10
Basic Search Engine Preparation Tips
10 Basic Search Engine Preparation Tips
While many people think it is enough to have web site to earn
hundreds or thousands of dollars within a few weeks, it is much
harder in reality to get people to your web site and then it is
another thing to get them to buy something from you. But that's
a different story. Let's concentrate on the first aspect: Getting
traffic and especially getting targeted traffic. You don't want
to have cat lovers on your site when you are selling dog food, do
you ?
How do you get targeted prospects ? First of all, you must know
your potential customers. Who are they ? What are they looking for
? So the first thing , even before you have built your web site,
is to know which keywords your prospects would search for. It is
not as hard as you might think. But if you have a general topic
like I have myself with Internet Marketing, it might be a much better
idea to concentrate just on one aspect of Internet Marketing.
My friend, you ask why ? Did you ever perform a search on AltaVista
for the term "Internet Marketing"? Yes ? Then you will
certainly know that there about 6 million web sites competing for
the top position on "Internet Marketing".
It is very hard, if not impossible to reach a rank in the top 10
or even the top 30 for such a general term. But if you concentrate
on, let me say autoresponders, then there are a lot less pages that
deal with that topic.
1.) Choosing your domain name
This means, when you order your domain name, be sure to include
your keywords in your domain name. To take the example just mentioned
above: If you're selling dog food, don't take a domain like www.petshop.com
.
Because then people could think that you are selling cat food,
bird food etc. , too. You want to target your potential customers,
so your domainname would be rather something like : www.dogfood.com
or similar .
So now you've designed your pages. What comes next ?
2.) Frames/no-frames
Web pages which use frames have one big disadvantage: Some search
engines are not able to index them correctly. They cannot follow
the links that are included on these pages and that means that they
won't be able to show the results of your pages.
If you want to be on the safe side, create your web pages without
using frames. There are some tricks to enable a correct indexing
but this would lead too far for this time.
3.) The title of your homepage
It almost goes without saying that your title should have your
keywords included as well. You should choose a title that includes
your four most important keywords. If you have a site where people
can learn how to write ads, you could give your page a title that
has the word ads in it plus some of your other keywords.
Example : "Writing ads: How to write ads that sell your products
like crazy." You have repeated your most important keyword
"ads" and you have used other keywords like "writing",
"write" and "sell".
4.) Meta tag : description
Meta tags are additional pieces of information which are placed
within the HTML - code. Your description reflects the most important
part of your homepage since this is the description
that is shown when someone searches for your site on a search engine.
You should clearly state the benefits of visiting your site. It
should be a like a little ad for your site. You should include your
keywords once again but not more than twice. I'll give you an example
of my own site and then it looks like this :
META content="Writing Headlines : No Success With Your Advertisements
? Discover The Little-Known Secrets Of Writing "Killer"-Headlines
!" name=description
5.) Meta tag : keywords
The Meta tag keywords should be used to put in all your keywords
that are relevant for your site . It is crucial to put your 4 most
important keywords at the beginning. You can include 15 further
keywords and even more .
Example :
META content="headlines, advertisements, ads, copywriting,
writing winning sales letters, prospects, online, web, internet,
marketing, campaign, writer, marketer, promotion, copywriter, top-seller"
name=keywords
6.) Meta tag : robots
You create a little robots.txt to let the search engine know which
links it should follow. If you want to exclude certain directories,
you can use special commands which forbid the search engine spiders
to follow a complete path.
This can be necessary e.g. to avoid that the search engines link
to your download page where you have the articles you want to sell.
An example can be found below :
# robots.txt for http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/
# file created: 16.08.01
User-agent: *
# Disallow: /cgi/ # exclude robots from specified tree
# Disallow: /scripts/
# file modified: 16.08.01
7.) Keyword density
Your main keyword should be mentioned within the first 8 words
of your body text and can be mentioned 3 times more. The other keywords
should not be forgotten, too. Try to use them at least 3 times in
your text.
8.) Alt-tags for your images
Alt-tags are alternative descriptions for your pictures. If you
move your mouse-cursor over your pictures, you can see this alternative
text. This text is also shown if a picture is not loaded correctly.
Use your keywords to describe your pictures.
9.) No tricks like white text on white background !
Some people consider themselves to be very smart and they want
to outwit the search engines by putting a lot of their keywords
with a font in the background colour on their pages to make it more
relevant to the engines.
But times have changed : The search engines recognize these tricks
and as a result your pages are banned from their index. Try just
to do what is necessary but don't use tricks, it won't do you no
good.
10.) Link-Popularity
Many search engines like AltaVista have a new ranking concept which
includes link popularity. This means, the more pages have a link
to your site, the better your site gets ranked.
Some of them have also made special deals with pay-per-click search
engines. Those sites which rank on the top 3 will also get a high
rank at "normal" search engines.
About the Author Detlev Reimer is the
publisher of the 1A IMS-Newsletter which gives you tips and tricks
on organizing your marketing data, web site and ezine promotion
and testing and tracking ads. Subscribe to his free newsletter and
get 3 free gifts for subscribing : mailto:newsletter@internetmarketing-success.com?subject=ms
or just visit http://www.internetmarketing-success.com
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