Skill #5: Search Engine Optimization, Getting Traffic To Your Website!
You’ve built a beautiful website with great products and have it up and running on the web. Do you think that just by opening a store, people are going to surf on by? Forget it! There are millions of domains out there. How is someone going to know you are there? Well…how do you find the products you need to purchase on the web? Can you say Google, Yahoo and MSN? You go to a search engine and type in a word or phrase that you expect will bring up a list of websites that sell that product or service. Up pops a list of websites and off you go on your search for the best product at an acceptable price.
That process has spurred an entire industry in our information age. It’s called SEO, an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. In short, it is the method(s) used to have your webpage rank higher in the search engine than every other webpage. At least that’s the goal. Here are the problems:
- Knowing what words or phrases people type to find the products you offer
- Configuring your webpages to come up first for those words and phrases
Let’s tackle the first problem. The first thing is to get the SEO jargon correct. These words and phrases are called “Keywords” and “keyword phrases”. They are the keys to your success with your online store. You have to know what words and phrases people type in when searching for the products you offer. How do you find out that information?
WORDTRACKER
Wordtracker downloads data from all the major search engines on clicks, keyword and keyword phrases entered, and compiles the data. Before you use their service, you first sit down and decide what words or phrases you would enter into a search engine to find the products you offer. Brainstorm with a group if possible. After you are done, chances are you will have between 10 and 30 keywords or keyword phrases that you and your group would probably use for a search to find your products. Now you go to Wordtracker. The really nice thing about this service is that they offer a free trial. This allows you to see how the service works. Take the free trial. (it really is free!) You will be taken to the “Keyword Universe”. That’s their term for the database. You type in one of your keywords or keyword phrases and tell it to search (I believe the term is “proceed”). After about 30 seconds the search return is shown. On the left hand side of the page are the associated keywords and keyword phrases that are similar to what you typed in. Some will make you go, “Huh?”-as in how is that related, while others will make you say “Duh!”-as in, of course. What I’m trying to say is that you may learn something just from the associated keywords and phrases that come up on the left hand side of the page. But that’s not the best part. Click on one of the phrases on the left hand side of the page, and a set of keywords and keyword phrases come up on the right hand side of the page. The keywords and phrases on the right hand side of the page are the actual keywords and phrases people typed into the search engines in the recent past (I believe over the previous 2 months, but check out the data at the site to confirm that number). Anyway, the number to the right of the keywords and phrases on the right hand side is the actual count of the number of times that keyword or phrase was typed into a search at the search engines during the recent past. Now you choose keywords/phrases from the right hand side of the page to load into your keyword basket. There is a limit on the free trial of 50 I believe. Click on the keywords and phrases entering them into your basket of keywords. When you are done, at the bottom of the page, click on “go to Step 3”. Here you will see a list of the keywords in your basket and you will have the opportunity to delete any that you think probably don’t apply.
Once you have the keyword list as you want it, you want to do a “competition” search. This is the powerful portion to Wordtracker. You select the engines you are interested in ranking high in, and tell the service to do a competition search. The service churns for awhile, and returns with your list of keywords along with several other columns: The KEI column, the count column, the 24 hr column and the competition column. The count is the number of times that the phrase was searched on. 24 hour is a prediction of the number of clicks it will bring. The competition is the number of webpages that contain that keyword or phrase-your competition who wants to rank higher than you!
The KEI (which stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index) compares the value of the competition against the number of expected clicks for each keyword to come up with a number which shows the relative ease or difficulty you will have trying to get a high ranking in the search engine for the particular keyword. In simple terms, the higher the KEI, the easier it is to get a higher ranking for that keyword on that search engine. The lower the number, the more difficult is to rank high for that keyword on the search engine, due to the competition. The rule of thumb in the past was a KEI below 50 was difficult to get ranked highly. Medium difficulty for KEIs from 50 to 400. Above 400 should be relatively easy to get ranked highly. My own experience shows that these numbers are very relative, but a good place to start. Also, what you are looking for is a large KEI. In the beginning, don’t worry too much about trying to get ranked highly for search terms with hundreds and thousands of searches. Find those niche keywords that very few other people are using. Get those tens of clicks a day to your website, first. Then develop pages to draw high rankings on the more competitive terms. That’s my two cents worth.
Well, you’ve researched the keywords and you have your list in hand, complete with KEI analysis, so that you know which keywords to go after first, second, third, etc…I mean this sincerely. You will be tinkering with pages everyday. You need to take your keyword list and prioritize the jobs that need to be done, because you will have other things that have to get done every day as well. But, you will devote a block of time for SEO work each day. You can’t do it all in one day, unless your website only offers a very few products. So, prioritize your SEO work to get the most out of the work time you devote to it.
Which search engines will you optimize for first? Interesting question isn’t it? The reason I bring this up is because all search engines are not developed equally. Let me state that a different and hopefully, clearer way. The number of searches done everyday are not spread evenly among the different search engines. Google gets by far and away the most searches everyday. That would be followed by Yahoo, then MSN (as of this writing). So, are you going to begin your page tweaking to rank highly on Dogpile? Dogpile is a great search engine, but don’t go by personal preference as to which engine you prefer to use for your searches. Make your pages rank highly where you will get the most clicks to your site. So, you probably want to start with one of the top three in terms of daily searches done.
The one thing you must remember about any search engine is its goal. Each search engine wants to return the most relevant data to the person performing the search. That’s what keeps their customers (the people who perform searches) coming back. If you search for the term “hammer” at a search engine and the first ten returns for that search term take you to webpages dealing with train whistles, then you’re probably not going to come back to that search engine any time soon. The results had nothing to do with the term you entered. So, keep in mind the goal of the search engines. If you get in their way of providing relevant results to their customers, they will not be happy!
Another thing you need to understand is how the search engines rank pages. This is painted with a broad brush, because the only people who truly know how a particular search engine ranks pages is the person doing the programming. Since the people who manage these organizations are pretty smart people, I dare say that no one individual programmer knows the entire algorithm. The work is probably assigned to different programmers who only know one small portion of the algorithm. So, this is a general description of how the crawler-type search engines go about ranking the webpages they crawl.
The search engine uses a program which goes out on the web and looks at the various websites. It looks at the HTML code, that’s all it knows. It looks at your title tag, and it might (depending on the search engine) look at the description tag and the keywords tag. It then “spiders” or “crawls” your page in search of text. It wants to examine your text to see what your site is all about. That’s how it determines your relevancy in search results, by determining what your webpage is about, by looking at the text on the page. So, what if your page has a big picture, and no text? Or what if your webpage is composed entirely of Javascripts, Flash or static images? In these cases, the search engine is going to have a more difficult time determining what your webpage is all about. Therefore, you are making life harder for yourself. You are making it difficult to get those high rankings, because you are not giving the search engine what it gobbles up-TEXT!
There is so much more to learn about search engine optimization. Use text links instead of Flash buttons, Javascript or images. Place the text designed to rank your page on the search engines as close to the top of the page as possible. And there are “tricks”. Now, you have to be careful about so called “tricks.” Some tricks will actually get your site banned from the search engines for spamming. An example of something that was tried years ago, which was eventually discovered by the search engines and became defined as spam, is the use of invisible text. Webmasters were trying to fill their pages with keywords they wanted to be ranked highly on. So, someone came up with the brilliant idea of writing text on a page with the same font color as the background color for the page. This renders the text invisible to someone viewing the page, but the search engine spider gobbled it up! That is until the programmers at the search engine started examining pages and finding the text written in the background color.
Now here’s the important point that you need to remember: Why did the programmers at the search engine company start looking at these pages? It’s because they started getting complaints from their users that the pages coming up for the terms they searched for weren’t relevant! So, they started looking at those pages and found what some unscrupulous webmasters were doing. Why do I characterize them as unscrupulous? Because they were indeed spamming. If the search terms they were trying to get ranked on were relevant to the content of their webpage, then the users would never have complained to the search engine company. So, what might be termed a “trick” may be fine as long as you are using it to rank on terms that are truly relevant to your webpage. Note, your webpage, not the website. However, if one of these tricks has been earmarked by the search engines as a spamming technique, steer well clear. Don’t even think about using it. It’s unfair that the search engines label techniques as spam, when the technique is merely a tool. After all, there are thousands of people killed every year on the highways in the US . But you don’t hear people trying to ban the car from the road. The car is the tool the drunk uses to kill. But it is the drunk who is the spammer, uh—I mean killer. Nevertheless, the search engines are king. They are the lifeblood of your traffic. Unfair or not, if they label a technique as spam, it is SPAM! Stay away from using anything known to get a site banned from the search engines.
By this point your head must be spinning. There are so many things to think about when it comes to SEO work on your website. I’ve saved the best one for last…the search engines change their algorithm on a regular (or some would say irregular) basis. You may have a page ranking highly one night, and get up the next morning and not be able to find it at all! Now that doesn’t happen on a daily basis. But monthly is not entirely out of the question. The search engines are always tinkering with their spider (crawler) in search of (pardon the pun) the most relevant results for their customers. So how do you keep up. This is something that you absolutely do not have time to do, considering all your other daily chores. But there are folks out there who keep a constant watch on the search engines, and actually set sites up for themselves and other people, just to try different techniques to see what helps with their rankings on each of the major search engines. The best I discovered early on in my web career. It’s the folks who put together the Search Engine News. They have a 200 page book which is updated on a monthly basis. It tells you both general ways to achieve high rankings, and specifics to help you with each search engine. You should read through the book as soon as you get it. But it isn’t usually necessary to read all 200 pages each month. Along with the book comes a subscription to their newsletter. The newsletter contains a summary of the changes from month-to-month and other articles that keep you informed on how to get and keep those top rankings. The link below provides information on the Unfair Advantage Book.
Search Engine News and The Unfair Advantage Book
Even if you only have a few webpages, you don’t want to do the optimization work by hand. Here’s a sample of why you want to automate the process...
Just two items that have to be considered when trying to get a page ranked highly are the Title and the Body Text. Let’s take MSN as an example. (Remember that getting a page ranked highly is specific to the search engine you are looking to get the ranking on. Each engine has different algorithms, therefore they will differ on what they want to see.) Let’s say that the latest data indicates that the top 5 ranking pages at MSN for your keyword phrase have titles that range between 5 and 8 words, with the search term at least 70% near the front of the title. And let’s also say that those 5 pages have the search term appearing in the body text 5 times and averaging 65% near the top of the page. What must you do to make sure your page matches these criteria to the other top ranking pages?
For the title, you first need to count the words and make sure that it falls between 5 and 8. That’s easy enough! Then, number the words in the title beginning with 1 at the end of the title and ending with the total number of words in the title as the number for the first word. Like I show below. Let’s say the keyword phrase is “commercial floor mats.”
Buy Commercial Floor Mats at Discount Prices
7 6 5 4 3 2 1
There is some question as to whether “at” should be counted, but let’s assume it is. The number of words in the title falls between 5 and 8 at 7. So we’re fine there.
Determining the average relative position of the keyword phrase to the front of the title is just a little tricky. That’s why I have chosen to number the words as I did. To determine that position, take each word in the keyword phrase and divide the number below it by the total number of words in the title, then add the fractions together and divide by the total number of words in the keyword
phrase (3).
“Commercial” is 6/7, “Floor” is 5/7 and “Mats” is 4/7. That adds up to 15/7 or 2.14. Now divide 2.14 by 3 to get the average position of the keyword phrase in the title. That’s 2.14/3 = 0.7133 or 71.33% near the top of the title. That also falls within the specifications. So from these two criteria, the title is fine.
Now think about doing a similar exercise for the body text. What if the body text falls between 425 and 750 words on those top ranked pages? Those numbers are quite typical! Can you imagine doing that by hand? Most SEO firms agree that there are anywhere from 50 to 75 such criteria on each webpage that should be checked to rank highly for a search on a specific keyword or phrase. Planet Ocean numbers them at 62. This is why computers exists. They are made to do this kind of mundane number crunching. You need a program to do this kind of check for your webpages to make sure they match high ranking pages on each of these critical criteria. And remember, these criteria change on a regular (or irregular) basis. So, the program needs to automatically update itself on a continuing basis.
Planet Ocean fills this critical need with their Search Engine Optimizer.
I haven’t touched on submission of your pages to the many directories that exist. However, that material is covered by other materials pointed to in this section.
You have mastered HTML, or enough to set up your webpages with Dreamweaver. You have determined the products to sell and have a supplier all lined up. You’ve got your store up and running at Yahoo. You’ve designed the pages to answer your customer’s questions and objections and will lead them to your shopping cart. After doing that, you went back and tweaked the text sales message to make sure that it not only sells your customer, but it will get the search engines to rank it highly, so that the customer finds you in the first place. Whew…I told you this was hard work and long hours.
There are two more skills in the mix…
Go to Home Business Online Opportunity Skill #6