12 Steps to Top 10 Ranking on Search Engines |
This practical hands on guide explains how to optimize websites to achieve a top 10 ranking and attract maximum visitor traffic through search engines. Search engines display web pages in response to search terms or keywords submitted to them by web surfers seeking specific information. Potential visitors coming to your website are either looking for information or looking to buy products and services.
This guide will focus on Search Engine optimization for web sites owners who are in the business of selling products and services. Well written content is a key factor in a search engine marketing campaign.
For a better illustration of these steps we are going to use an on-line
car parts website
http://www.thepartsbin.com as an example.
1. Start out by analyzing competitor websites.
These are sites you already know by name or you are able to look up their website address by performing a search on a search engine. Key their web address directly into SEO Studio Keyword Analyzer. You'll want to identify the keywords your competition is targeting and get a feel for how good a job your competition is doing in being found on search engines. Export the keywords found on at least ten competitors websites to a coma delimited file. Merge these files into one using Microsoft Excel and sort all 1 word, 2 word and 3 word long terms by keyword occurrence and density in descending order.
2. Select the top 5-10 keywords of each 1 word, 2 word and 3 word long terms. You should start with at least 15-30 or more potential keywords.
1 word = part
2 word = car parts
3 word = import car parts
3. Now do a Google search for a few of the most important keyword terms. I am using car parts in this example. Select the first 4-5 hits and analyze them as with the above. You should get something like this: http://www.thepartsbin.com.
After running the Keyword Analyzer with http://www.thepartsbin.com you'll see the following result for the keyword "import car parts":
After analyzing some of the invisible web page content such as Meta tags, turn your attention to the visible text content of the web pages. Using the Keyword Analyzer tool, the yellow highlighted areas indicate what keywords are actually being used in the HTML text and where they are placed.
Keyword density is determined by the total number of words, excluding stop words, divided by the number of occurrences of that particular keyword in which density is measured. You'll want to optimize your web pages to achieve high density factors for your key terms without sounding repetitious. There are no hard and fast rules regarding keyword density, but you should target between 4% - 10% for the overall page, and at least double or higher for the Title, Meta and Heading tags.
As a general rule, try to ensure there are approximately 500-600 words on each page. However, if the number of words falls a bit short of or exceeds this limit, don't worry, it usually does not make sense to optimize for more than 3-4 keywords phrases per page.
4. Now that you have a fairly good idea what keywords your competition is using, let's verify what search terms people are using.
The tools below help us make that determination.
Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
Open a web browser window and go to the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion.
The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is one of the most powerful tools for web masters, enabling you to find out what keywords people are using in their searches.
Once the term suggestion tool window opens,
start at the top of your keyword list
you created earlier and enter each one into the text box and click on the
blue
arrow, as shown in figure 1 below:
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Figure 1: The Overture Term Suggestion Tool |
As you can see, the term suggestion tool returns a list of keywords and how many times they were searched for during the last month. This report was run on December 19th 2003, so the results are returned from searches in November 2003. As you type each of your keywords into the text box and see the number of searches, write that number down next to your list of keywords you have saved earlier. You should now have a list of your top keywords with the number of searches for that keyword from the previous month.
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WordTracker
Open a web browser window and go to Wordtracker
You can use the WordTracker trial version, free of charge. We do recommend you spend the money though and sign up for a one-day full version at $6.73. It's well worth it as it gives you access to data from all of the major search engines. It also gives you far more synonyms and other related keyword suggestions.
With Wordtracker you will be looking for keywords that return the highest possible Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). The KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign. Often these will be keywords two to three words long. You'll want to ensure not only the KEI is high, but the keyword also shows a high number of people searching for it. At this point you are still in the discovery phase for the best keywords to target therefore, don't be afraid to target keywords with low KEI figures. It is possible by including low KEI keywords you will discover some very important keywords your competition has not used.
At the end of this exercise you should be able to narrow down your list of 15-30 potential keywords to your top 6 to 8.
Now that you have used these effective tools to identify your best keywords you are ready for the next step with the help of the SEO Studio Ranking reporter.
5. Before you spend considerable time implementing these keywords do one final check to see how your competitors are ranking against these keywords.
Select your top 5-6 competitors.
Start up the SEO Studio Ranking tool
Enter your top 5 competitor's domain names
Enter or import from a file the 6 to 8 keywords you have selected
Select only the Top 50 Results
Select all search engines or just select the most important ones. Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google, Netscape, Excite, Overture and Open Directory
Click Start
You can view the results in the Ranking Results screen or in a browser window which opens automatically, or you can navigate to the Report Manager and open the report displayed at the very top of the list.
You'll be using the Ranking Reporter tool later on to monitor your progress in improving your own search engine rankings for the various key words. The SEO Studio Top Ten Spy tool also provides good information on how to improve your rankings by comparing various aspects of your pages to other pages that generally rank well.
6. Once you have verified your keywords, you will need to optimize your pages. Begin your keyword optimization for the Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords and Heading as we examined above. You will want to begin modifying the text in the body of your web pages.
<TITLE>
The title of your web page (i.e. the text between the <title> and </title> tag in your HTML code) is very important for all search engines especially for Google. Your page title needs to be brief and targeted, it should not contain more than 40 characters. The words in the title of your page also need to exist in the body and various headings in the actual content of your HTML page. Each page on your website should have a different title targeting various word combinations and phrases.
<META Description>
The Meta Description tag are used by many search engines to provide a short description of the page listed in the search results. Similar to the Title tag, it is important the Meta Description tag is keyword rich as well as attractive to both search engines and web surfers. The rules for the Meta Description are basically the same as the Title tag, however, the content of this tag will generally be longer than the Title tag.
<META Keywords>
The Meta Keywords tag has become less important as far as search engine optimization is concerned. In fact, you can get top rankings without having anything in the Meta Keywords tag at all. However, just to be on the safe side, you will want to include some keywords in the Meta Keywords tag. You should also include some of the common upper/lower case variations of the keyword, along with plural versions for some of the keywords. The rules for the Meta Keywords tag are simple - don't repeat any keyword in the Meta Keywords tag more than three times and don't repeat any keyword one after the other.
<H1...H6>
Heading Tags <h1> and <h2> tags used to emphasize keywords. Heading tags are a great way to boost the importance of your keywords, they are also given more weight by search engines compared to regularly formatted text or text between bold or strong font tags. Heading tags range from <h1> (bigger text, signifying more importance) to <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5> and <h6> (smaller text, signifying least importance). Headings tags are generally used to emphasize a page or paragraph heading to search engines for importance. You should stick to only <h1> and <h2> tags. Make sure <h1> headings and subheadings include keyword text for optimization purposes. The only draw back of using heading tags is the unappealing look, which can be easily overcome with cascading style sheet formatting.
<BODY>
Start out by creating your web pages and placing keyword rich content near the top of each page. Since some search engines do not read the META description content, the first few lines of text near the top of your web page will become the description of your web pages when displayed in the search engine results. An excellent way to ensure your pages contain keyword rich content at the top of the page is to open your web page in your browser. Go to the Edit menu and choose Select all, copy and paste the web page content into a plain text editor, Notepad. The first few lines of text is how the how the search engines will display the description of your web page.
When placing your keywords in the body of the text, pay particular attention to grammar, sentence structure and readability. This not only this leaves your web page readers with a good impression of your website, but also avoids blatant repetition of keywords which is a sure sign to search engines of spam tactics being utilized on that page. It should not end up being a concatenation of keywords. Search engines pay particular attention to headings and proximity of keywords.
Finishing touches.
Try to use keywords in your web pages names.
Add <ALT> tags with keywords to every image.
Link to other pages within your own website using your top keywords in the link. For example a simple label "Products" might take visitors to the product section of your website, but by labeling it "Car Parts" you've optimized the link.
Examine your website code and make sure you get your text as close to the beginning of your page as possible. Your goal is to put keywords towards the very beginning of your web page since search engines give those a much higher relevance.
If you have Java script at the top of your web pages make sure you move them toward the end of your web pages.
Make sure your website has a site map. A site map is a listing of all sections of a website. Usually, each listing is an active link, enabling a visitor to click on the link and move directly to a section from the site map. Your site map should be linked from the home page. The site map assists crawlers in finding and indexing all of your pages.
7. After you've optimized your pages, check each page with the Keyword Analyzer and Top 10 Spy. Ensure you have achieved the desired concentrations of density and prominence of keywords in each page compared to your competitors top ranking pages.
8. Check the body text and in what order the text is being found by the spiders. This will help you pinpoint where you need to focus on optimizing your web pages. You can use our suggested method of simulating a spider crawling your web page to be sure your pages contain keyword rich content at the top of your optimized web pages. Open your web page in your browser. Go to the Edit menu and choose Select all, copy and paste the web page content into a plain text editor, Notepad. It is important you chose a plain text editor for this exercise as Microsoft Word or other full featured editors may paste the formatting of the text and images as well from your web page. The first 100-200 words are very important to be well optimized and keyword rich.
9. Once the web page is optimized, you will want to use SEO Studio's Search Engine Submission tool to submit your web pages to all the search engines accepting automatic submissions including Google. In addition, you should submit to some of the free manual submission search engines such as http://www.dmoz.org (Open Directory Project). They take a long time to process, but are free. You may also want to consider some of the pay for inclusion search engines and directories including Yahoo, Inktomi, and Ask Jeeves. Inktomi provides results to several major search engines including MSN, and Hotbot. You should be found there within 72 hours.
10. The only thing left to do is build links to your website. Build a quality link campaign by seeking out high ranking websites relating to the theme of your website. When contacting other web masters to exchange links with you, some of the specific information they will request from you, the Title of your site and a brief Description, always include your top keywords, see, Link Popularity A Beginners Guide.
11. Google also seems to consider the size of the entire site. The larger the site the better. In order to get additional opportunity to embed keyword optimized content on sites which are in the business of selling goods and services, we suggest those sites dedicate a fair number of pages to informational content. Possibly do "how to" pages, your company history, shipping and return informational pages, some information about your industry. Special write-ups on some of your key products or manufacturers. All these add relevance to your site.
12. Monitor your ranking once a week, but more importantly check your web server logs for information on who is visiting your website, which keywords and search engines do they use to arrive at your website. You will be surprised by some of the keywords you are being found under on search engines. Sometimes they are keywords you did not initially identify, but since you have well optimized keywords on your website, your pages can be found under related keyword terms. There is a wealth of information buried in your server logs about your visitors and their navigational patterns, you will want to identify high and low traffic web pages on your website and a host of other important visitor metrics. For more information visit Google's list of commercial log analysis products. The Google directory category covers most of the popular products that are available.
