Search Engine Optimization

Search engine promotion strategies can sometimes be very confusing and at other times, outright strange. However, if you understand the basics, you can implement a successful promotion strategy that makes sense.

By far the best way to increase you website's search engine placement is by regularly adding valuable content to your website that attracts visitors and makes them want to come back.

Everything else you do to promote your website should be secondary to this main goal because the other tactics only support the content and help the pages to increase in rank faster.

Without quality content, your website will not consistently place well within search egnines no matter how much time and effort you spend at it.

Why Search Engines Are Important:

First, search engines are important because over 80% of web users utilize search engines to locate what they are looking for. Second, search engines deliver targeted traffic to your website. This means, when a visitor comes to your website from a search engine, they are probably looking for something that you sell. If someone searches for "cars" and the search engine sends you to a corporate gift basket page, the user will find what they are looking for. This is why keyword selection and monitoring are very important. Case in point, one of our clients hired us to help promote their ecommerce website. Part of what we do is monitor the closing rates of certain keywords. As it turns out for this client, one of the keywords we optimize the website for had a conversion rate of almost 80%. But a different keyword had a closing rate of less than 20%. To us, both keywords acurratly described the product however for some reason, visitors that searched for the first keyword and found our website had a muc higher closing rate. therefore, we focused most of our client's advertising dollars on getting traffic from the first key word.

How Search Engines Work:

Internal Website Factors Effecting Search Engine Placement:

Site Structure - Website structure can have a huge effect on search engine placement. For example, to a search engine, websites designed with flash are blank. No text, no information. The same with banners. Search engines can not read inside of the flash to see what you have written and then can not read a banner. Websites that are designed completely in flash or mostly with banners have a very diffucult time ranling well in search engines because to the search engines, the website looks blank. Next, search engines can not read javascript links. The way search engines work is by indexing a page and then following the links on that page. If your site navigation is made up of only javascript links then the search engines can not get to the other pages of your website. Finally, the content you want to rank well should be placed near the top of the page. Search engines see the content at the top of a page as more important that the content at the bottom of a page. Therefore, it is important to have relavent content placed high on your web page.

Website Relavency - Have you ever gone to a page thinking you were going to find out something about a certain topic but when you got to that page what you found was very different? I have, and it sucks. Search engines understand this and they look bad when that happens. Therefore, they come up with ways to solve this problem. One way is by comparing the content on the current page with the general theme of the rest of the website. For example, if you have a website about real estate but one of your pages talks about karate, this does not make a whole lot of sense. This does not mean that you should not add pages about other topics that will interest your visitors because it is important to make your site sticky. This does mean that you probably will not rank as well for the keywords on that page as a website entirely dedicated to karate. Search engines try and take a general snapshot of your website and determine a theme for it. Therefore, sticking close to your website's theme and useing keywords related to that theme will help you search engine rankings.

Content Freshness - So have you ever bought stale bread? It does not taste very good. The same is true for websites (figuratively!). If it is and election year and you go to a search engine and search for "election news", you don't want to read news from the 1864 election (unless you are specificaly searching for that). The same is true for other topics as well. Search engines understand that most people are looking for updated and current information. If you create a website and it stays the same for 2-3+ years, this is very stale and will not rank as well as a website that is updated regularly. The web is a living orgnaisim that is constantly changing and if your website is not also changing, your search traffic can diminish significantly.

Page Title - Your page title is one of the most important aspects of you on-page optimization. There are many theories out there stating which way is the best to write these but here are the considerations to take when writting the title. First, your visitors will see the title and if it does not make sense with what they are looking for then they will leave. Second, many times the title is used in the search engine results so if your title does not make sense or it does not do a good job selling your product then even if you show up number one all of the time people will not click on your link. Finally, search engines use your title to categorize the keywords on the page. This means that if it is important enough to place in your title, that probably means that the words in the title have something to do with what is on that webpage. For our clients, we generally recommend selecting two to three keywords for a page and make sure that those words are used in the title somewhere. Also, the title should read well so just listing the words does not work either. Be sure not to make your title too long either; we generally recommend no more than 70 characters in your title.

Description Meta Tag - The description tag for you website has become less and less effective as more people attempt to trick the search engines with spam. However, many search engines will use your description when they display your search results so therefore you need to have a well written description that includes your keywords to tell a visitor why they need to visit your website. Be careful not to make the description too long; we generally recommend a length of about 120 to 150 characters if possible

Keyword Meta Tag - This tag has been used to spam the search engines so much that it is not even taken into account in your rankings. There are a few obscure search engines that still use this however they will not provide you with much traffic. Google, Yahoo, and MSN supply over 80 percent of the search engine traffic out there so focus on these. We still do recommend adding this tag however because it is useful for remembering what keywords you optimized that page for and also some seo tools use the kayword tag to facilitate rating checks.

Keyword Frequency - There is a huge debate in the search engie community about the best number but we feel that you don't have to be that precise in this. From our experiance, if you have about 3% - 5% of the words in your body be keywords, your site will be just fine. However, try to keep the number of keyword repetitions below 15. Much more than that looks like spam to many of the search engines.

Keyword Highlighting - Generally we recommend making at least one occurance of each keyword bold, underlined, and italicized on your page. Also, your keywords should be placed within your H1 tags and other title tags.

External Website Factors Effecting Search Engine Placement:

One Way Links -

Reciprical Links -

Domain Name -

Google Page Rank -

Alexa Traffic Rank -

Website Directories -

Article Directories -

Press Releases -

Forums -

Blogs -

Search Engine Promotion Services: