10 Steps to better search engine placement

First Post.. This Document helped me Understand SEO

The 10 important step necessary for search Engine optimization are:

Step 1: Find effective high traffic keywords and keyword phrases.

Step 2: Use correctly formatted title and meta tags on all pages.

Step 3: Optimize your content and design for higher rankings.

Step 4: Make doorway pages for carefully selected keywords.

Step 5: Check for spam — and other common SEO mistakes.

Step 6: Register a high-ranking, keyword-rich domain.

Step 7: Discover search engine friendly Web hosting.

Step 8: Add your URL to the top 10 search engines.

Step 9: Monitor and improve your site’s ranking.

Step 10: Analyze and understand web log files.

Step1: Keywords:

Selecting effective keywords

Keywords are the words and phrases that people will search for when trying to find your type of product or service in a search engine. Selecting effective keywords should be the first step for anyone planning to build a high ranking Web site. After all, it makes no sense obtaining a good search engine placement for keywords that rarely will be used by anyone.

But how are you supposed to know what keywords to optimize for? How can you figure out which keywords are the most popular among those looking to buy your product or read your site? What exactly are all those people typing into the search box?

Understanding keywords

Before you start to brainstorm your list of keywords and keyword phrases, it is important to understand in general how people uses keywords. Here is one place where you can “spy” on people as they enter keywords into a real search engine: Meta Spy

Do you notice any patterns? One important ting to notice is that most people don’t just enter single keywords into the search box. They are using keyword phrases. Instead of just searching for single keywords like “books”, most people will search for keyword phrases like “search engine books”, search engine optimization books” or “books about search engine placement”.
This is important to understand when you select keywords for your own site. Keyword combinations can be much more effective compared to single keywords.

Finding effective keywords

Wordtracker automatically generates the best possible keyword list for you — without you ever having to lift so much as a finger. OK, OK, you have to lift a finger… Wordtracker does more than just brainstorming. It will tell you which keywords are the most profitable — which is where you should focus your efforts! Profitable keywords are terms that are popular (or are in fairly high demand) but return few listings at the search engines (low supply). It is the keywords with the greatest combination of high demand and low supply that will generate the best profits.

But we will also have a look at how you can do the same job manually:

Brainstorming: Sit down with pen and paper for a couple of minutes and write down all the keywords you can come up with, related to the subject of your site or the product you are going to sell. Do not be critical at this stage. Write down all the words you can think of.

Asking other people: Ask your family, friends and colleges what kind of words they would use to describe your product or the subject of your site. They will usually be able to come up with keywords and phrases you have missed.

Log file analysis: Site stats and logs will tell you exactly what keywords already has been used to find your site. Combine those words into new keyword phrases.

Surfing the Internet: Have a look at the meta keywords and text used in other Websites about the same subject. However, don’t be tempted to paste the code from other sites straight into your page. You do not know if the other Webmaster has done proper research before adding his keywords. Use this method for keyword research only.

Search suggestions: When you are typing popular keywords into the search engines, you will often get suggestions for keywords or key- phrases related to the original word. Not all search engines have this feature, but some do.

Going regional: Keep in mind that people from other parts of the country, or from other English speaking countries, might be using different keywords. How are people from UK and Australia saying things? Using such additional keywords might open a completely new market for your site. If your site deals with a particular region only, remember to include that in your keywords list. Many people refine their searches by inserting regional keywords like “UK search engine optimization” versus searching for the more general phrase “search engine optimization.”

Catching misspellings: Some keywords are frequently misspelled. If you can find a popular misspelling, you have a very easily ranked keyword that will bring a lot of traffic.

Using a thesaurus: This is an excellent tool for coming up with more keywords similar to those you have already found by your own. Try the Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus.

Making keyword phrases

Combining single keywords into keyword phrases will make it easier to rank well, and you will be targeting your visitors more effectively. Very general and highly competitive single keywords will most likely not make it into a top #10 search engine placement.

If you have a list of single keyword, try linking some of the keywords together into phrases. The more specific your keyword phrases are, the better the chances that people who search for them will actually benefit from your site’s content.

Keywords not to use

Do not worry about optimizing for ALL CAPS versions of your keywords. Most people are using lowercase only when searching, and most search engines will treat uppercase and lowercase keywords the same.

Superlatives are another group of keywords usually not suitable for our purpose. Millions of competing pages are all claiming that their sites are “best,” “amazing,” “fantastic,” “awesome,” etc. However, nobody actually searches for such keywords.

And there is one more thing… “stop words”. “These are common words that are usually ignored by search engines (like: a, an, and, for, the, of, that, it, to, if, you, etc). If your keyword phrase contains “stop words”, it will be ignored.
How can you tell if a word is a stop word? Go to a search engine and search for this particular keyword. If the search engine tells you “no document matches your query,” (or something similar) you will know this is a stop word for that particular engine.

Using a keyword spreadsheet

If you have carefully followed all the steps outlined above you have managed to find a huge list of keywords for your site. But chances are you still have too many keywords. It’s time for the final keyword optimization step.

When selecting keywords the trick is finding the balance between keyword demand and keyword supply. A spreadsheet is an excellent tool for this:

Your keywords	Demand	Supply
(These numbers are not accurate – For illustration purposes only)
flowers	1.000.000	100.000.000
cheap flowers	500.000	5.000
flower	500	1000

Enter all your selected keywords into the first column, one by one. In the next column, enter how many times that particular keyword has been searched for. Then you can easily see what keywords are in highest demand (most popular). In the last column you must write down how many other Websites you will have to compete with for this keyword.

To figure out the supply of Web sites for a particular keyword, go to a search engine like Google and perform a search for your keyword in quotes: “my keyword”. The results will show exactly how many other sites are containing this keyword. This is the number of sites you will have to compete with for a top position.

Now have a good look at your spreadsheet and try to spot any keywords in high demand (lots of people are searching for those keywords), but in low supply (few sites are containing the keywords). These are the keywords that most likely will give you the best chance of success.

Wordtracker will find and calculate both keyword supply and keyword demand automatically. Sign up for a free trial!

Step2: Meta Tags

Why use HTML meta tags?

Meta tags are special HTML tags inserted into the source code of your pages, containing hidden information about your site. The purpose of meta tags are explaining to the search engines what your page is all about.

HTML meta tags are not a magic solution to higher search engine placement. Never or less they are essential parts of a well-designed Web site. So let us try to put them to work for you:

HTML code for meta tags

There are several meta tags, but only three are important: The description meta tag, the keyword meta tag and the title tag (strictly speaking the title tag is not a meta tag, but I will refer to it as such on this page).

Your meta tags should include only keywords directly related to the particular page they are on. Organize your keywords so each page within your Web site concentrate on a different group of closely related keywords. Each page should focus on different products, different keywords and different aspects of the sites central theme.

Here is an example showing the HTML source from a Website using correctly formatted title and meta tags.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>The page title is placed here</TITLE>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”This is a short description for your page.”>
<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”keyword here, another keyword here“>
</HEAD>
<BODY >
(This is where the visible text and images in the page are placed.)
</BODY>
</HTML>

Below you can see how this page will appear for people watching it in the search engine listings. Notice the title tag and description is shown. The keyword meta tag is not.

The page title is placed here
This is a short description for your page.

http://www.yourdomain.com

To edit the HTML source in your Web page (the local copy residing on your computer), open it in Internet Explorer, right click on the page and choose “view source”. Now you can insert or edit HTML meta tags (remember to save the changes afterwards). There are several WYSIWYG editors capable of adding HTML meta tags to your site. Unfortunately, some of those editors are also inserting many unnecessary meta tags. Such tags should be removed, or at the very least be placed below the title, description and keyword tags.

Do you feel uncomfortable typing HTML code? Do not worry. You are welcome to use the HTML meta tag generator to produce correctly formatted title and meta tags for your site.

The title tag

The title tag is perhaps the most important tag on your page. The title tag is the first thing people will see when they spot your page in the search results. Keep it short and appealing. Make the title sell your site!

The search engines put much weight on the words in the page title. Placing this tag first in the HTML (before other meta tags) and your main keyword first in the tag, will give a very powerful boost in rank.

Some directories give slight priority to alphabetically correct titles. Try to start your title with a letter that starts early in the alphabet…. whenever possible an “A”.

Description meta tags

Along with the title, the description meta tag is what encourages people to click on your search engine link instead of your competitors.

The description tag should be a short paragraph (one or two sentences) capturing the “essence” of your site.  Many search engines will display more than 150 characters for your description meta tag. Nevertheless you should keep the tag to 150 char or less to prevent it from being cut of by those who don’t.

Search engines often regard words in the description tag as more important compared to the words elsewhere on your page. This makes perfect sense, considering this tag should be capturing the “essence” of your page. Take advantage of this fact by always including your primary keywords within the description meta tags, preferably near the beginning of the tag.

Keyword meta tags

This tag is not read by anyone except the search engines. Some search engines are totally ignoring it. But used correctly the keyword meta tag still can contribute to a higher rank.

The standard format for keyword meta tags is comma-separated words. Each phrase should be separated with commas (no space between the commas). However, many search engine optimizers are claiming to get better results by separating keywords with spaces only. Try both methods and see what is working best for you.

Avoid the temptation to repeat your keywords over and over again. This is considered spamming by some search engines and might result in your site being blacklisted, or penalized.

Most search engines will allow you to use approximately 1000 characters within the meta keyword tag. Usually you will get much better results by targeting just a few keywords for each page though. Less keywords will give the remaining words more weight. By watering down your keywords, you are reducing your possibility to rank well.

Robots meta tag

One last tag worth mentioning is the robots meta tag. This meta tag is supposed to give instructions for search engine robots/spiders and let you in control of how your page is indexed. However, some search engines do not fully support the robots meta tag standard and might refuse to index Web pages using variations of this tag.

You should not be using this meta tag unless you want to exclude your site from being found by search engines. If you do not want the search engine spiders to index your page, you can use a robots meta tag like this: <META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=” noindex,nofollow”> This will instruct the search engines not to index your page or follow any links from it.

For better control over search engine robots I recommend using robots.txt instead of robot meta tags.

A few words from AltaVista about meta tags:

“Many Webmasters focus on the “METAtags” and lose sight of the importance of the HTML title and the plain-text content of the page. What people don’t realize is that for ranking purposes, the HTML title and first lines of text are still very important. METAtags do not take precedence.

AltaVista indexes every word on every page, and every word (and the order in which they appear) is important. The purpose of the “keyword” METAtag is simply to allow you to add synonyms words that are appropriate for what’s on your page – that describe what’s there but that do not actually appear on that page.

One of the best uses for “keyword” METAtags is for foreign translations of the main words on your page, so, for instance, somebody searching in French will find that page.”

AltaVista

Step3: Optimization Technique

Basic search engine optimization strategy

As this free search engine optimization guide will show, there are five main search engine optimization factors to keep in mind:

1. Your Website’s content and main theme.

2. Number of keywords on each page.

3. Keyword placement.

4. Click popularity.

5. Link popularity.

#1. Website content and theme

The actual content on your site is the most important factor in your search engine optimization strategy. It’s only natural: Sites with a lot of up to date high quality content should rank ahead of outdated sites with little valuable content.

Keep in mind that search engines can only read the text in your page, and are unable to view pictures, flash and other clever presentations. Having sufficient text in all pages for the search engines to index is a basic requirement for your search engine optimization to succeed.

What does this mean to you? Creating an informative site with lots of original content focused on one central theme should be the foundation for your search engine optimization strategy.

#2. Keyword density

There are usually hundreds of words on a Web page. How are the search engines able to determine which words are the most important for describing the actual content on your site? It’s done by counting the number of words on your page. Words or phrases frequently used are considered more important.

Search engines use mathematical algorithms to calculate the importance of each word in your pages. The total number of words on your page divided by the number of times your keyword appears are called “keyword density” or “keyword weight”. By watering down your keywords, you are reducing the possibility to rank well. Your keywords must be present in your page a certain number of times to rank well and achieve a favorable search engine placement.

How are you supposed to know exactly how many times you need to repeat your keywords to get a top ranking? You will have to look at the optimized Web sites already listed in the top positions for that particular keyword. This will give you an overall idea of the keyword density needed to get a top search engine position.

An incredible tool for comparing the keyword density and other factors on your own site to high ranking sites is “Web Position” by WebTrend Inc. A tool like this is invaluable for anyone serious about their search engine optimization strategy.

#3. Keyword prominence

When you have figured out how many times you need to use your keywords in the text of the page, it is time to consider where to place your keywords. The search engines will pay more attention to certain parts of your site. Words in those sections are seen as more important compared to other words. This is called “keyword prominence”.

● Title and meta tags: The title tag is the most important tag on your page. It is crucial that you put your keywords in the title. Some search engines also pay extra attention to words in description and keyword meta tags.

● Headings: The <H1>-<H6> heading tags give your visitors (search engines included) a good idea about what is the main subject of your page. It is crucial for your search engine optimization strategy success to include keywords in these tags.

● Hyperlink text: It is natural to assume that the pages you are linking to will be related to the subject of your own page. This is why keywords in hyperlink text are considered very important with some search engines. Hyperlink text refers to the part of the URL that is seen on the page, the visible text that a user clicks on (some search engines will also index the hidden URL text in the link).

● URL text: Keywords in your domain name and page names can influence your rank in both regular search engines and directories. Such keywords are called “URL text”. When you are using keywords in the URL, links to your site from other sites will carry more weight toward a higher search engine placement.

● Top: The words on top of your page, in the beginning of your tags, first in paragraphs and at the start of your sentences are generally speaking regarded as more important. Make sure the keywords are among the first words on your page. Making your keywords underlined, bold or otherwise highlighted also help to emphasize the importance.

The page critic module in Web Position is an excellent tool that will let you find the exact word count and keyword density within each section of your page and compare the stats of your pages with those who already have achieved high search engine positions.

#4. Click popularity

Another factor influencing search engine placement in some search engines is click popularity.

The number of users clicking on links to your page from the search results is counted. Pages that are frequently clicked will get a popularity boost. If your Web site already has a high ranking you will get fewer points compared to a low ranking site. This way all sites have an equal chance to get click through points awarded.

Don’t be tempted to click your own link over and over again. Repeated clicks from the same IP will be detected.

How can you influence click popularity then? By putting some work into your page title and description meta tag. These are the main factors influencing people’s decision to click your link. High quality content will make visitors stay at your search engine optimized web site, and will stop them from quickly returning to the search engine.

#5. Link popularity

One major factor to consider in your search engine optimization strategy is link popularity. Search engines will regard sites with many links pointing to them as more important. It’s only natural to expect that popular sites with many links pointing to them will be high quality sites.

Links from popular sites will give your site a higher boost. Sites linking to you should also be on the same subject as your own site and contain the keywords in the hyperlinks text. Linking your Web site to other popular sites on the same subject as your own site, can also improve your search engine placement.

Link popularity is nothing you have direct control over (apart from setting up several sites on similar subjects and linking them to one another), but there are a few things you can do:

1. Make a great Web site. If people find it to be a high quality site with valuable content, they will link to it.

2. Make it easy to link. Put HTML code and link buttons on your site. Ask visitors for links to your site. Consider using a free service like easy2link.com or make your own “how to link to us” page.

3. Offer rewards for those linking to you. Reciprocal links, free text or banner advertising etc.

4. Conduct a search for web sites that are similar to yours in one of the major search engines. Find out who is linking to your competitors and suggest they put up a link to you too. Reciprocal links from sites related to your site will benefit both parties. To help finding link partner for this site we have used Arelis. This is an excellent tool to help you find and get in touch with potential link partners.

5. Pay for getting text links placed on important sites related to yours (just like you usually do with banner ads).

And of course…. get listed in all the main directories like Yahoo and Dmoz.. Don’t forget about yellow pages, business directories, award sites and the minor directories either. Do you have a free Ezine? Get listed in Ezine directories. Do you offer a free ebook? Get listed in ebook directories. Offer any freeware/shareware? Get your site listed in the appropriate software directories. Every little link helps.

How can you know how many Web pages are linking to yours? You turn to OptiLink. This search engine optimization and link analysis software let you reverse engineer the linking strategy of any top 10 site and make your site out-rank it!

Step4: Doorway Pages

Doorway pages – Your secret weapon!

Doorway pages are Web pages designed for only one reason: Getting a high search engine placement on a particular search engine for a specific keyword or keyword phrase.

Think of search engine optimization as running a pizza restaurant. Many people will visit your restaurant, but they will not all want the same type of pizza. Search engines work in a very similar way. Sometimes you will find your Web page high ranked in one search engine, but still nowhere to be found in another. Then it’s time to make some doorway pages specifically tailored toward the taste of that particular search engine.

Spamming and doorway pages

In the past, most doorway pages had no real content. Doorways were usually made up by just a few keywords, a picture and a link (or meta tag redirect) to the main Web site. People used doorway page generator software to create hundreds of doorways automatically, and submit them all. Occasionally you can still find such doorways left behind in some search engines.

However, search engines will not continue to take on board thousands of single page, low quality doorway pages with no unique content. Those who constantly are spamming the search engines with useless doorways are hurting not only the search engines and the search engine users, but also themselves.

Notice this statement regarding doorway pages from AltaVista:

“Attempts to fill AltaVista’s index with misleading or promotional pages lower the value of the index for everyone. We do not allow URL submissions from customers who spam the index and will exclude all such pages from the index.”

So, don’t get tempted to use doorway pages without unique content and of no real value to your visitors. As time goes by, more and more search engines will stop indexing such doorway pages and begin banning sites that are caught using them.

Search engine friendly doorway pages

Your doorway pages must always blend seamlessly into the whole site and provide visitors with real information, just like any other page within your site. If doorway pages are used responsibly, they can increase the accuracy of the search engine index and make it easier for searchers to find relevant content.

A good doorway page is just like any other pages, but tailored to conform to a particular search engine’s unique ranking formula or to rank well for a specific keyword.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

● It really is not necessary to create doorway pages for all search engines. Concentrate your efforts on those who just don’t like your regular Web pages (If none of the search engines like your regular pages, you need to rework those pages, not make more doorway pages).

● Stay away from the directories. The main directories like Yahoo and ODP will only allow you to submit your main page. Don’t try submitting any doorway pages here (or any other sub-pages for that matter).

● You’ll need extensive knowledge of the particular search engine you are making you doorway pages for. Analyzing other high-ranking sites on the search engine in question will help you determine this engines specific taste.

● Effective doorway pages use only 1-2 keywords each. If you use more, your pages’ effect will be diluted. Keep each of your doorways strictly focused on the keyword (or keyword phrase) which you want a better search engine placement for.

● Keep it simple. Short doorway pages do better. Usually 300 – 500 words will be the ideal size for doorways. Avoid using JavaScript and other fancy effects that are not necessary.

Avoid using software or scripts to generate hundreds of random doorway pages without any real content.

Step5: Avoid Spamming:

What is search engine spam?

Search engine spam is the use of unethical techniques for improving your search engine position. Dishonest Webmasters are using these spam tactics to fool the search engines into giving irrelevant pages high search engine placement.

If you are not aware of what constitutes search engine spam your site will not be indexed — and could even be blacklisted. That is a very high price to pay if you are serious about the success of your Website.

Therefore, besides looking at factors that will boost your search engine rankings, we will also look into what tactics to avoid:

Ten common search engine spam techniques

1. Invisible text. Hiding keywords by using the same (or very similar) color for font and background is one of the most common techniques used by search engine spammers. This can be done unknowingly if you are using tables or a background image with a different color than the real background for your site.

2. Keyword stuffing are often used along with hidden text, but can also be used to repeat keywords over and over again on the bottom of the page (tailing) in tiny font or within meta tags (or other hidden tags).

3. Unrelated keywords. Never use popular keywords that do not apply to your site’s content. You might be able to trick a few people searching for such words into clicking at your link, but they will quickly leave your site when they see you have no info on the topic they were originally searching for.

4. Hidden tags. The use of keywords in hidden HTML tags like comment tags, style tags, http-equiv tags, hidden value tags, alt tags, font tags, author tags, option tags, noframes tags (on sites not using frames) and hidden links might be considered search engine spam by some search engines.

5. Identical pages (or very similar pages). Don’t duplicate a Web page, give the copies different file names, and submit them all (mirror pages). Duplicate pages are regarded as search engine spam by all search engines and directories.

6. Code swapping (“bait & switch” technique). Do not optimize a page for high search engine position, and then swap another page in its

place once a high rank is achieved. Doing this will never result in a lasting search engine placement anyway.

1. Page redirects. Often people create spam filled Web pages intended for the eyes of search engines only. When someone visit those pages, they are redirected to the real page by META refresh tags, CGI, Java, JavaScript, or server side techniques. There are legitimate reasons for cloaking and similar techniques, but don’t use them unless you know exactly what you are doing.

2. Link farms. Many search engines consider the use of link farms or reciprocal link generators as search engine spam techniques. Several search engines are known to kick out sites that participate in any link exchange program that artificially boosts link popularity.

3. No content. Sites without unique content of value to the search engine users are often regarded as spam. Illegal content, duplicated content, and sites consisting largely of affiliate links are also considered low value search engine spam, especially by the directories.

4. Over submitting. Each search engine has its own limits to how many pages can be submitted and how often to submit. Do not submit the same page more than once a month to the same search engine and don’t submit too many pages each day. Never submit doorways to directories. Follow the submission guidelines carefully.

Penalties for search engine spam

Not all search engines are equally strict about search engine spam. Tricks that are perfectly acceptable for one search engine can be considered search engine spam by another. Some engines will refuse to index pages believed to contain spam, some will still index, but rank the pages lower. Another option is banning the whole site.

On some search engines, you may find pages that are ranked high and DO use some of the search engine spam techniques described here. These are usually old pages — often several years old. If these pages were submitted today, they would be scored low, or rejected. Even if you currently can get away with certain search engine spam techniques, spam and other ways of cheating just do not work in the end.

Search engines strive to provide the most relevant results to their users, but spam clutters their indexes with irrelevant and misleading information. Make no mistake. Search engines will always react to the spam techniques when they become a big enough problem.

Step6: Registering With a proper Domain

Domain names & search engine optimization

No matter how well you optimize your site for the search engines, it can be a waste of time if you don’t have a properly registered internet domain name. We are going too have a look at domain name registration dos and don’ts from a search engine optimization perspective.

Avoiding free domain names

Some Webmasters are using shared domains or sub-domains available for free from popular Web hosting services, or some kind of free domain name redirect service. This might be cheap, but if you want a good search engine placement, it’s not an option.

1. Some search engines do ban free Web hosts because search engine spammers are frequently using them for hosting duplicate sites (mirrors) and doorway pages.

2. Sharing domains or IP addresses with spammers can get your search engine position penalized or your entire site banned. Note this statement from AltaVista: “You could wind up being penalized or excluded simply because the underlying IP address for that service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes.”

3. Most search engines limit the number of submissions or number of listings for each domain. This will make it very hard to get your site indexed. Other sites on the same domain might already take all the available spots.

4. If you do manage to get your site indexed, the search engine will have a hard time finding the  “theme” for your site if you are sharing a domain with other sites on many different subjects. Pages are no longer ranked one by one, ALL content within the domain are considered.

5. Without your own domain, you will be forced to start working from scratch again if the host goes out of business or if he decides to change your URL.  Many Webmasters have all the sudden lost all their search engine positions, link popularity and Web traffic because of this. Don’t let it happen to you.

Domain name registration – the search engine friendly way

What domain name is right for your site then? From a search engine point of view, keywords in the internet domain name are crucial.

1. Separate multiple keywords like my-keywords-phrase.com instead of typing it all in one word: mykeywordphrase.com. This will make it possible for the search engines to understand your keyword phrases correctly.

2. Keep in mind that Yahoo are rejecting domain submissions with URL’s in excess of 54 characters.  You would be wise to stay under the 55 character limit when choosing a domain name.

3. Directories like Yahoo and ODP will not look for keywords in the text of your page, and editors will often edit keywords out of your title and description. This leaves your internet domain name as the single most important place to put keywords for your site, – the only place nobody can edit them away.

4. Too many dashes in a domain name might trigger the spam filters of some search engines

5. Yet another benefit of keyword rich domain names is in reciprocal linking. If the domain name keywords appear within the text of incoming links, you will get a major boost in ranking, especially in Google.

Before you decide on your new domain name, try out some of the free tools for brainstorming domain names at Dotster.com. Here you can also do a search for expired domain names. Try to find one with many links pointing to it. If you are lucky, you might be able to find an expired domain with keywords related to your site and ready- made link popularity!

Owning your own internet domain name tells people, and search engines, that you are serious about your business. Registering a domain name is not only a way to get a better search engine placement, it’s a way of telling visitors to your site who you are, and a sign that you are a professional that can be trusted.

Step7: Search engine friendly web hosting

Choosing a Web host provider for your site is no small decision. When you make a choice of a Web page host, you are actually placing your Internet business in the hands of your Web host provider. The wrong Web hosting plan can cause permanent damage to your search engine placement.

Selecting a Web page host is like renting an office. You want to get it right the first time. It is always possible to move somewhere else, but it’s no easy task to move your entire business – not to mention the damage that already could be caused by then.

We are going to look at some little known facts about Web page hosting and how it can effect your search engine placement:

Web host providers that will ruin your search engine placement:

Did you submit your site over and over again without ever getting it indexed in the search engines? Or was your site indexed, but is nowhere to be found when you are typing your search terms into the engines?  Your Web host provider might be the cause of that!

Note this quite interesting statement about Web hosting from one of the major search engines, AltaVista:

“If being found via search engines is important to your business, be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded.”

AltaVista is not the only search engine enforcing this policy against certain Web page host services. This is a common practice causing many sites to lose rank while the Webmasters are wondering why. Choosing the right host for your Web hosting needs is of great importance if you really care about your search engine position.

Here is a short list of things to watch out for:

● Shared IP hosting. Many Web hosting services are not giving out unique IP addresses to customers. The name-based system of virtual Web hosting allows multiple domains to be hosted by a single IP. This means several hundred domain names could all be using the same IP address. Are you sharing an IP address with people you don’t even know?

If someone else that is hosted on the same server as your site gets banned on a search engine, then your Web site will be caught and banned as well. This is happening on a regular basis and causing serious problems for those who are affected.

● Downtime. It goes without saying. If your Web host provider cannot keep servers up and running 24/7, people will not be able to find your site. The search engine spiders won’t find it either. They will assume your site is gone and remove it from the search engine index. Then you will have to resubmit and wait weeks or months for the spider to re-index your site. If your site already is indexed and ranking well, it might lose it’s position altogether.

No matter what web host provider you are using, I highly recommend signing up for a free site monitoring service like EasyMonitor. This guarantees that you’re alerted within minutes when your site goes down.

The speed and reliability of your Web host provider will depend on several factors: Look for a Web page host with A T3 Connection (or better) close to a primary Internet backbone, safeguards against systems, network or power failure, several connections to the Internet (in case one goes down), backup power supplies and “uptime guarantee” with at least 95% uptime.

● No logs. Access to raw web log files is one feature often missing with low quality Web hosting services. Some Web host providers are providing logs, but do not include referrer information. Others are deleting logs frequently, making it impossible to use them effectively. Make sure your Web hosting service gives you access to raw server logs, preferably in “Extended Common Log File Format”, a standard that can be understood by most log analyzers.

The server logs will give you some valuable information for your search engine optimization work, including what search engines people are using to find your site, exactly which keywords they are typing into the search box, and when the search engine spiders visit your site. This is crucial information. You cannot properly optimize your site without it.

What else to look for when choosing a Web host provider? Daily back up of your data, high bandwidth and, of course, the quality of their support services. In addition, you must consider the features offered by the Web page host. Some features to consider are: The space available for your site, monthly transfer limits, POP mail server availability, support for CGI, SSI, Perl, databases and FrontPage 2000 extensions, secure server access (SSL), anonymous FTP and shopping cart software.

One good Web host that provides all this is Net Link Services. I have been very happy with the features, customer service and low cost of their hosting plans.  But there are many other quality Web hosts available. Any hosting company that obeys by the rules of search engine friendly hosting company will be a good choice for your site.

Step8: Url Submission

Web site submission tips

Don’t rush to submitting. It is no point in getting traffic if your site is not ready for the customers to see. An unfinished site with dead links and missing content will only hurt your reputation.

Did you know there are certain items on a web page that always should be checked before you submit to any search engine? Search Engine Optimizer users can use the built in page analyzer to check for optimization errors prior to submitting.

Where to add your URL

There are thousands of search engines and directories around. Submitting to them all would take a long time. The good news is that many search engines share the same database. 90% of your search engine traffic will originate from just a few search engine databases.

Here is a short list of the most important places to add a URL:

Free submissions:

Yahoo search engine (need to log in), Google search engine, MSN search engine, Yahoo directory (free for non-commercial sites only) and DMOZ (Open Directory Project) are the five most important places where you should submit your URL.

Paid Inclusion:

Some search engines will charge a fee in order to list all pages in your site and continually reindex your content. Positiontech.com manages the paid inclusion programs for most big search engines including AskJeeves/Teoma. Ah-ha.com also offers paid inclusion for several large meta-search engines including InfoSpace owned meta search engines.

Pay Per Click (PPC):

Pay per click search engines will charge a fee every time someone click on the link to your site. Usually sites paying the highest fees will get the best placement in the search results. The pay per click programs run by Overture and Google AdWords are most important. Listings from these search engines are shown on many additional search engines  as well including Yahoo, MSN search and AOL search.

Introduction to PPC search engines

Most pay-per-click search engines allow you to bid for keyword placement. For example, if one of your pages focuses on the topic of “search engine software” you can bid for the #1 (or any other #) placement on the first page of search results.

What a nice time saver! But there’s a catch, of course. The most popular keywords are expensive. So your best strategy is to work the niches. Bid on hundreds of less popular keywords related to your content. And keep in mind: You do not always have to bid for the #1 placement. Slightly lower placement is usually much more cost effective.

Submitting to PPC engines (pay per click search engines) is a quick way to get visitors to your site. However, make sure you know how much each visitor is worth to you before you start using PPC.

You should be aware that it’s a lot of fraud going on in the PPC business. Many PPC search engines have affiliate programs and partnership programs. These search partners often generate bogus clicks to inflate their commission. Popular keywords with high bids are the most popular targets for this, but anyone can be a victim of fraud. This is mainly a problem with the smaller pay per click search engines. The leading PPC search engines mentioned previously on this page has safeguards in place to protect you from dishonest affiliates but it never hurts to track and verify all clicks on your own so you can spot fraudulent activity.

Free for all (FFA) link pages

Submitting to FFA pages (free for all link pages) is  waste of time! FFA pages generally exist only to harvest e-mail addresses and generate spam mail. If you do submit to such sites, be prepared to receive a lot of unwanted e-mail from the page owners.

How to spot the difference between a FFA page and a genuine link page? Before you place your link on any link page make sure that:

● Both the site that host the links and all the sites it links to should have similar themes/ topics as your own site (the search engines weight the value of a link less heavily if the linking site is not of a similar nature to yours – so why bother with any other kind of site?).

● Make sure the site is of good quality and links only to high quality sites (the search engines might lower your ranking for being “affiliated” with sites of low standard).

● Check that the link page is easily found and readily available for both search engine spiders and human visitors (what use is a link to your site if nobody ever sees it?).

Quality links like this will stay on the page for a long time and is actually seen by people that are genuinely interested in the topic in question. Just one good link can give you the same traffic as a major search engine, and it will increase your search engine rankings as well.

Web site submission software

I’m sure you have seen it: Advertisement for site submission software claiming to add your URL to hundreds of search engines with the click of a button. That sounds like a fast and easy solution. Never or less there are often good reasons not to use that kind of software:

● Some search engines have banned certain brands of submission software.  Search engine spammers who frequently submit the same pages (or page copies) repeatedly can cause this to happen.

● The only way to be sure your submission is accepted is by reviewing the actual confirmation page from the search engine. Most submission software won’t save these pages for you to see.

● Search engines do frequently change the submission methods. If the software is not updated frequently, your site will not be indexed. Make sure your software is up to date and gives you the option of changing site submission strings whenever it is necessary to do so.

Most of the submission software available is also unable to submit your site to directories like Yahoo and ODP.  Even some regular search engines like now block ALL automated submissions. You must always submit to these search engines manually.

Unless you have a huge site, you can add your URL to the most important search engines and directories by hand in just a few minutes. Webmasters with a single Web site and just a few sub pages have no real need to invest in expensive web site submission software.

Still site submission software might be useful if:

1. You have a large site with many sub pages and want to deep submit your site to several engines while keeping an accurate record of each submission.

2. You have several sites of your own, or are managing sites for your clients. You might need to generate web site submission reports on a regular basic.

3. You want to get listed on several minor search engines with much less competition for your keywords,- and increase your sites link popularity and the chance of getting spidered by getting links from some of the minor directories.

In such situations submitting all your URLs manually would be much too time consuming. Web site submission software is still the only sensible solution to submit large Websites to a huge number of search engines.

If you are using WebPosition to optimize your site you have access to a build in search engine submission module that automatically submits (and resubmits if needed) your site while making sure the search engines guidelines are closely followed.

Submit your site manually

Adding a URL by hand is usually a straightforward thing to do. Most search engines require you to fill out a short submission form supplying only the URL of the site you want to add, and your e-mail address. Occasionally you also have to choose a category for your site.

Make sure you read the submission guidelines for each search engine carefully first.  Choosing the correct category and following the guidelines for filling out the submission form is especially important with human reviewed directories like Yahoo and  ODP.

Generally speaking you should only add the URL of your main page (index) to directories. The search engines will allow you to submit individual pages as long as each Web page has unique content. Just don’t overdo it. To be safe you should preferably submit just one page each day. And give the engines time to index (4 – 8 weeks). Don’t resubmit the same page over and over again.

If  your site still is not listed after several weeks, your site submission might have been lost. Try to resubmit your site, but make sure you first check if there are any potential problems with your site preventing it from being indexed.

“Search Engine Optimizer” is a great tool for identifying potential problems and making your site ready for submission. Think of it like an HTML validator, only smarter! Instead of validating HTML source code, it checks for search engine compliance issues and gives the latest optimization tips being used by professionals!

Step9: Search Engine Rank

Monitoring search engine rank

Creating, optimizing and submitting your site is only the beginning of the road to higher search engine ranking. A crucial part of any search engine ranking strategy is monitoring and reporting your search engine ranking.

After submitting your site, these are important things to monitor:

● Web site/page inclusion: Is your site indexed by all search engines? Are all pages within your site listed?

● Search engine ranking: How is the search engine ranking for popular keywords and key phrases related to your products?

● Visitors: How many people are actually visiting your site? Which pages do most people read?

● Results: Which search engines and keywords draw targeted visitors to your site? Which traffic sources are proving to be most effective? Where are your highest search engine ranking?

● Changes: Do the number of unique visitors change on a monthly basis? Are your search engine ranking falling or rising from month to month? Why is that?

Here we are going to focus on monitoring your search engine ranking. After all this is what everything else depends on. Only when your site ranks in the top 10 – 30 spots in the search results, people will be able to find your site and buy your products.

Before you start worrying about search engine ranking, are you listed at all?

Before we start working on search engine ranking, let us figure out if your site is listed at all. Even if you cant find your site by searching for related keywords, it might be listed deep down in the search results. When your Website is found, we can start working on improving your search engine rankings.

Keep this in mind when you design your site: Make sure you always include a unique word in all your pages when you make a new site. Later you can search for this word in any search engine and get a list of all your Web pages. This is a fast, easy and very accurate way of checking how many pages were indexed in a particular search engine. This word can be your name, your street address, your company name or just a made up fantasy word like “bubblibluppin”. Just make sure it is unique, not used by any other Websites.

Tip: By changing the unique tracker word every time you update the site content or tweak your pages for higher search engine ranking, you can easily keep track of which search engines have found and indexed the most recent version of your site.

If you already have a site where you did not include any tracker word, you can still check to see if your site is indexed. The trick is to use a special search string for each search engine that will return a list of all pages currently indexed.

Search engine ranking analysis

When you have made sure your Web site is listed, it’s time to figure out how it’s ranking. When someone types the name of your product or the subject of your site into the search engines, will they be able to find your site within the first pages of search results, or does someone else occupy all the top search engine spots?

You can of course check your search engine ranking manually by going to all the search engines, search for all keywords under which you want to be found and read all the search results for yourself – trying to spot your site in the results. Still,  I recommend using search engine ranking analysis software to check search engine rankings – unless you have a lot of spare time on your hands.

WebPosition is now the leading product for keeping track of search engine ranking. You just tell WebPosition  what pages to look for, and which engines you want to check, then a single click of the mouse puts WebPosition to work scouring the net’s search engines. It goes out and finds your pages and then compiles a report that tells you where each page ranks .

Whether you choose to check your search engine ranking manually or to use software, it’s important to do it regularly. Unfortunately, search engines are not error free, so from time to time you can expect pages to fall out or your page rank to drop without warning when the search engines change their algorithms. However don’t get into the habit of checking your search engine rankings excessively.  Checking rank for your most important keywords on a monthly basis is  usually sufficient.

If you are making changes to your site, or if your competitors are changing their sites, your search engine ranking is also subject to changes. Always keep track of the effect when you modify your site. Did your search engine ranking go up or down? Keeping track of where your site ranks is the only way to know if your search engine optimization is working or not.

Step 10: Log file analysis

The final step in your search engine optimization campaign is web log file analysis. The value of raw web logs are often not understood, but the truth is that your web log files are one of the most valuable resources you have as an Internet marketer.

The only way to successfully market anything online is to track and measure your results. In fact, the ability to do this effectively is one of the most powerful benefits of doing business on the Internet.

Here are just a few examples of what your server logs can tell you:

1. Measure the effectiveness of banner ads and PPC search engines.

2. What search engine spiders have found your site?

3. What keywords are people using to find your site?

4. What search engines brings you most traffic?

5. How many have book-marked your site?

6. How well do people like your site?

7. How many people visit your site?

8. What pages are most popular?

9. Why do people leave your site?

10. Who is linking to your site?

Web log files tell exactly in what areas you have success and where you need to put in more work. So, if you run a site but haven’t seen your servers web log files, get a hold of them right away. They will teach you things you’d never expect about how to make your site better, not just for you, but also for the people who matter – your customers.

What are web log files?

Server web log files are simple text files that are automatically generated every time someone accesses your Website.This contains information about who was visiting your site, where they came from, and exactly what they were doing on your site.

Here is a sample line of a Web log file in its raw format:

217.13.12.209 – - [19/May/2001:02:50:32 -0400] “GET /meta_tags.htm HTTP/1.1″ 200 28950 “http://www.google.com/search?q=meta+and+tag” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)

This web server log file line tells us:

Visitor’s IP address or hostname [217.13.12.209]
Login [ -]
Authuser [ -]
Date and time [19/May/2001:02:50:32 -0400]
Request method [GET]
Request path [meta_tags.htm]
Request protocol [HTTP/1.1]
Response status [200]
Response content size [28950]
Referrer path [http://www.google.com/search?q=meta+and+tag]
User agent [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)]

You will have to contact the company hosting your site for specific info on how to get the web log file for your site. Try logging into your site with FTP and see if you can find a directory for web log files. If your host does not provide raw web logs or if the standard log file does not include the keyword information, you can generate your own web log file by using:

Counterlog log file script
RatLog log script

Still I would advise you to use a Web host that will provide you with real web log files, preferably in the “Extended Common Log File Format”, a standard that can be understood by most web log analyzers.

Understanding web log files

Web log files are not easy to understand in their original format. To get the most out of the log file data, you need to be able to see totals for the whole site, and compare the figures over time. For this, you need a log analyzer.

Web log analyzer software can read your raw log files and turn them into easy to understand stats that you can use to tweak your search engine strategy. For advanced statistics, filters and complex analysis, you should probably chose a software based tool like Nihou. Its also possible to use web based stats like AwStats, but these are usually less flexible.

Link tracking with log files

No matter what log analyzer software you use, it will only measure the activity within your site. You can not track clicks leaving your site. Or can you?

Here is a trick you can use to measure how many people clicks on external links (links on your site leading to other sites on the web, most commonly affiliate links): For each external link you want to track, set up a “reflector page”. This is a blank page on you server that uses JavaScript code to to send people to the external link. The visitor will not see the blank page, but the click will be logged in your log file.

Now you can use your web log files to keep track of how often people click on your links by measuring hits to the reflector page. This technique is also useful if you want to track the effectiveness of email advertising, classified ads, banners or PPC listings.

Log analyzer stats explained

Here is a short explanation of some of the most common stats given by most web log analyzers:

Hits: A hit is when a page, picture, file or something else is accessed on your site. If one person views a page with 10 pictures on it, that will be counted as 11 hits. Each line in your web log file represents one hit.

Unique visitors: Unique visitors are usually defined by IP. If someone from a specific IP address looks at 50 different pages on your site, it is still only counted as one visitor. If he goes away, but comes back after a few hours he will usually be counted again. It is important that you always measure unique visitors when you are trying to figure out how many visitors it takes to make a sale on your site. This information can be used to determine how effective your banner buys or PPC search engine campaigns were.

Visitors by hour/day: If you have to make changes to your Web site, take it offline or make changes only when there are few visitors.

Authenticated Users: Shows users that have gained access to password-protected pages. Tip: Do not link to password protected files or pages from pages that search engines have access to without first excluding these pages in the robots.txt file. If you do, this will result in many unnecessary errors in your web log files.

Visitors Paths: Shows how visitors have moved trough the site, and which pages they have visited. Sometimes even the time spent on each page is displayed. This is some of the most important info you can get from your log files. It tells you what kind of pages your visitors want to see and what they like best on your site. You also get valuable info on how useful your site navigation is from these stats.

You might be surprised to see how many visitors spend less than 10 sec on your main page and then go away without clicking further into your site. When this happens, you have either targeted the wrong keywords for search engines (your visitor was expecting another type of site), or your site might be designed to “look cool” instead of being effective seen from a marketing standpoint.

Top entry pages: Shows what page a user accesses as their first page when visiting your site. These are usually pages ranking high in search engines, book-marked pages or pages with many external links pointing to them. Whatever you do, never remove or rename these pages.

Never change pages getting high rankings and loads of visitors from the search engines either. If these pages are on top because of search engine traffic, try to analyze why these pages are so well liked.

Top exit pages: Shows which pages that user accesses as their last page when they are visiting your site. You don’t want you visitors to leave to soon. If certain pages seem to cause people to leave, you must do something about those pages so your customers stay longer.

Maybe you should make links to external pages open in a new browser window so people can check out external recourses without having to leave your site first? Or maybe you just have to make that particular page of yours more interesting.

Popular pages: Show which pages are seen most often. Place important info on these sites and make sure a link to your order form always can be easily spotted here. Try to figure out why these pages are popular. What must be done to your other pages to get them higher up on this list? Perhaps you should concentrate more on expanding the most popular sections of your site?

And what about the Web pages NOT listed here? Maybe some of these pages need to be removed and replaced with content that is more popular. On the other hand, perhaps you are just making it difficult for visitors to find the pages. Do you have links pointing to them from the rest of your site? Can the text of the links be changed so you get more clicks?

Popular files: This reports shows downloaded files. Download managers like GetRight and GoZilla sending multiple requests for the same file can make this number somewhat inaccurate.

Tip: Check how often the “favicon.ico” file is downloaded. This will tell you how many have book-marked your site. If you do not have a favicon file, you will find the stats in the error section instead.

Browsers: Shows which browsers the visitors are using. Make sure your site looks well when it’s seen through the kind of browser your visitors are using. Not everyone is using Internet Explorer. Some log analyzers will also tell you if the browser have support for VBScript, JavaScript, Java Applets and ActiveX. It is useful to know when you decide whether to use this on a site.

Operating Systems: Shows what operating systems the visitors are using. MS Win 95,  NT, Mac, etc.

Countries: Shows what countries visitors are coming from. Are you selling in US only? Perhaps these stats can make you change your mind. Have you considered translating your site into another language and targeting foreign search engines? These numbers will show you if it’s worth the effort.

Please note that these reports are not always accurate. Some web log analyzers assume that com and net domains are located in the US but this is not always true. This is why the reported number of US visitors often is to high.

Refereeing sites: Shows what URLs is refereeing to any page on your site. These sites link to your site. Make sure all these pages are indexed in the search engines (link popularity) and consider linking back if their site is related to yours. Another use for these stats is to measure the effect of banner ads, text adds, message-board and Newsgroup postings.

Unknown referrer usually means that visitors either typed in the link to the site or used book-marked links.

Search engines: Shows which search engines have guided visitors to your site. Tells you where your search engine optimization works and where it doesn’t. Keep on working with engines giving you problems (use doorway pages), but don’t forget the ones where you have success either. Keep on giving them more of the same.

Search keywords: Shows the keywords in the search phrases. See if you can combine some of those single words into keyword phrases you haven’t thought of before. Then design new pages to rank in the search engines for those keywords.

Search phrases: Shows the search phrases that have guided visitors to your site. These are the actual terms people are typing into the search engines to find your site. Search phrases sending you many visitors are a sign of good ranking. Keep on working with phrases already sending you many visitors.

Many log analyzers will show you the search phrases per search engine. This is useful to see your relative visibility for search phrases in search engines. You can then use this information to create new pages with search phrases that you want to be found on by a specific search engine (doorway pages).

Spiders: Show the name of spiders and robots visiting your site. Here you can see which search engines have found your site and check if they have spidered all your pages. When a search engine have spidered your site, you will usually show up in the search listings after a few weeks.

Tip: You can assume that everyone tying to access the “robots.txt” file is a spider or robot. Not all these hits will be from search engine spiders though.

Errors: Shows different errors and status messages. Are you getting many visitors to a non-existing page?  Perhaps a search engine is referring to the missing page? Put it back right away, so you don’t lose more customers. Then update your search engine and directory listings. A robots.txt error message is a sign that the search engine spiders cant find your robots.txt file. You should fix that as soon as possible.

The sections explained above are just a few of those you can find in many web log analyzers. Your web server web logs contain a wealth of info about your site that can be used to get better search engine results and more sales. Using filters will increase the usability of your web log files even more. Log filters will let you search for specific information within the web log files so you can determine how effective your marketing campaigns really are.