Having a Google Sitemap just got better! Not only does the search engine company check your sitemap, but now they give you feedback! The new feature was quickly noticed by many users of the service recently as a way for Google to alert the webmaster about possible problem pages that they have had trouble indexing.

I had the wonderful experience of getting to know this service first hand when I logged in to Google Sitemaps to check on the status of one of my many sitemaps. Along side of the address for the sitemap, there was a link with the anchor text “verify”. This helps Google to know that you are the actual webmaster for that site and is a wonderful addition for security.

Once you are verified (which is a simple process of creating a page on your root directory that they will see) you are able to see the stats for the site index. Often times, you won’t see anything in the stats area, but if you have recently updated, redesigned, or deleted certain pages that Google has in its index, you have a good chance of seeing something there. Google will tell you about possible errors in the indexing process such as pages that are not showing, or pages that they can’t see.

You might already be familiar with the new Google Sitemap Program, but if you aren’t here’s a quick synopsis. The Sitemaps program is a new offering from the Google family and is currently in beta testing.

The goal of the program is to allow Google to see the complete sitemap or a sitemap of frequently changing pages. This is extremely helpful if you have links that can’t be reached by the Googlebot when it’s indexing your page due to things like Java script menus and such. The codes on a page that prevent the bot from viewing your site ultimately hinder you in the search engines.

So using the XML standard coding language, which is easy to understand once you get the hang of it, you create a log of the various pages on your site and tell Google some attributes about it such as the overall priority of the page, how frequently you alter the content, when the page was updated last, and of course its location.

This will give Google the overall picture of the layout of your site and does help in getting the pages indexed for greater relevancy. There are protocols for the creation of the sitemap so it’s best to read all the information completely at the Google Sitemaps website at http://www.google.com/webmasters/ .

Do you know that a majority of what you do on your site to optimize for the search engines is not as important as what you do that is outside of your site. It’s odd when you think about it, but the external factors to your site are more important than what you have control over.

Take, for instance, the sites that link you to. You can do only so much optimizing on you actual site, but when it comes down to it, when you submit to the search engines, it can take you a good 6 months to be added to their index. Whereas, if you do one simple link exchange with a website that has a PR of 7 or higher, you can be indexed by Google in under 24 hours. Again, off page optimization is what carries more weight.

In this article, we will examine other off page factors that can help you in the search engines, including examining what types and how many sites link back to you.

The first point I want to make to you is this: where link-backs are concerned it’s definitely quality and quantity. Specifically, if you had a website promoting web design and you wanted to exchange links with another website in order to help you in the search engines, would you choose a link exchange with someone in the wedding industry. Those are some different industries doing two completely different things. Although, it’s not certainly bad for a wedding business to help promote a web design firm, it generally doesn’t help unless that website has a higher page rank than yours and the goal is to help your site to be indexed.

If you have a web design site and you were looking for the maximum boost in the engines, you should generally lean more toward link exchanges with websites that are similar to yours, such as a search engine optimization website, like this one.

If you already have a website established and are uncertain as to who has already linked to you, there are very simple ways to find this out. First, you can go to Yahoo, and type in the search box “link:http://www.yoursite.com/.” I specifically say Yahoo because from experience, I have seen Yahoo contain more data regarding link-backs than other search engines. You can also get this information from the program that I previously mentioned called WebCEO. The link is in one of my first posts. This is a free software that helps you with almost anything search engine related.

If you already have WebCEO installed, open up to your project or start your first project as your website. Then select “Analyze Link Popularity”. This is a powerful tool that allows you to analyze your site’s link-backs and your competitions link-backs at the same time. Take the time to analyze the link popularity of some of your competitors and see if you can discover the difference.

The sites that have the higher page ranks have a lot of links pointing to their site and a lot of quality links. There’s where both of them come into play. There is a fine line between having a lot of links to your site and having a lot of quality links. You want the links that you exchange to be good quality links to better help you in the search engines.

A very good way to do this is by being an active member in your local message boards. You are a website owner and because of that, people can see you as an expert in your field. That’s why it’s very easy to get on and provide solutions to surfers seeking them in your area of expertise. The reason I am quick to suggest the forums is because you can add a signature line to your posts. Now not all search engines can see the signature, but in certain forums you have luck. And depending on the forum that you link to, you increase the density of your links out there and quality of those links because the forum you post on can be related to your website.

Another off page feature you should look at is the anchor text that is used in the link back to you. The anchor text, if you don’t remember is the text that says something and the word is really a link. So, if someone were to link to you, you would have better chances if someone said “The SEO Journal” rather than http://seojournal05.blogspot.com/ . The results are even better if they use one of your keywords in the anchor text, such as “search engine optimization”. This helps solidify that your site is what your meta tags say and establishes your site as a legitimate resource for the search engines to index. The more links back to you that have that anchor text, the better

Next, you should examine how popular the sites that have those links back to you are. Again this can be done in WebCEO, where you can analyze their link popularity to yours. And while we are on the subject of link popularity, check how many outbound links that have coming from their site. Your chances are better with a site that is very popular that has fewer outgoing links.

Again the door swings both ways, where you can become very popular by having a lot of links on your site. I, for one, know of a wedding favors site that has a page rank of 7 with a lot of outgoing links (including some that go to websites outside their industry). But the general finding that I have with those types of sites is that they have a flood of sites that they link to and that link to them.

The sites that have the best statistics (good link back ratios, anchor text, similar content) you should contact for possible link exchanges. If you already have sites out there that link to you that are good quality sites, I would say keep the links as they are. Through this process, you tend to find good sites that you might be interested in linking with so do contact those sites and see if you can exchange links. Doing so, will further solidify your credibility in the search engines or establish credibility where none might have existed.

Good Luck

Outside of having a shopping cart and product sales on your website, is it possible to make money using your website? Yes! It is very simple to use your website as a vehicle for further profits.

Take, for instance, a website that has only content. This site is a great example. At the moment, you are reading this and I am not charging a penny information. In fact, in some cases, I don’t even ask you for your information before I let you have access to this information. That is what is called a content-only site. I am not selling anything.

You would think that there was no real way that I could make money off of just posting information to my daily blog, except there is. If you look to the right side at the top of this side toolbar, you’ll notice an advertisement. If you were to reload the page, there is a chance that the advertisement might change. At the bottom of the advertisement, you’ll notice some anchor text that says, “Ads provided by Google”.

Not to long ago, Google came out with a program called Adsense. This was to couple with their Adwords program. Both are at the opposite end of the spectrum and let me explain.

If I had a site and I was looking to promote it via online advertising I would sign up for Google Adwords. This is a program that takes your information and posts the ads on various websites that have content related to yours or posts them in the search results when someone searches using a keyword that you specify.

If I had a website that I was using that had a lot of visitors daily and I wanted to make money using those visitors, I would use Adsense. Being at the opposite end of the spectrum, Adsense is for web designers or webmasters that have content related to a certain area of expertise (say wedding photography, or search engine optimization), I would register and copy a small portion of code onto my site that would pull these ads from Google and post them on my website. When people see these ads and click through them, I would be able to make money, depending on the theme of the website.

Here’s the interesting thing. Google actually takes a look at your site and is able to tell the common theme of your website and thus posts ads that are tailored to that information. So if I had a website that was built around wedding photography, Google would automatically be able to determine that and post ads that were tailored to wedding photography. That is why when you look at my side bar, my ads that are sponsored by Google are tailored to search engine optimization.

Now this is a blog, and information can change daily. So if tomorrow, I decide to write about real estate rentals off the Florida Keys, it would automatically post ads pertaining to that niche and I would still be able to make money off of those ads.

A nice thing that Google adds to this program is the competitive ad filter. This is a filter that takes out all the ads of your competition. It’s like if I were a wedding photographer and I posted these on my site, with the competitive ad filter, I could make sure that my competitors ad don’t show up on my website. (although I see it as quite melancholy that you can make money off of your competitor).

Now this all depends on the payouts of certain keywords. It took me a little bit of time to be able to understand this key part. The theme you build your site around is what determines your payout. If I was a lawyer representing mesothelioma sufferers, I would be able to earn more per click through on those ads than I would if I was selling retainers online. It all depends on where the demand for that keyword is at. And the payouts for those keywords change daily. So I could build a site around mesothelioma and put these ads on it and one month later it could all be out of style.

I will tell you, there is a lot of information out there nowadays about Adsense. And it can be very confusing if not thoroughly researched. That’s why, you need to take advice from people who have been there and done it successfully. Have I conquered the Adsense war, no. I am not there yet, because I am just getting into it and learning all about it. But I do know many people who have made a very sizable living off of having these ads on their websites. These livings can range from it paying for a couple of cups of coffee a month to paying your monthly mortgage expense to allowing you to buy a $25,000 car every month because you have another $25,000 coming next month.

Using Adwords is very lucrative, but takes a lot of understanding, patience, traffic, and a themed website.

I know this topic has been off subject, but is still in the interest if making money using the search engines. I’ll let this semi-tirade continue for one more post before we continue on our subjects. And I have a lot of information to give to you! See you soon

Good Luck  

In one of our first discussions on search engines, I said that robots were the algorithms that indexed your site. In this discussion, I’ll tell you how to keep them off of certain pages.

Did you know that a robot will follow your links to index the site? What would you do if one of your links went to a page that you didn’t want in the search engine index? How would you protect your data from intrusion by the spiders.

Remember our discussion of the meta tags. Well, there is another meta tag that is helpful in getting you indexed fully or partially. It’s called the “robots” tag. Using this robots tag, you can tell the search engines to either index all pages by following all links, or you can have them index certain pages and ignore other pages by putting a robots.txt file on your server and telling the spiders that there are indexing instructions in that file. If you were to go to a website that had a robots tag (and most meta tag analyzers recommend that you have one), it would either say index all or redirect to a robots.txt file. Here is a very good resource, http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm . I suggest this page because it gives you a very good step by step layout that you can use to write your own robots.txt file

It is very interesting to know that the search engine spiders actually have different names (GoogleBot, T-rex, Scooter). So that gives you the flexibility to tell one robot that it can index a certain page or group of pages while telling another robot that it can index a completely different set of pages. You end up with total control over what is indexed by certain search engines.

Another feature that the robots file has is its ability to tell the robot to slow down. There are certain spiders that index the site very quickly, almost too quickly. By setting a “speed limit” per se, you can make sure your site is indexed completely.

I personally tell the robots to index all of my pages because anything that I need to hide is taken care of with passwords. But the situation is different if you are a work in progress or have pages that are for e-mail subscribers only.

There is some speculation, though, that some of the robots are ignoring the webmasters requests and indexing everything. Although speculation is light at best, it’s always best to still make the request known.

It’s also not required to have a robots.txt file or tell the robots to index all pages; it does help though to cover all the bases.

Hope that helps and in my next lesson, I’ll talk to you about how to make money off of your website through promotional ads and affiliate links.

Good Luck

Have you ever heard the term “Page Rank”? Some of the biggest talk these days is about a little term the Google created that has revolutionized the search engine industry. Almost everyone who optimizes their website for Google will be able to tell you about page rank and confess at will, what theirs is.

To fully explain what page rank is, you need to download the internet explorer toolbar from Google. You can find this by going to Google and typing in toolbar. The first result will be the answer you are looking for. Once you download and install the toolbar, open Internet Explorer and look at the new addition. Along the line of new buttons on the toolbar, there will be one marked “PageRank” with a bar below it that is either fully or partially filled with a green bar.

When ever you go to a website, that toolbar transmits the address to Google which comes back with a number. That number ranges from 0 – 10 (0 being the lowest, 10 being the highest). Google’s website is a full 10/10, whereas MSN and Yahoo, are 9/10. It is difficult to describe the process that is involved in determining the page rank number, but the number is a conglomerate of factors that Google sees when indexing your site.

When your site starts out, you initially have a page rank (PR) of 0. As soon as Google indexes the site, depending on a number of factors, your rank can go anywhere. In fact, I have found that a majority of business websites will have a PR that ranges from 2-4. Anyone in this range is considered normal, while being at 2 not considered to be bad.

As I said before, a lot goes into determining your PR that is determined by Google’s algorithm. Some of those factors include: how many links you exchange between different sites (more importantly, how many good sites link to you), whether those sites are similar in context (wedding planners should link with others in the wedding industry. Although it’s not bad to include different types of businesses in link exchanges, those that are similar help you the most), and how long your site has been in existence (the newer sites are less attractive, age sells).

Now if you’ve ever submitted to a search engine, you know the length of time it takes for the spiders to index your site. But, what if I told you that you could be indexed in Google’s index within 24 hours? What would you think then? You’d probably think it was some scam or that I’d be asking you for money. But this is real, and real people do it everyday.

Here’s how:

The page rank of a website plays a very big part in how fast you can be indexed. For example, if you have a friend who has a website that is already ranked high, you have a better chance of being indexed faster.

Here’s a great example. If I had a brand new website, not submitted to the search engines, and I find someone with a PR of 6 and we exchange links, I can be indexed by Google in 3 days. 3 days!!! Not 3 months like some people have experiences.

But the best of all is that if you swap links with someone who has a PR of 7, you can be indexed by Google within 24 hours! 24 hours! That’s almost unheard of, not. It’s very common that new sites that are serious about being in the Google index fast to swap links with a website that has a very high PR.

So you are wondering… Where can you find a website that has a PR of 7 or higher? Very easily! In your browser, go to http://www.linkmetro.com/ . This is a powerful website. You can sign up for a free account and you can explore the listings by category (industry), successful links, and PR. That’s right, you can find them easily. Linkmetro provides the medium for successful link exchanges that work. I have used it before and have found that it is full of serious people. The morning after I signed up, I had two link exchange requests in my inbox (1 of which was a PR4, and the other was a PR0).

Anyway, hope you have fun being indexed. In the next lesson, I’ll discuss how you can tell the robots which pages on your site are off-limits. See you then!

Directories and submissions: What’s the Deal?

You know I had a question posed by someone about what should be the best route to take for their submission needs. On the one hand, they heard that you should submit to the individual search engines as the best way to maximize your exposure. On the other hand, they were told that for the widest audience, they should submit to directories. So, my thought is… What’s the difference?

Well, there is quite a difference and to best explain this, I will try to stick to comparing two different sites: Google and dmoz.org.

First, dmoz. Some people are familiar with this site, others have not a clue what it is. DMOZ is what is called an ODP, short for open directory project. DMOZ is considered a directory. In fact, it claims to be the largest human edited directory on the internet. That’s right, I said “human”. The amazing thing about dmoz is that it is administrated by a network of volunteers. To date they claim over 5 million sites in their directory edited by almost 70,000 volunteers. That’s a lot of people to manage.

The thing that makes dmoz unique is that it is used by major search engines to enhance their own indices. Yahoo, Google, MSN, AltaVista all use dmoz to a certain degree to enhance and add to their own directory. The reason they do this is simply because it’s human edited. DMOZ has a set of guideline that its editors have to follow before adding a site to the index. They don’t accept every submission.

DMOZ looks at every site using the same guidelines to decide which is most helpful to the directory users. Sites that contain duplicate content (content that is copied from another site), contain a lot of affiliate links, are mirrored, redirect, or sites that are still under construction are usually not permitted on the directory. That is the whole reason search engines use their data, it’s been previewed and pre-qualified.

Now search engines go by a different set of rules. Directories are a list of various websites and their categories. Search engines are queries to find websites. That in itself is a huge difference.

Search engines do tend to use directory information, but tend to rely more heavily on submissions to their own sites. Search engines are also monitored by humans, but Google, for example, uses an algorithm and spiders to index sites and place them in the right order on the list. Search engines also tend to rely on the keywords and content of your site for the correct placement while directories like dmoz have you in a certain category.

Your position in the search engines is static and can change from day to day which makes it difficult to stay on top. But a majority of the consumer public uses the search engines for their queries.

The engines also allow in other sites that the directories won’t. Mirrored sites and sites with duplicate content are okay, in certain instances, although Google tends to frown upon duplicate content. Sites that are under construction and redirects are also welcome as the index changes daily.

In answer to my friends question about which is more important to submit to, my answer was to the individual search engines. The SEO industry has lost a lot of confidence in the directories because of their inconsistency in adding sites. Professionals have said, “Add your site to the directory and forget about it. If you get added; great. If not, then don’t lose sleep over it.” Even if sites are not in the directories, you can still be indexed by Google and just because you may be removed from the directories, doesn’t mean that Google will remove you.

So search engines are the way to go these days.

Hope that helps.

Good Luck

In the last post, we talked about the title and description of your website that should be added to improve your positon in the search engines. In this post we are going to be finishing up our discussion on some on page factors that help you in the search engines. I will devote a later post to talking about factors that can hurt your site, so that this one will be fully devoted to helping.When you look at your site there are a number of things that can be done to help you. First of which is whether or not the keywords that you have selected are listed somewhere in the text. In our discussion of keywords, I suggested that the keywords that you use on your site be related to whatever your site is about. It is even more important that you actuallu USE your main keywords throughout the body of your text. This creates higher relevancy which earn high marks with the search engines. A few other things that you should look at:

Header Tags

If you aren’t familiar with header tags, they aren’t a difficult concept to grasp. When you look at the code of a website, header tags are located in “h” tags. Think of them as preprogrammed font layouts. They contain information such as font size, and weight, to make the font itself stand out. The “h” is usually followed by a number 1-5 (1 being the largest, 5 being the smallest).

The “h1” and “h2” tags I am going to focus on here because the “h1” tag can be thought of as the title for the body of your website. The “h2” tag can be thought of as the subtitle. What you can do here to immensely improve your positioning is to put your main keyword in the “h1” tag while your secondary keyword in the “h2” tag. You don’t have to have it just your main keyword, as the only thing in the tag, but it is helpful if it is solitary.

Keywords in the Text

Also, I mentioned above that is important that your keywords be similar to the content of your site. It’s actually more important that the keyword that you use be in the body of your site. Sprinkling the keywords here and there helps bring you up in the rankings because Google looks at your keywords AND the content, not just the keywords, so in order to make your page more relevant, it’s best to sprinkle away!

Make it Creative

Also, when you look at your text on your page, is there just text that is all the same size and layout, or is there some bolding, and italics? Having different styles to your text, especially the text that relates to the overall theme of the page and thus the keywords, can significantly help you.

It’s just a matter of being creative. Think about those guys that sell some of the make it rich ebooks online (you may not know these guys). These are the guys that show you a lot of reasons why you should buy their “make it rich” ebook online right now. Other than the lengthy advertisement on one very long page and the testimonials that seem to g on and on, they have one thing superior about their site. They jazz it up. You don’t just see one big block of text throughout the length of the site, you see text bolded and highlighted. You see text in all sorts of sizes and colors. Their sites are competitive on the search engines and very easy to get through (even quickly) because of these features. Seems odd enough, doesn’t it?

Alt Tags

You’re probably thinking to yourself (or not), “What is an “alt” tag?” Well , have you ever been searching the internet and you come across a page that for some reason or another the images won’t load. Depending on what browser you use, what you’ll see next to the broken image logo is some text. This text is usually enclosed in an “alt” tag in the image information. The “alt” tag actually serves two purposes. First is the one I just mentioned, the second is when (in Internet Explorer) you scroll over an image that is already loaded, a little yellow box shows up next to the mouse pointer. This text describes the picture and it’s also the same text that would show up if the image didn’t load.

This is a very good place to increase keyword relevancy within your site. Having these alt tags allows you to prove to Google that the image that you’ve placed there does relate to what your site is about. It’s good to try to include one of your keywords in the “alt” tag itself, although it’s better to make sure you don’t try to fill it up with keywords because it tends to have you sandboxed. A good example of this would be if you had an office supply store and the product you were showcasing was some sort of supply. A good “alt” tag entry would be “office supplies: notebooks”. It’s simple, it relates to your site and it includes one of your main keywords. Those are the best kind!

There’s a lot to examine when optimizing your site for the best performance, but if you think about it, optimizing the actual site is a very small part. Optimizing everything that is not on the site is what helps you the most.

In our next lesson, we’ll discuss directory submissions versus search engine submissions. And later, we’ll talk about page ranking and how swapping links with someone can be the biggest help you can get.

Stay tuned and good luck!

John

In the previous post, I let you know how choosing the right keywords can make or break your website position on the search engines. In this lesson, I’ll help you understand a few other on page optimizations that you can do using the “title” and “description” tags.

So tell me, what’s in a name?

When someone creates a page, often times (depending on what program they use to create it) there will be a “title”tag. This is a tag that is located between the two “head” tags in the source code. The title tage is what shows in the browser window up top next to the name of the browser you are using. For instance, the name listed at the top of the browser for this blog is “SEO Journal – Netscape Browser” (because I prefer to use Netscape for my internet browsing).

Often times, the program that you are using to create your site doesn’t know what to name your website because all websites are different, so you’ll end up seeing something like “Untitled Page” or the name of the address they are visiting. But optimizing your website for the search engines includes adding this tag. It’s not only visually attractive for your visitors, but it also helps you rank higher in the search engines.

So let’s begin… If you remember from our last lesson, we examined the Office Depot website for these examples. So load the code from their home page and take a look at the top lines. Almost immediately, you’ll notice two “title” tags listed their. Having that in the code seems simple enough, right. That’s correct. Their title is simple, understandable and attractive. And here’s how to pick the right title.

You want your title to be brief, and understandable. Too many websites have been removed from the search engines just because they have been too overzealous with their title (yes, I said removed. In the search engine world, we call it “being sandboxed“). It’s simple enough to just add your keywords to your title to make it all consistent, but those are the things that can have your site removed. What I’ve found to be the easiest and safest policy is to put your company name in the website followed by that the purpose of the page is.

For instance, if you were the Microsoft Corp., then your title might say “Microsoft – Download Updates” It’s brief, attractive, it helps the customer know what step they are on and what page it is in case they are working on another program, and it’s “spider-friendly” (that’s the term we use for the spiders that crawl your website for indexing).

For your home page of your website, you can do it a little different. For instance, you really can’t put on the home page of your site, ” Microsoft – Home Page”. It would look cheesey and unattractive to your customer base. Instead if you have a business slogan, you could put that. A very good example of that would be “Office Depot – Taking Care Of Business”. I quote this because this used to be one of their slogans. Or even “Staples – We’ve Got That!” This helps on the home page of your site, but I recomment that you use this only on that one page. It can become tedious if you allowed it to be on every page, and it would take up space in the browser title bar that you don’t want to look cluttered.

Another idea that Office Depot has used is to list one or two of their specialties on their title bar. For instance, at the writing of this post, their title bar says, “Office Depot – Office Supplies, Furniture…”. This is a great tactic if you are in the product business. But again, I stress, don’t fill it up with a ton of keywords. There is a very fine line here.

A good rule of thumb is to keep it simple. Don’t put crazy symbols in the titles such as smilies (:-), or unusual codes that are difficult to distinguish (such as characters in another language). This makes it more difficult to get you to the top of Google or other search engines because it looks more complicated. Another thing that I always suggest to stay away from are marquees. If you aren’t familiar with them, a marquees is simply scrolling text that goes from right to left across your screen. It is not only a big no-no for the searches, but is VERY unattractive to customers (at least to the customers that I deal with).

So what is your site about?

If you remember from our last lesson, I had to write out what it is that your company or organiztion does on the internet. If you still have that quote, pull it out. Now, point your browser to Google and type in office depot. When the page comes up, and office depot is the first listing, open up the code that you had for the office depot hope page. Now if you do a little looking in the first few lines of the code, you’ll notice another “meta” tage that has the word “description” close to it. Read what is in the quotation marks for the description and when you are done, go back to the Google page and read the description about Office Depot.

Find any similarities?

That’s right, they are identical. That is what happens when you add a description to your website “meta” tags. That is where they end up!

So, tell me, what do you want your customers to read when they go to the search engines and find your listing there? That is the heart of adding a description. It helps you imensely in the search engines. If you don’t have the best quote or description for the site, ask a friend, or another business owner to help you out. Follow the instructions listed in the last lesson to help you put the tags on your website and your there.

I hope that helps. A friendly reminder: Getting to the top of Google is tough. It’s even harder to stay there sometimes, but with the tutorials that I provide here, you can maximize your chance of attaining your goal. (And yes, it is possible to be indexed by Google overnight, albeit difficult. I’ll show you how soon enough).

Stay tuned, in the next post, I’ll show you how to change some of the things on your website to help you gain an edge over the competition.

Good luck!

In the previous post, I talked about how search engine technology works to place a website on their index. In this post, I will talk about keywords and their relation to your success.

What are keywords?

Keywords are descriptive words (usually one to two word phrases are okay) that tell the search engines in general, what your website is about. The reason I say that keyword are the key to your web success is because keywords play a major part in how high up in the search engines you go. They better you are at choosing the right keywords, the more successful you are at getting into the right search path and in front of the right customers. The more relavent customers see you on the search engines because of your keywords, the better your success in driving them to your website.

Your success depends on keywords.

Let’s look at an example…

Type into your browser, http://www.officedepot.com

Now after the site loads, go to the “view”menu in your browser and select the option to view the page source. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the source code of a website, it’s very easy to decipher. When the source code shows up you should see several things encoded in “meta” tags. The part that I want you to focus on right now is the tags that start with “meta”. Meta tags are hidden pieces of code that don’t show in the design view of your website, but are very instrumental in helping you in the search engines. Now as of the date of this writing, the tag is clearly visible on the Office Depot code. You can see them several lines down.

So, now let’s help you get off the ground. There are a lot of programs out there that I have used to help you choose the right keywords and optimize your site. Whichever you choose, they are a great asset to the modern webmaster because they provide a lot of information in a very short period of time without a lot of legwork on your part. I personally prefer one called Web ceo. It soars above the rest and I think you’ll agree when you use it. They offer both a free package and an upgraded package for all types of webmasters to use, but in my opinion, it’s easier to purchace one of the full packages because it includes everything you will ever need to make your website fully optimized. Make sure you use the access link provided in this post, it goes directly to their product.

Even if you don’t download the program, these steps are very simple to do, they just take a bit longer and require the use of multiple search engines.

First, take out a sheet of paper or open up your word processor program (ie. Microsoft Word) and write out what it is that your website does. The easiest way for you to focus on your keywords is to write out what it is that you do through the site itself. You can even go to your site and pull some quotes. Good keywords can come out of your best marketing and sales information.

From these phrases or quotes, pick out a few words that really hit the heart of what you do. For instance, if you say, “I help people spend less time worrying about where to find office and school supplies”, your keywords would be similar to those of the Office Depot website that we looked at earlier (office supplies, business supplies, school supplies, furniture). It may take you a little time to come up with these words and I don’t want you to limit yourself by the number of words.

Next, open up the Web ceo program. One of the first things you do when running this program is to establish a project. You can do this by simply selecting “add new site”. This is simpler if you have a website already established, but not impossible if you are still working on your site. Follow the onscreen directions and after you’re done and you have returned to the main menu, select “research keywords”.

This interface is ideal because it provides a lot of information in a very short amount of time. Select your project and enter your first keyword into the box provided and hit “enter”. The program will provide you instantly with the number of daily search requests for that term, the actual competition from the search engines, and a number they like to call the “keyword efficiency index” which is very helpful in narrowing down your list. The best thing about this is that the information provided in this program is updated and you get those updates whether you upgrade or not.

When the first result comes back, go to the second pane and create a new basket so that you can compare the results side by side. Manually enter in all of your keywords and one by one add them to the basket. When you are done, depending on how many keywords you have, select those with the highest ranks (as shown by the KEI column) and write them down. It certainly is okay to include some of the others in your site, but remember that you may not have as much luck with it was with those of higher ranking.

If you have a web design software and can gain access to the code of that software open your website. If you can’t, or have a web designer that handles all of that, get in contact with them and have them add the keywords to your website. They should know how to do this for you.

If you own your own website and have access to the code for alterations here is what you do. If you look at your code you should see two tags labeled “head” These are similar to the beginning and end tags for the head of your website where your metatags and title will eventually be.

Copy and paste the keywords “meta” from the Office Depot source code into your code between the “head” tags:

This is obviously a copy of what was on the Office Depot website, but when you have it copied onto your site, remove their keywords listed and replace them with yours (each keyword seperated by a comma). Once you are done, save the page and upload it if you have to to make it live. Nothing significant has been changed to the content to your site, it has just been enhanced to make it more search engine friendly.

When you are done, go back to each one of the pages in your site, and repeat the process again. The only difference is that each page needs to be geared toward the content that is on that particular page. For example, if one page is about staplers, the keywords need to be geared toward staplers. If one is about office chairs, the keywords need to be geared toward that and so on.

I hope this helps. In my next post, I’ll talk to you about the title and description of your website.
Good Luck

Okay, you have a website or you are working on a website (even if you are thinking of starting a website, this blog is for you)!

Search engines are tricky things. To the beginning designer it can appear almost impossible to understand them. So were going to break it down into easy to understand lessons so that you won’t feel lost.

A search engine works through what’s known as spiders. Spiders are small programs that “crawl” the internet, namely whatever the search engine has in it’s index. When the spiders crawl the web, they look at various parts of a website and gather data from it that can be added into it’s index. When you enter in a keyword into the search box at any search engine website, it examines it’s index and comes back with the most relevant information to your search.

The act of optimizing a website for these search engines involve tweaking the way information is presented and some of the hidden code to ensure the best placement in those search engines.

A few things before we begin. No seo tutorial will ever be able to ensure the best placement for your website in the search engines. Because the internet changes every minute, circumstances may change and/or competition for the top ranking may be extremely difficult. The information presented in this blog is meant to help you create the environment that is favorable for your success. And because Google is the most used and well known search engine available, many of our lessons will revolve around it.
Good Luck!