I learned what I know about search engine optimization
through a combination of reading and experimenting with the first three
websites I built. You don't have to be a computer
expert to get better search engine rankings for your website. You can give
your website enough basic search engine optimization to do reasonably well
in most topic areas just by following the simple
advice I present here. There are more complicated methods available to
the professional web site design engineer which do require a high level of
design and programming skills, but the techniques I show you here will
give your website high search engine ranking results that can put you ahead of
most of your competition. More....
When Your Car Is Broken, You Call A Mechanic
If your website is "broken" in the search engine results,
and you can't tell how to fix it yourself, you should call in a specialist because he's trained for the job. He knows what's wrong and
how to fix it. Doing it yourself is not always the wisest choice. You can end up wasting time and
losing sales by taking weeks or months trying to learn what I already know about search
engines. Be smart and start getting
more targeted traffic now by ordering my Search Engine
Optimization Service today! You can also request my FREE Search Engine Evaluation.
I'll tell you what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, and how I can
help your site get its fair share of search engine traffic.
When I visit other websites, I'm usually comparing
them with my own websites and those of my clients in terms of their
search engine ranking and optimization techniques. I examine high-ranking websites
to learn why they have good search engine positioning. There are several common mistakes that new
webmasters make that keep their websites from ranking high in search engines. You will be miles ahead of the
webmasters of new and smaller websites simply by avoiding these common search engine optimization
mistakes.
Lack of good quality links - Google ranks webpages in large part using their formula called PageRank,
which is based on the number and quality of incoming links pointing to a page. This principle
of rating websites by the number of other sites that link to it is often called Link Popularity,
and all of the major search engines rely on this measure when they rank websites in search results
in one way or another. If you have no links from other websites pointing to pages on your website, you will never
achieve high rankings in Google, Yahoo! or the other search engines. The most common way of obtaining
links is by inviting the webmasters of other websites to exchange links. Naturally, you will
have to have created a page on your site to fulfill your part of the link exchange agreement. Other methods include
registering your website with one of the many directory websites. Links from blogs, guestbooks, forums,
websites' automated link directory pages, and other low-ranked webpages are of little or no help in this regard.
See my Building Links article for some helpful advice in this area.
Poor choice of <title> - Search engine ranking systems give the
<title> tag a great deal of weight in ranking. Don't waste the <title> by just
using your just your name, your website's name, URL, or some silly phrase that amuses you. Your two or three
most important keywords should be in the <title> of your main page. The <title>
tags on your interior pages should similarly focus on the keywords for each page. By the same token,
don't overstuff the <title> with every conceivable keyword for the page. Moderation
in all things, as the saying goes. And every <title> must be unique and relevant to
the page.
Little or no presence of keywords on the site's main page - Search engines
ranking methods are completely dependent on the text they find on your webpages. How is a search engine
supposed to know the topic of your site if you don't set it out in plain text? A search
engine will only find the keywords you feed to it on your webpages. Add emphasis to
your keywords by enclosing them in <h>eadline and <strong> tags. I've
exaggerated the technique on this page to demonstrate what I mean. A page that is comprised
solely of graphics or Flash animation is severely impairing its search engine potential. Feed those
search engine spiders some juicy text! Even a single keyword-rich sentence at the bottom of the page
is better than no text at all!
<META> tag abuse - Many years ago, search engine ranking systems
gave a good deal of weight to the <META> tag, and so every computer book author told his
readers this was the secret of search engine optimization. Well, that time has long passed, and all
but one of the major search engine ranking systems now ignore the <META> keywords tag... unless
you overstuff it, in which case you could get penalized for SPAMming. Google still largely ignores all
<META> tags for ranking purposes. Yahoo! has retained many of the tendencies of its Inktomi
search technology and does give some weight to the keywords and description <META> tag, but
again, its not a major factor. Note that only three <meta> tags are recognized by the search
engines: 'keywords', 'description', and 'robots' (the individual search engines all have unique
variations of the 'robots' name so you can customize the controls to the individual search engine
when that's appropriate). They especially DO NOT support the 'revisit-after' <meta>
tag. Overall, keep your <META> tags moderately short and to the point.
Invalid HTML - Writing code that is in compliance with the World
Wide Web Consortium's standards means your site is easily read by search engine spiders,
easier to maintain, and cross-browser compatible. This is especially important for websites
that receive government funding, because the federal government requires compliance with the
Americans With Disabilities Act, which in turn means your site has to be compatible with devices that
allow the visually impaired to browse the Internet. Using code that is proprietary to
Microsoft Internet Explorer is not acceptable for such sites, so you need to know
what is and isn't in the current W3C standards. You can check your webpages' compliance
with the W3C's HTML standards using the W3C's newly-improved HTML
Validator. Be sure your HTML code complies with your <!DOCTYPE> statement. Google
appears to ignore the entire <head> section of HTML pages when the tags within them
are not properly formatted for the version of HTML declared in the <!DOCTYPE>. When you
have proper HTML coding, not only will your pages get indexed and ranked properly, but you won't have to worry that
some users won't see your pages the way you intended just because they don't use the same
browser that you do. Don't forget that not everyone surfs the Web with a computer. Cell
phones, PDAs, and other devices are Web-enabled now and they don't usually rely on Microsoft Internet Explorer
to display webpages.
Dead links/Bad Links - Be sure all of the links on your pages are valid. Do not link to
link farms, web rings, or other schemes designed to fool the search engines. Also watch
for server problems. Inaccessible pages are liable to be removed from the search engine
index. Avoid redirects that rely on JavaScript or <META> tags. These can be
considered as "doorway" pages, which violate nearly all search engine guidelines. There
are several automated link-checking tools available online. The W3C offers a basic FREE link
checker. Windows users can take advantage of an excellent program called
Xenu Link Sleuth which does a thorough job of finding broken
links on sites of up to several hundred pages. Links that include User ID numbers, session ID numbers, and long query strings
(ie. the text following the "?") in the URL are often ignored by Google and may cause
problems in all search engines because of the way they nibble at sites in small bites over many
visits. If your URLs change with every visit for visitors that don't accept cookies, the search engines'
index of your site will soon be filled with many apparently duplicate pages.
Poor spelling and grammar - Misspell your keywords and you're negating your
search engine optimization efforts. When you misspell common words, people may lose respect for
you and your company. For example, the contraction for the two words "you" and
"are" is "you're," not "your." And there is no such word as
"alot." You can allot blame for this between parents and schools, but it takes a
lot of hubris not to thoroughly proofread AND spellcheck your writing. I went to Catholic
grade school and the nuns had us all diagramming sentences for 5 of those 8 long years. I
hated it then, but I'm very grateful now because good grammar comes to me naturally as I
write. The sole exception is to include some common variations of your keywords in the
<body> text of your interior pages in order to snare the search engine traffic from
user errors.
If you want your site to rank higher in the search engines, my Search Engine Optimization Services
can give your website what it needs to get your fair share of search engine traffic quickly, without
disturbing your design, and without breaking your budget.
Call Richard L. Trethewey in Minneapolis today at 612-408-4057 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Central time to get started on your new website design package or search engine optimization program today!
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