Owning a website is a cool thing in itself, but it's even greater if you're able to welcome a lot of visitors to it. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this, is by making sure your site is easily found through search engines like Google.
In contrary to what the SPAM flooding our inbox is promising ("submit to 500 search engines!", "Guaranteed Top Rankings!", "Free beer included!"), there is no quick and dirty way to accomplish this. On the other hand, the secrecy and vague terminology used by dedicated SearchEngineOptimization bureaus are mostly a means to mask there's nothing secret or difficult about optimizing your website for search engines. Let's give it a quick start...
About search engines
The two biggest search engines worldwide are Google (used by Google / AOL) and Overture (used by MSN / Yahoo). Google fills it's database mainly by letting robots automatically crawl and index the web. The Overture database is mainly filled through affiliate programs. That will cost you, so let's focus on Google for now. Google is the cooler one anyway...
A bot visit
You can request a Google robot visit at www.google.com/addurl. The robot will browse your site and index it's contents. Expect to have to wait for a couple of weeks before this will happen. Also, always list your site at www.dmoz.org. This is Google's webdirectory and, next to the google robot, an important source of the google search API. Dutch sites can be listed at www.dmoz.nl (used by google.nl).
Get your keywords
Your website is not ranked as a whole. Keywords are used to determine the relevancy of your website for particular subjects. So, before buiding your site, make sure you have a relevant set of keywords. Check competing websites for keywords / search terms and use the good ones for yourself. You can get an indication on the frequency people search for a certain keyword (and alternatives to it) at inventory.overture.com. You can find synonyms for certain keywords at www.thesaurus.com.
Place your keywords
The most important elements to insert keywords into are the URL (domain name + path + filename) and title of your web page. Also, a low-level URL (www.mysite.com/page.htm) is considered more important than a higher level URL (www.mysite.com/subdir/anothersubdir/page.htm). Check out the Dutch website Nu.nl for a good example. Notice how every newsitem has it's own title in the titlebar and how every item's html file is named after its title. These tricks make you score!
It's also important to use your keywords in the body of your site, frequency (a lot) and proximity (close to each other) are important. The higher in a page, the more important a keyword is considered to be. Text in headline (h1 or h2), bold or caps is considered more important than regular text.
Check your keywords
Once you think you have found the right keywords and you've written your text so that these keywords appear all over the page, it's time to check out how your site is doing. At googlerankings.com you can check your position in Google for the keywords you have chosen. Top of the ranks? Great! Not even close to it? Don't worry, here are some tips to improve your rankings.
Tech and formatting tips
First, make sure your site, especially your homepage, is frequently updated. Google seems to like frequently changing websites, this might be why weblogs tend to score very well at Google.
Second, make sure to have a lot of incoming and outgoing links (especially to and from big, relevant, high-quality websites). If something can be a link, make it a link! By doing so, Google will rank you pages higher as others who are not that embedded. This link relevancy system is called Google Pagerank. You can check out your pagerank at pagerank.net. Pagerank works on a scale from 1 to 10. If you have a rank of 1 or 2, you're likely to be way down the search results. If you have a higher rank, your site will appear at the top of the search results, even if there are a lot of competitors for your specific keywords or business.
Third, make sure your site is clean and correctly formatted, preferably in web standards / xhtml. Avoid certain technologies the Google robot doesn't understand. Don't use a frameset for your website. Robots may skip frames or only index the upper one (refering will be a mess anyway). Avoid javascript or Flash menus, only a.href links are followed by a robot. Additionally, all javascript and comments are skipped by search robots.
For the same reason, full-flash websites should be avoided if search accessibility is important (actually, if ANY accessibility is important). If you do feel the strong need to use Flash, all you can do is to make sure you have a keyword descriptive URL and page title.
Some last remarks
Google simply puts a 30 days block upon sites that use trivial keyword tricks (hidden text/div or text in the same color as a background), so don't bother trying this kind of stuff. Detecting and catching a robot with javascript or IP cloacing or using linkfarms to boost your Pagerank are considered even more illegal. They could get you put out of the ranking for good.
Just remember that a robot will be optimized over and over to be able to judge webpages the way a human does. In the end, if you make sure your site is clean and accessible and your content is good and relevant, websurfers will find you and bytes will flow.
Of course this article only covers the rough basics of search engine optimization. If you feel like I have missed out on something, or you've got an excellent hint to share, please feel free to post them in the forum! The diagnostics guide from GoogleRankings.com is a great resource for more information (there's a list of issues at the left side).
Keywords
Here's a scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30's, 50's, or heaven forbid, the 300's. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”.
Not necessarily. If you got ranked for a keyword in Google that you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in Google's search engine increased, at no cost. How? The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword.
Find Your Google Keyword Ranking
For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood. Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to:Google Rankings.
You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant.
So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to:Search Term Difficulty Checker. This tool tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You’ll need a free Google API key to use it.
Estimate Search Traffic
Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here:Keyword Suggestion Tool.
This article about how to improve your Google rankings is continued from page one.
Optimize Your Keywords for Google Search
Okay, let’s say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000 in Google's search listings. The term you want to optimize for won’t be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts. Our fourth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page. GoRank.com does periodic reports on the search engines, and as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants, as well as Google.
Calculate Keyword Density For Your Website
Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up in Google- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the fifth step at GoRank.com - it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done.
Google Site Submission - Maybe
Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right? Not necessarily. Let Google find you. HOW Google finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting to Google. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.
What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my members' sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site naturally shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can get spidered within 24 hours if you know where to get your link picked up, and then end up in Google's index in as little as 4 days.
Google Page Rank
Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight– my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Google Page Rank increased to 5. So even if the Google spider comes to your site on a monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the sixth step: let your page be re-discovered by Google with its great new changes.
Here are some articles that can help you get started optimizing your site for searchers and search engines:
* Ten Steps to a Well Optimized Site: Want increased website traffic, higher search engine ranking, and increased customer satisfaction? Read these Ten Steps to a Well-Optimized Site and you'll be well on your way to accomplishing these goals.
* Top 5 Mistakes in Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of making your site search-friendly both to search engines and searchers. There are five common mistakes that people tend to make when beginning to optimize their sites for search engines.
* Ten Search Engine Optimization Myths - Debunked!: If you're just getting started in search engine optimization for your Web site, you might (unfortunately) have been subjected to a few SEO whoppers. Before you start throwing away your time and money on search engine optimization wild goose chases, read these ten myths of search engine optimization.
