new idea, popular in just the last few years. The idea is that you can "bid" to have either a high ranking placement (in the top few) of several search engines, or some sort of "featured" listing at the top of the first page of l Pay-per-click / paying for ranking Pay-per-click is a somewhat new idea, popular in just the last few years. The idea is that you can "bid" to have either a high ranking placement (in the top few) of several search engines, or some sort of "featured" listing at the top of the first page of listings presented a surfer when they search a particular keyword. You pay only when a surfer clicks on your link. You bid against other interested webmasters. When there are very few interested others, you can have such a listing for as little as one cent. When the competition is high, you might need to pay several dollars. A big advantage of some of the pay-per-click engines is that they sell their highest clicks to other search engines. Overture, for example, has agreements with several of the major search engines -- probably by way of giving them a little piece of the pie. Using Overture and bidding for one of the top three placements puts your site's url and description in the top listings on several search engines.  Click here! Fine tuning pay-per-clicks. When you pay for clicks it doesn't cost you anything if your link isn't clicked on. What costs you a bundle is being clicked on by surfers that don't buy your products or use your services. Paying for clicks and enticing surfers to your site is only worth the money if they buy something -- or at least bookmark you and recommend you to someone who does. Try to organize the statistics on the pay-per-click site with your counter statistics (see SiteMeter) to see if you can determine whether you need to fine tune by either being clearer in your link description on the search engine (so only those who really want to find your material click through) or beef up your presentation on your website to present a stronger sell.
I used the pay-per-click sites below for the first six months my head-cleaners site was up and am now seeing if I can mostly fly solo. (Mostly, in that I still pay about $2/day for clicks for my two sites combined.) Pay-per-click opportunities were very helpful in the beginning months while I waited to establish popularity-based rankings on the basis of building my numbers of reciprocal links and adding interesting information I have on the site. |
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pay-per-click search engines Note that a more obscure site will get far less visitors but their clicks are usually very cheap. It can be worthwhile to pay a small number of dollars for clicks on the lesser used search engines because you can often find a bargain price for clicks. As with the larger pay-per-click search engines, you only pay for the clicks that do go to you. In the long run, fewer clicks per day for a reasonable or bargain price can give a much better return than many clicks per day at a large price - it depends on how compelling your site is.
 McAfee AntiVirus Protection Click here! My do-it-yourself website design experience dates from 1/01, when I began a tiny e-commerce enterprise -- a web sight designed to sell a very modest product line of 7 items (www.head-cleaners.com). You can get a measure of my web design credentials by looking at this site; you can measure my search engine savvy by searching a few search engines for the words "hypnosis tapes" (began promoting 2/01) or "website design" (began promoting 3/02). Recommendations on this or any other page on my websites are candidly made on the basis of what I really believe, but keep in mind I'm not suggesting I'm all-Knowing and I'm offering no guarantees or warrantees. To be open and above board, the little blinking star or a graphic ad indicates services or products from sites that will pay me a commission if you purchase something -- if you arrive on their site from this site.- g. johnson |
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