Presented by SelfPromotion.com, Robert Woodhead
Step 0 - Make sure your site is useful!
I'm always amazed by how many people miss this simple concept. They spend a huge
amount of time trying to get good search engine rankings and lots of visitors,
and then what do the visitors find? A poorly designed, badly written website. If
there's one bit of advice I wish I could drum into everyone who visits this
site, it is this:
"It isn't how many 'hits' you get, but how many 'sales' you make."
Making your pages "people-friendly" is as important as making them
"search-engine" friendly. It's usually much easier to double the effectiveness
of your website than it is to double your traffic, and the bottom line result is
the same. At the bottom of this article, I'll give you some advice on how to do
that.
But for now, let's talk about what you can do to help out the search engines.
Step 1 - Determine your Key Phrases
People get obsessive about their keywords. This is wrong. It is difficult if not
impossible to get high rankings based on keywords. Instead, you need to think
about keyphrases.
The easiest way to do this is ask yourself "what would someone trying to find me
type in when they search?" Make a list of these. Try them out on the search
engines -- pretend to be someone looking for your product or service.
If your business is geographically restricted, then your keyphrases should
reflect this. For example, if you are a a real-estate broker in Wilmington,
North Carolina, then the key phrase "buying real estate" is a waste of time;
instead, the more specific phrase "buying real estate in wilmington north
carolina" is what you want to be thinking about.
Think about variations on the key phrases and write them down. Continuing with
our example:
site submission company in Roswell, Fulton
county Georgia
website submission for Roswell, Fulton county Georgia
submit your website for Rosell in Fulton
county Georgia
List my website for Roswell in Fulton county
Georgia
site submission company in Roswell, GA
website submission for Roswell, GA
submit your website in Roswell, GA
promote your website in Roswell, GA
list my website in Roswell, GA
site submission company in Roswell, north
Fulton county Georgia
website submission for Roswell, north Fulton county Georgia
submit your website for Rosell in north Fulton
county Georgia
List my website for Roswell in north Fulton
county Georgia
site submission company in Roswell, north
Fulton county Atlanta Georgia
website submission for Roswell, north Fulton county Atlanta Georgia
submit your website for Rosell in north Fulton
county Atlanta Georgia
List my website for Roswell in north Fulton
county Atlanta Georgia
real estate brokers in wilmington north carolina
buying real estate in wilmington north carolina
selling real estate in wilmington north carolina
renting real estate in wilmington north carolina
home buying in wilmington north carolina
house buying in wilmington north carolina
selling a house in wilmington north carolina
renting a house in wilmington north carolina
renting an apartment in wilmington north carolina
apartment renting in wilmington north carolina
real estate brokers in wilmington nc
buying real estate in wilmington nc
selling real estate in wilmington nc
renting real estate in wilmington nc
home buying in wilmington nc
house buying in wilmington nc
selling a house in wilmington nc
renting a house in wilmington nc
renting an apartment in wilmington nc
apartment renting in wilmington nc
real estate brokers in new hanover county
buying real estate in new hanover county
selling real estate in new hanover county
renting real estate in new hanover county
home buying in new hanover county
house buying in new hanover county
selling a house in new hanover county
renting a house in new hanover county
renting an apartment in new hanover county
apartment renting in new hanover county
The above is only a partial list, but you get the idea. You can also get a good
idea of what keyphrases and page design techniques work well by looking at other
pages that do well in the searches you've tried. I discuss how to do that in
more detail in my Improving Your Rankings article. Note that this sample list is
just a list of possible keyphrases -- we're not going to use all of them because
we won't have room.
One of your fellow users, Stephen Sherman, pointed out an interesting subtlety
about keyphrase selection. Let's assume you find a keyphrase that you think
people will type in a lot. Try it, and look at the results. If the results
seem to be "on topic", then people are likely to drill down several pages to
find a listing that is just right for them. This kind of keyphrase is one you
want to target, but if you don't get on page one, you'll still get traffic.
If, on the other hand, the results are mostly irrelevant (or full of spammed
listings), then people will rarely look at page 2, or even more than the first
few listings. These keyphrases are thus not as valuable. This doesn't
automatically mean you shouldn't try to target it -- none of the criteria are
absolutes -- but it does mean that it will be more difficult to get a useful
listing with that keyphrase.
Two great resources for finding out what keyphrases are the most effective are
the Overture.com Search Suggestions Page and WordTracker. On Overture's search
suggestion page, you just type in a very general keyphrase (like "real estate")
and it tells you all of the more specific keyphrases that relate to that
keyphrase and how many hits they got.
Using our example of selling real estate in Wilmington, NC and entering "real
estate" into the Overture tool, I found that in October 1999, the broad
keyphrase "real estate" was searched for 67016 times (on Overture). However,
you'd never want to target that keyphrase, because you don't care if someone in
Kalamazoo wants real estate; you're only interested in people who want houses in
Wilmington. Looking down the list of results, I found that "north carolina real
estate" got 489 searches. That's a possibility. Doing a search suggestion on
"wilmington" revealed several hundred hits on "wilmington north carolina,"
"wilmington nc" and related topics. Zooming in even further, getting a
suggestion on "wilmington real" found 36 hits on specific queries related to
real estate in wilmington, NC. These queries obviously don't get a huge amount
of traffic, but because they're so focused on what you're trying to do, they're
often the best ones to target.
Side note: If you've read my Overture page or my page on Search Engine Trends
then you know I'm a big fan of pay-per click services like Overture. The top
position on those nice, juicy specific queries on Overture could be had for a
nickel each. Such a deal! Yeah, you might only get 10 visits a month by
sponsoring "wilmington real" but each one would be looking for exactly what
you're selling - at a cost of five cents per pre-qualified visitor! Recent
changes at Overture have made it a lot less valuable for highly targeted
advertisers, however. Read these other pages for more information.
Those of you who have contributed and gained access to the Secret Net Tools will
want to check out the Keyword Susser tool, which will do multiple queries using
the Overture.com Search Suggestions system and merge the results. It's a really
great way to find out what your keyphrases actually are.
WordTracker goes a bit further. It helps you develop lists of relevant
keyphrases, ranked by their popularity. It then queries the major search engines
to determine which keyphrases are the least competitive. It's usually not much
use targeting a popular keyphrase (lots of searches) if there are millions of
other pages that contain that keyphrase. On the other hand, a relevant keyphrase
that only gets a few searches a day but which has only a few pages competing for
it is a good candidate, because it will be much easier to get a high ranking.
WordTracker has a free trial that will give you a lot of information, and
additional services available by subscription - including some great tools for
working with Overture.
Disclaimer: WordTracker pays me a commission on any income generated from
clickthroughs from SelfPromotion.com, but as usual, I donate all such income
to the Salvation Army in order to preserve my editorial independence.
My advice is to use the Overture tool to get a rough idea what your keyphrases
should be (and find ones you might not have thought about), and then use
WordTracker to determine which ones you really should be targeting - and (this
is key!) to rank them in order of importance.
OK. At this point, you know what your best keyphrases are. You've got your list.
You've checked it twice. Now it's time to use it!
Step 2 - Crafting your <TITLE> tag
Most people make the mistake of using a page title that's good for people but
lousy for the search engines. Big mistake. A title like "Bill Phillips - Real
Estate Broker" is a disaster! The golden rule is this: All your most important
keyphrases should be in the TITLE tag. So what you do is look at your
keyphrases, make a list of all the important words, and create a title tag that
uses them. Also, keep in mind that since browsers only display the first few
words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So, while
the first sentence of your title tag should be "human readable", the rest can be
just a list of keyphrases.
There is some debate as to whether a very long title tag is a good thing or a
bad thing when it comes to search engines. Some people are concerned that a very
long title tag might result in the search engines deciding the page is a "spam
page." I'm waffling on this issue right now. Based on the available (scanty!)
evidence, my advice is to keep the title between 15 and 20 words. But you might
want to try longer title tags on some of your pages, just to see what happens!
So Bill Phillips might have a title that looks like this:
<TITLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - New Hanover County - Buying
Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Office</TITLE>
The reason for this is that the three most important places to have keyphrases
and phrases are your title tag, your meta tags, and your first paragraph. You
want them to all contain the same important words; this increases your keyphrase
density and improves your rankings.
Step 3 - The Meta Tags
The fabled Meta tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search
engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what
gets displayed.
Meta tags go in the <HEAD> section of the HTML page (the same section as the
<TITLE> tag). The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the
web-page. Guess what? You've already written one for the <TITLE> tag! So just
edit that to make it totally human readable (and perhaps a little shorter), and
you're done. The format of a Meta description tag is simple. It looks like this:
<META name="description" content="whatever you want to place here">
So, in our example, we might use:
<META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina -
Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments, Commercial Property and
Office Space">
My advice on the length of this description is keep it between 100 and 200
characters. Remember: the description tag should be written for humans to read.
It should not be a list of keywords!
The other Meta tag is the Meta Keywords tag. What you do is take your
keyphrases, and enter them in the order you think is most appropriate, separated
by commas. Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word more
than 5 times or so. This may mean that you can't use some of your better
keyphrases.
The reason why you don't want to repeat any particular word more than 5 times is
that some search engines may penalize you for doing this. Search engines aren't
as sensitive to keyword repeating as they used to be (most of them ignore extra
repeats), but play it safe. The exception is common "noise" words like "the",
"in", "a", "and" and so on. Most search engines ignore them. Leave them in, but
don't worry if you have more than 5 of any of hem.
If you've got a lot of keyphrases that really are relevant to your site, the
best thing to do is build "theme" pages devoted to a particular keyphrase or set
of keyphrases. This is good for you, good for your visitors, and appreciated by
the search engines. Use the most important keyphrases on your homepage.
Some people get confused about whether to use commas between phrases, and
whether to capitalize keywords. The truth is, some search engines pay attention
to the commas, some don't. But the ones who don't treat them as "white-space".
So just use commas as appropriate, but don't waste a character putting a space
after the comma. Similarly, just capitalize words as you might expect people to
normally use them. Most search engines will ignore the capitalization, but it
can't hurt to help out those that make note of it.
If you want to get really fancy, play the cunning comma trick. The search
engines that don't pay attention to commas sometimes pay attention to sequences
of words. So if you can put two keyphrases together with a comma between them,
and the last words of the first keyphrase coupled with the first words of the
next keyphrase make up one of your keyphrases, then you've gotten 3 keyphrases
for the price of two! Normally, however, this is difficult, so don't waste too
much time over it.
Keep your keywords meta-tag length between 200-400 characters. Unfortunately,
this means you may not be able to include all of your key phrases in your meta
keywords tag even if you don't repeat a word too often. The theme pages concept
deals with this also. After pruning away, our sample keywords tag might look
like this:
<META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying
real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north
carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in
wilmington north carolina,new hanover county,south-east north carolina,house
broker,apartment broker,home sales, apartment rental">
Step 4 - The first paragraph
The first paragraph of your page should recapitulate and expand upon everything
in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases in it.
However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with
them in mind. This is where you introduce yourself to your visitors, so you want
to make a good impression.
Try to put this first paragraph as close to the <BODY> tag as possible. Avoid
putting graphics or other HTML in front of your first paragraph as much as you
can. I don't have a banner ad on my homepage for this reason. Also, use the <H1>
or <H2> tag to emphasize your opening sentence (but make sure it looks
tasteful!). Bill Phillips might use the following opening paragraph:
<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington,
North Carolina?</H2><BR>
If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the
last 10 years, I've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home,
apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me
to be your guide.
Step 5 - Don't Go Overboard
You clearly want to have your important keyphrases on your page more than once,
because this is what gives the search engines a clue as to what your page is
really about. But you don't want your keyphrases to appear too many times,
because that might make the search engines think your page is a spam page trying
to rank highly for a particular phrase.
The question then becomes, how much is too much? And the answer is, nobody knows
for sure, and it's going to be different from search engine to search engine.
Rumor has it that Google likes pages with less than 13 repeats of a keyphrase,
for example.
My advice is to try and keep the number of repeats of important phrases down to
10 or less; this means all instances, in title, meta tags, and the text of the
page. Sometimes this simply isn't possible, because the phrase is so integral to
your topic, so don't get paranoid about this. Just keep it in mind.
Putting it all together
Combining steps 1-5, we get some HTML that looks like this
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - New Hanover County - Buying
Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Office</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina -Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments and Commercial Property">
<META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying
real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north
carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in
wilmington north carolina,new hanover county,south-east north carolina,house
broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental"> </HEAD>
<BODY>
<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington,
North Carolina?</H2><BR>
If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the
last 10 years, I've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home,
apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me
to be your guide.
... rest of your html
</BODY>
</HTML>
Avoid Search Engine Tricks
Some "experts" advise trying to trick search engines by putting keyphrases in
comments, putting them in text that is the same color as your background, and so
on. I strongly advise that you not try these tricks. Bluntly, most of them don't
work -- and the ones that do may stop working at any minute, as the search
engines are constantly trying to detect and defeat them.
My philosophy is that you should try and help the search engines by making it as
easy as possible to get a good idea of what your page is about. That way, as
search engines get better and better at rating the contents of sites, your
rankings will get better over time, with no effort from you.
Got Links?
Once you have your pages up and running, and chock full of useful content, it's
a very good idea to try and get other people to link to them. It's not enough to
just get them in the search engines. There are three very good reasons for doing
this: First, many search engines are now using link popularity (how many other
pages link to your page) as a ranking criteria -- they figure that if other
sites link to your page, it might be useful. Second, it's recently been revealed
that Inktomi applies a ranking penalty to any url submitted through their free
"Add URL" system, but removes it if their spider also finds the page by
following a link from another site (they do this in an attempt to find and
penalize "doorway" pages). And third, you'll get traffic from the websites that
link to you.
Getting links isn't that hard. When you find a website that has content similar
to yours, email the webmaster and ask for a link, pointing out why it would be
appropriate. If he has content on his site useful to your visitors, link to him
without even offering to trade links. Link to him, then email him and ask for a
link back. A good site for learning the basics of getting links is Linking 101.
Don't get hyped about the new long domain names
I've been getting a lot of questions about the new, longer domain names that are
available. There is a lot of misinformation being passed around about them. The
big lie is that if you have a domain name with lots of keywords in it (eg:
add-url-register-website-promote-site-selfpromotion.com) you will get a higher
ranking in the search engines.
This is flat out not true. NONE of the major search engines will significantly
boost your rankings based on keywords in your url. Not one. This is what they
said when Danny Sullivan, editor of the highly recommended Search Engine Watch
Newsletter asked them, and I've confirmed it by experiment. If the search
engines look at them at all, they simply add the url text to the rest of the
page, so the added benefit of keywords in the URL is totally insignificant.
Don't waste your money.
My advice is to try and go for a short, memorable domain name, either 1 word or
2 words combined, or with an i, e, i- or e- prefix. Make it easy to type, and
easy to remember.
If you insist on trying the keywords in URL, do it either using subdirectories
(eg: http://selfpromotion.com/add-url/register-website/promote-site.html) or
subdomains (eg:
http://add-url-register-website-promote-site.selfpromotion.com/). You'll still
be wasting your time, but at least you won't be wasting money!
A note about Framed sites
Many "experts" also say that using frames to construct your website can hurt
their rankings. My experience is that this is not so, as long as you construct
your frames properly. The trick is this: make sure that your <frameset> page has
a proper title tag and meta tags. Similarly, your subframe pages should have the
same ingredients (perhaps with modified contents), as well as a little bit of
javascript that "pops" the user to the proper framed presentation if they surf
into the subframe page. Here's some sample javascript that works with just about
every browser:
<BODY onLoad="if (top == self) top.location.href =
'http://www.yourserver.com/yourframe.html';">
What this does is, when the page is loaded, if it finds that it is not in a
frame, it redirects the browser to the proper frameset url, whatever that might
be. A much more detailed explanation of how this can be done in various ways can
be found in this excellent article.
Once you've got your pages configured, simply promote them all (the frameset
page and the subframe pages) to the search engines. The MultiSubmitter tool,
which you get access to by forking over $10 or more, makes this easy!
Checking your HTML
Almost all websites have HTML errors, even those that appear to display nicely
on your browser. Browsers do a pretty good job of being tolerant of errors, but
even so, it's a good idea to make sure your HTML is as perfect as possible, as
this increases the chance that your website will display the way you want it to
on as many browsers as possible (both past, present and future).
I strongly recommend that you use a HTML Validator to check your pages, and my
favorite is the W3.org HTML Validator. While it is a little hard to use and
unbelievably picky (good!), it's by far the best I've found -- and given that
it's written by the folks that define what HTML is, it does the job right. One
thing to be aware of with this tool is that a single error can cause a cascade
of error messages, so I typically fix the first error reported, then revalidate.
What about a "robots.txt" file?
The robots.txt file is a special file you can place on your webserver to
restrict access by some or all webcrawling robots to some or all of your site.
You only need one if you want to place some areas of your website "off-limits"
to robots. If your whole website is open to them, you don't need one.
You can only have a robots.txt file if you own your own domain, because they are
always located in the same place (so the robot can find them!). Thus, my
robots.txt file is located at http://selfpromotion.com/robots.txt.
If you feel you need a robots.txt file, then the complete specification how to
create one can be found here.
One caution: some robots interpret a blank robots.txt file as meaning "don't
crawl any pages on this website." So if you don't need a robots.txt file, don't
have one (even a blank one!) on your server.
Meta Tag Software
While I have not personally used it, if you are looking for a Macintosh-based
tool to manage the meta tags of many pages, you might want to check out Meta Tag
Manager. Windows-based users who have found a good tool, please email me and let
me know which ones you like.
Making your site "people-friendly"
OK, you've got all your keywords set up. You've made life easy for the search
engines. Hopefully, you'll get a lot of traffic. Make sure you don't waste that
traffic by making sure your site effectively sells your products.
