Effective webmasters and online marketers are constantly
searching for ways to improve their search engine rankings.
The simple fact is that most websites get the majority of their
traffic from search engines. So it is important to give the
search engines what they are looking for. If you do, your site
will do well in searches and the search engines will drive
traffic to your site.
There have been many changes over the last two or three years
to the way search engines evaluate the importance of websites.
Many of these changes have been spurred on by Google. But other
engines such as Yahoo and MSN have followed suit.
There is a general consensus among search engine optimization
experts on many of the techniques and practices that enhance
your website in the eyes of the search engines. Here are some
of them.
1. Give your site a clearly focused theme - Your site should
have a clearly focused theme which can be defined in terms of
search phrases (or "keywords"). If your site has no clear
theme, the search engines will not be of much help to you. Ask
yourself if there is a small set of search phrases that people
can use to find your site. If not, then go back to the drawing
board and redefine your site.
2. Evaluate your keywords - Now let's assume you have decided
on a theme, and you have defined it in terms of five or six
primary search phrases (keywords.) It is time to analyze these
search phrases and determine if anybody actually searches for
them. There is no point in having a focused theme that no one
is looking for.
There are excellent free tools and services available to help
you do this analysis. One of the easiest to use is at
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion -
the Keyword Selector Tool built into Yahoo Search Marketing
(formerly Overture.) Just enter a keyword and the tool will
tell you how many searches have been done for that term in a
recent period. It will also give you searches for related
terms.
3. Start creating pages - Once you decide on your most
important search terms (keywords) you are ready to start
building pages. Give each search term its own page, and
remember to focus, focus, focus. Be sure to put the keyword for
each page in the page title (what shows up in the title bar), in
the description metatag, and in the major headline. Then repeat
it several times throughout the page, with an emphasis on
repetition near the top of the page.
4. Include outbound links to "authoritative" sites in the
subject area you are emphasizing. For instance, if your page is
about "Golf Travel" a link to a couple large established golf or
golf travel sites will help establish the subject matter of your
own page.
5. Create content that is unique and that focuses on your
subject matter. To carry on with the previous example, if your
site is about Golf Travel, you will want to focus on several
different areas -- for example Scotland Golf Travel, Ireland
Golf Travel, Florida Golf Travel, and so on -- and make the
content on each of these pages relevant to the theme of the
page. Yes, this seems obvious, but so many websites do not have
this kind of obvious focus.
6. Keep your content current and update it regularly. Search
engine experts refer to this as "fresh" content. One way to
keep adding fresh content is to place an RSS feed from a
relevant reputable source on each page. Feeds are often from
news sources or blogs, and are often updated on a daily basis.
Generally speaking, the more often your content is updated, the
more often it will get spidered, and the better it will rank in
searches.
7. Get inbound links - Now it is time to get inbound links
pointing to your site. This is perhaps the most difficult part
of the project, and the one that takes the most time.
The search engines consider inbound links an indicator of the
importance and relevance of your site. "Relevant" links are the
most valuable. These are the ones that come from other sites (or
pages) that are closely related to yours.
About The Author: Rick Hendershot does website promotion at
