Search Engine Optimization Basics

When a client comes to you and wants help to make their website appear higher in the return results for Google and other search engines, they are asking you for search engine optimization services and there are a number of ways to you can “tweak” out a website (including your own) to appear higher in the search rankings. Statistics show more people go to Google to find companies for products and services instead of their local Yellow Pages. When you search for something how many pages on Google do you go down? If you’re like most folks, about 2-3 pages of results, there might be a better deal buried 20 pages down in the results but because they don’t have good search engine optimization, Google doesn’t feel their site has as much relevance to your search as the sites that appear in the top pages.

First of all, let’s start with the basics; there are search engines and there are directories. They are slightly different but will be looking for the same basic criteria on the web pages to determine how relevant your website is based on the text on your page and other small factors.

A search engine is a place that uses purely computerized ways to calculate the relevance of web pages using text-indexing robots called “spiders”. Spiders patrol the web and index every piece of text they find and assign relevance to that information based on other factors on the web page. A web site that has their SEO (search engine optimization) done correctly is said to be “spider food”. Google is an example of a search engine.

The other side you’ll be optimizing web sites for are the search directories. A search directory works just like a search engine in terms of sending spiders to come index the web sites; however the relevance of that returned information is decided by an actual human being called an editor. Yahoo is an example of a search directory.

Google has a tool called “Page Rank”. Install it on your web browser and with every website you visit, you can see what the importance of the website is based on their spider food factor. You can get the version for IE here. The version for Firefox browsers is located here.

Alexa will also tell you how important a website is, traffic information and such but Amazon purchased them and now they charge a small fee for everything; if you want to spend money go for it – but you can find everything you need to know through Google.

What Do You Look For When You’re Consulting On a Website?

When someone wants SEO services, visit their website and then note the Google Page Rank and the Alexa (if you choose to use that service) information about the site. So you have a baseline to start from.

Then, note that information down and then look at the website. And make special note of the following:

☺ Does the title of the website (not the URL) reflect what the site is about? A primary keyword phrase that describes the content of the site accurately will have page rank power in the title.

☺ Check the header of the site (read the source code by clicking “View” in your browser); does header show that the text on the page is in head (h1 – h6) tags? If it does or doesn’t make a note of it. You will want to make your text on the page into H-tags so the search engines will index all the text on the page as more relevant.

☺ Link on the page should not be made with “click here” or “view more” or “continue”. The search engine spider will follow those links and look for a page containing information about the name of the link. If you have a write up about electric dog polishers and it contains a link for more information and a purchase page, but the link says “click here”; the spider will follow
that link and when it doesn’t find anything about “click here” it will discount both pages as irrelevant on a site about electric dog polishers. Making that link “purchase a dog polisher” or “more information about dog polishers” will give both pages (the page the link is on as well as
the page it connects to) power.

☺ How often is the site updated? Google’s spiders will actually “learn” the habits of a website come back to crawl more frequently on a site that is updated more often. Posting informational
articles with relevant links to products or other information on the website will serve two purposes, it will add links that mean something if they done correctly (using actual descriptive words instead of “click here”) and the other purpose will be that sites that are updated more frequently are considered more relevant as their information is deciphered as more current.

☺ Exclusive content is a must. Anyone can run out and get free articles for their website off a billion different websites that offer that freebie service and post them every day – but those articles won’t add an iota of relevance to the website and will actually drive the rankings down
making the site less important. Can you guess why?

The reason is simple. The information isn’t original.

When Google indexes an article on a page that has been used on another site – it will penalize both sites and discount BOTH pages as irrelevant. This makes exclusively written content more important than ever. And that doesn’t just mean articles that means all the content, from the about us page to the frequently asked questions. Any website that reads just like all the rest will be stuck in the lower rankings of search engine results forever.

☺ Links on the website are also important. Once upon a time it was easy for sites that had a little disposable cash to pay larger sites to post links back to the little guy’s site. CNN.com and Weatherunderground.com were two places that did this.

Here’s how it works. Some guy with electricdogpolishers.com would pay one of these (or many of these larger sites) about $2500+ a month to have a link back to his electricdogpolishers.com site. Because these big websites are so popular and get a lot of traffic, not only would more people see the link to the company that could fulfill all their electric dog polishing needs, it would also mean Google would rank their site as “more” important than their competitor dog polisher sites because of the power of the links from big sites like CNN and Weatherunderground.

Companies called “Link Farms” sprung up overnight to sell their services. For a monthly fee they would place a link to a site back and because of all the links on these “farms” it falsely raised the page ranks for many sites and in turn raised the page ranks for any site on these link farms. It was a way many websites “manipulated” the algorithms of Google to get a better ranking than they probably deserved.

Google got wise to this and changed the playing field literally overnight. They did an update to the spiders and overnight, any site that was linked on website that wasn’t in the same genre was discounted as relevant. It made the Link Farms industry out of business overnight. Then in early 2007, Google took it a step further and wanted anyone that knew of any websites that were paying for links or taking money to link– to report it to them and Google began penalizing both sites for either taking money or paying for links.

In the present, the links on the website must be in the same genre of the site and must have a
similar page rank to be considered relevant when being indexed for importance.


Putting It All Together

When you’re ready to go forward with a client. Talk about the information on their website and give them the following solutions.

☺ Add a description in the title page, including a relevant keyword phrase.

☺ If there’s text on a web page – it must be exclusive as well as containing keyword phrases that are gently repeated to increase the relevance. 3-5% is the standard relevance for repeating keyword phrases. So if you have 450 words on a web page, repeating a keyword phrase about 13 times will give you a minimum. A good way to write it so it doesn’t sound stupid and repetitious is to just write your text and then go back and change your pronouns to the keyword phrase where appropriate. A good formula to follow is to use the keyword phrase once in the title, once in the opening and closing sentences and then in the body of the article for the remaining number of times. Never use a keyword phrase twice in one sentence and read it yourself, if it sounds ignorant and overly repeated to you – it will to everyone else. Keyword written material is only successful when the reader doesn’t really notice the gentle repetition of the phrase.

☺Frequent updating is a must. A blog is a great way to do it. They must host the blog on their website or they won’t be generating page rank for their site but where the blog is hosted. Google owns Blogger.com and most people go with that. Blogs are pure text and putting articles about the products and services complete with links is a beautiful way to build page rank, update the site frequently and spread good information.

☺Use the web stats from the client’s website to decide what the keyword phrases to hit first are. You might find that people are using the word “dog wax” or “cheap dog polisher” to find your client’s website. Optimize those words first as people are already using them to find the website.

Another place to get valuable keyword is Google’s Keyword Tool. It will read the site of your
choice and tell you what Google thinks are relevant keywords and you can see clearly if the site is on target for content and then use the flip side of the tool and get additional keywords that will make great ideas for articles, informational pages and more.

☺Your client needs to understand that they need to update their site regularly – at least with articles or information. Many of my clients update using keyword articles on new products and services or just an interesting use for a product with links to those products from 2-5 times a week to maintain the legitimate page rank that they have worked hard to attain and want to keep.

☺A great way to generate links back to the site is to write exclusive articles with a resource box that links back to the website. There are numerous article directories and one post a week will help build traffic going to the client’s website. Many websites publish monthly newsletters and they go to those websites looking for content. Your client may want to consider having a newsletter of his or her own. It can include tips and tricks for using their products and services, coupons for products and news of upcoming changes, specials and more. Keeping their company name in the forefront of their client’s minds will keep the clients stopping by to visit.

☺ A press release once a month is another way to generate news. I highly recommend PRWeb.com as the place for getting the most traffic. A new product, service, safety about a product or just because July is National Dog Polisher Month – all of these are reasons for a press release.

☺It can take from around 3-6 months for the page rank to begin to move and once the process is started, it can’t be stopped or your client will lose ground and lose it quickly. That’s the main reason most people don’t have a good page rank or as good as they could because they aren’t willing to stick to the program and keep updating their site. They want to make these changes and suddenly have a page rank of 9/10 and it’s not going to happen.
It will be a slow, steady climb if done correctly but yes it can be done.

If your client chooses to go the blog route, you will want to put the information out on a “feed” where it can be picked up by other blogging and news service.