Optimise your site

Listed here you will find the five of the most important points to remember when optimising your site and individual pages for the search engines.

If you optimise your pages by working through these points one by one you will see a significant rise in your search engine rankings.

1: Buy the right Domain names !
The best way to increase your rankings in the SE's(Search Engines) and for the least amount of effort is to choose the right domain name for your site from the start. The SE's give a domain name the highest prominence and score when issuing a ranking. So it's a major priority to have your domain name contain keywords relevant to your site content.

The other point to remember is that domain names can have up to 67 characters in them including the extension(.com, .net etc) now as opposed to the original 23. So you can load your domain name with a number of keywords to boost your ranking, just remember to use a hyphen to separate them out.

This also means that if a really great domain name has gone you can get something close and in fact better because you could simply add another keyword. Eg say exercise-equipment.com wasn't available, I could register best-exercise equipment.com or cheap-exercise-equipment.com.

I have a number of clients using this technique very successfully, and of course if you check out the address bar above this very site does the same thing. ;-)

For the cheapest domain names online with the best control panel online try www.123-reg.co.uk I highly recommend these guys I've used them for years now and register all my own and my clients domains through them.

2: Choose the right Title for your page.
The title of your page is what visitors will see across the top of their browsers when they visit your site. It's important that each of your site pages is titled differently to distinguish them from each other and to tie in with the content of the page.

This is also the title of your listing when your site is returned in the results of a Search Engine.

This is probably the second most important thing to get right after choosing your domain name. If your domain name has good keywords then repeat these keywords in the title of your page, add a hyphen and then add your keyword rich title for that page. So going back to the example above exercise-equipment.com your title should probably be along the lines of -

Best Exercise Equipment - Best, Cheap, New and Used Exercise Equipment.

Notice how I get exercise equipment in there twice, first as the name of the site and then as a description of the page. The capitalising of the main words within the title will help your page stand out in the results a little. Don't be tempted capitalise all your letters this looks cheap and some directory's will not list your page with a title in this state.

I've mentioned keywords a fare bit already and I should probably say jump down to No5 for a better idea of what they are and how to use them.

3: Use the H1 tag on the, on page, title/heading of your page.
A H1 tag is the heading text tag in HTML. SE's give this tag more relevancy as it's generally used for the title of a page eg <h1> best exercise equipment </h1>.

That 's the actual on page title and not the browser title.

If you try this out you'll find that it looks pretty ugly, with lots of space around it and much to chunky for a nice looking site.

So here's a trick you can use to keep the H1 tag but have the text appear as normal. *whisper use css style sheets to shrink the text back to size. Check the title of this page 'Optimise your site' that's a H1 tag that's been fixed. Big difference isn't there.

This is a little known but very useful secret. ;-)

Here's the code to do the trick, drop it into your css document or place it in 'style' tags at the head of your code -

h1 {font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;}

Its that simple, play around with the font-size until it's in proportion to the rest of your page.
Remember it's the title of your page and should stand out a little from the rest of the text.

4: Meta tags are still useful. Choosing keywords.
Not as important as they once were due to abuse. But still used by a number of well known search engines, the new Yahoo search checks them as does the MSN search. But Google gives them little relevance. Which means it's still important to use them to cover all your bases.

Essentially the meta tags you should be using when targeting the search engines are keywords, description and robots.

Keywords should also contain keyphrases and list keywords/keyphrases relevant to the page they appear in. There are two ways to list your keywords/keyphrases. Either with commas separating them or without. The benefit to not using commas is that the keywords side by side can also be read as keyphrases by the SE's. Where as a comma separates everything out. So not using commas allows for some odd combinations to be picked up by the SE's.

meta name="keywords" content=" best exercise equipment cheap home gym equipment health good exercise order online"

That's just an example off the top of my head I haven't researched the words as I normally would, you should also have much more in there around 20-30 words at least. Notice again I've started of with 'best exercise equipment' to echo and boost the use of that phrase elsewhere as discussed above.

The description is self explanatory again and it's a good move to echo the title of the page and fill it out a little so -

meta name="description" content="best exercise equipment - best, cheap, new and used exercise equipment reviewed and available to order online"

The robots tag is very simple and is not strictly necessary but useful. What it does is tell the visiting SE spiders what to do when it comes to listing your site. Spiders are the little programs that crawl the web gathering info on websites for the SE's. You can also use something called a robots.txt file to further control the spiders, but I won't go into that here since its not strictly necessary and the robots tag is enough for our aims at the moment.

Here's an example -
meta name="robots" content ="index, follow"

With this we're telling the spider/robot to follow all the links when visiting this page.
If you have a members area or an admin area on your site that you don't want listed in the SE's, or any other pages you want to keep to yourself then you can use this -

meta name="robots" content ="index,no follow"

A well known and very useful tool for checking out what search words people are using on the SE's is Wordtracker. When you know what people are searching for you know what keywords and keyphrases you should be weaving into your website. This tool is used by all the online Marketing experts. Another tool is the Overture suggestion tool which will list the number of times a word or phrase has been searched for on the Overture engine over the previous month. A handy tool that will query Overture directly from your desktop and store all results of your keyword searches is Good Keywords.

For a more extensive list of keyword resources try my keyword research page.

5: Body text Keyword/Keyphrases and bold text.
This is very much where the focus is when it comes to keywords and keyphrases. Generally it makes sense the more focused your body text is on what your page is about the better you will get ranked. In those terms everyone's a winner. You get better listing and your content is more relevant in order to achieve that. Does that make sense ? let me clarify.

Returning to our examples again our site is called exercise-equipment.com
We've already used the phrase 'exercise equipment' in our domain name, page title, on page title and in our meta tags.
If we now add this same phrase to the main text of our page a number of times ideally near the top within the first paragraph we'll boost our ranking in the SE's yet again.

Note you should try to make the phrase fit the text and not just cram it in there. It's also important not to over do it. As it is with the other techniques described in this article. You can get your site dropped and even barred from the SE's if it's seen to be 'spamming' them by abusing these techniques. So tread carefully and try not to be tempted to over do it.

Back to the keywords/keyphrases, there's a further twist to this if we also make the body text 'exercise equipment' bold we'll score again in the SE's since text in bold is seen as being more important and again more relevant. ;-) The side benefit is that it breaks up the text a little on the page too for our site visitors and makes the page a little more interesting and easier to read

6: The hidden benefits to having the right links.
Every site online has an index or default file as its home page file. But outside of that rule you can name the other pages whatever you like. So why not cram the names with keywords and/or keyphrases relevant to that page and your site? We've just scored again ;-)

Eg exercise-equipment-reviews.htm is our reviews page.

Note the hyphen again always try to avoid using spaces when naming your files or pages. You will get a horrible looking 20% appearing, which is something the browsers throw in there to represent a space.

If we then name the link to this page from our other pages 'exercise equipment reviews' and also make the link bold we'll score a whole bunch of points on the SE's. If you then use the other techniques described on this page to Optimise the page exercise-equipment-reviews.htm around the phrase 'exercise equipment reviews'. You'll be well on your way to getting a top listing in the engines. ;-)

Keywords and keyphrases in a link and the name of a page file are very important boosters.
Anyone would be a fool not to Optimise them to the hilt. But this is often overlooked and simply not known about.

7: Name your Images properly and utilise their Alt tags.
Each image file displayed on a site is linked to with a line of code containing the path to the image. So along the lines of our link strategy above lets utilise that link and fill it with keywords.

Eg We have an image on our home page of a piece of exercise equipment. Lets name that image exercise-equipment.jpg. Most sites store their images in a folder named images, logical, but there's a missed opportunity there. Lets call our image folder exercise-equipment.
So what we have as a link to our image is src="exercise-equipment/ exercise-equipment.jpg"
Very nice.

But there's more, all images should have an Alt tag this tag controls the text that appears when you role over an image, the little yellow box that appears with a description?
Hmmm … what should we do with that ;-) You guessed it stick our key words in there.

Is that it for images ? not quite there's one more trick I'll let out of the bag here. Its very simple but effective, add a link to your image to a relevant page or if you don't want it to lead anywhere link it back to the page its on. Either way you'll score again for the keywords in the link as mentioned above. ;-)

So you should have something like this -
a href="exercise-equipment-review.htm"
img src=" exercise-equipment/exercise-equipment.jpg " alt="exercise equipment" width="113" height="123" border="0"></a

Just look at all those juicy keywords. This little technique is little known and is another wasted opportunity.

8: Site map and doorway pages.
A site map simply consists of links to all the pages on your site. It may be that the way you have your site structured you will have some pages that don't link to each other. Having a site map linked to from every page not only helps visitors navigate your site but also acts as a highway for the 'spiders' to crawl all of your site quickly and easily. Plus think of all those juicy keyword and keyphrase links on the one page. ;-)

Doorway pages consist of the techniques mentioned already on this page but taken that little bit further. Essentially the pages focus heavily around a keyphrase and utilise the techniques mentioned here sometimes to the detriment of grammar and readability. A doorway page exists to get a listing in the SE's for its keyphrase and when visited it simply has a link to the main site.

If your site is pretty small then it may be useful to have some keyphrase targeted doorway pages. If your sites a little larger there's no reason why you can't focus the existing pages on a keyphrase properly as described here and have them do the same job as a doorway page.

9: Link exchange.
Over the last 2-3 years or so the links pointing to your site have become extremely important.
Following Googles lead the SE's have placed more emphasis on the related and relevant links a site has. The better these links are the better your sites ranking. It's important to state that not just any old link will do although this will help a little a relevant link would be much more beneficial.

So back to our example site -
Our site sells and reviews exercise equipment that's all. That's a pretty big area by itself anyway. But what if we exchanged links with a site selling exercise clothing, exercise-clothing.com. One of our keywords is in there which is even better. We add value to our site, exercise-clothing.com adds value to their site our ranking is boosted in the SE's and the SE provides better results. Everyone's a winner.

It's not good enough just to find relevant sites. Ideally you should be finding sites that get good results in the SE's already. Linking to one of these sites will give your site a great boost.
But how do you find out how well a site is ranked?

Try these two free tools -
Google toolbar - I'm sure Google needs no introduction. Other than to say once you have it installed the little horizontal green bar in the middle of the toolbar displays the Page ranking(PR) of any site you visit. Other benefits of the toolbar include, search Google from whichever site your on, a popup stopper and an autofill form feature, enter your details once and whenever you need to fill a form in online you can do it with one click.

Alexa toolbar - Alexa is a search engine owned by Amazon. This toolbar goes into even more detail about a site you visit. You can check its ranking, who's linking to it and even go back in time and view the site as it was years ago. There's also a search feature for Alexa and Google, and a search feature for Amazon built in, so you can search any of them from any site. Handy for ordering those books, CD's and DVD's.

The other benefit of these toolbars is that they track sites that you visit. Not in an intrusive way and totally anonymously. What this means is that if you visit your own site regularly just by having the toolbars installed you will boost its rankings. ;-)

I recommend you install both these tools. They install across the top of Internet Explorer underneath the address bar. It only takes a minute or two for installation and its done without any need to download software. Once installed you can always right click them and close them if they get in the way. Very handy little things.

To check a sites link popularity try this handy online tool

10: Search Engines and Submissions.
To round off this article and tie things up I'm going to say a little bit about which search engines to submit to and why, how to go about it and why you need not pay anything to get into the major SE's..

Google is king of the search engines producing the most accurate and relevant results for any search and up until recently it 'crawled/spidered' the web once every six weeks or so, doing what was called the 'Google dance'. So called because as their database was updated ranking of sites could shift dramatically for a few days before settling back down. This has now stopped as of Q2 2003.

Google now crawls constantly and there is no longer any major shift in listings. Entry into Google is free and can be very quick, probably the quickest outside paid listing. A site should appear in Google within six weeks of submitting the URL. This is still a long time to wait, but it works out quite well if you use the next little tactic I'll explain after the next two paragraphs.

Relationships between the SE's have changed dramatically over the last 12 months.
(For a very useful and informative illustration of the current Major SE relationships take a look at this chart. If your new to SE optimising you'll probably find this a real eye opener)
Google has been supplying search results for AOL and Yahoo amongst others. Yahoo has bought out the major SE Overture for millions of dollars and a few months later bought out another less well known but significant SE, inktomi, who actually supply listings to MSN, Overture, HotBot, BBC, About.com again for millions of dollars.

Yahoo is now basically consolidating these engines and will I'm sure restructure its own sites search algorithms to bring these engines online. Yahoo currently charges for a listing in its directory $299 last time I checked. But since they brought their new search engine seperate from their directory there's no need to pay to enter yahoo.

By far the fastest and most cutting edge way to get your site crawled by the search engines is to use a tactic called Blog and Ping. This will call the main search engine spiders over to your site when you choose and get you indexed within days. Keep this up and your whole site, all its pages, will be indexed before you know it. Click on the link above for more info from my friend Rick Butts.

(One word of warning stay away from the 'Submit your site to 1500 search engine' style links you find all over the web these days, you'll just end up with loads of spam emails. The majority of SE traffic comes from the top six SE's.)

Hand submission or automated software?
Well neither really these days. You can have your home page indexed simply by finding another site to exchange links with. Google actually states that they prefer to find sites by crawling the web rather than through their submission service. This will work much faster than the submission service.

If you do decide to submit to the search engines then ordinarily I would recommend submitting by hand one at a time. I've done this for the last five years. Simply because the software available to submit a site wasn't up to the job. But finally there is a piece of software that is up to the job and more than that it helps with the choice of keywords, checks the optimisation of your site pages, checks for broken links, reveals your link popularity, tracks and reports visitors to your site and will report on your position in all the major engines for your chosen keywords.

In the past there was a chance that a site could be blacklisted or not even listed if it was submitted by software. This software gets around this problem by simulating a browser whenever it deals with the search engines, be it submitting your site or reporting on its ranking.

I now use this for all my own and client sites. Finally I can save the time I used to spend on submitting by hand. You can download a free trial from www.webceo.com. The guys behind this have also recently put together an interesting pdf, documenting some handy tips when using this software. This will also give you an insite in to how useful the software will be for your site. Download the pdf here.

Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading what has turned out to be a rather long article and found something new and useful within it.

It goes without saying that you should apply the above techniques to the individual pages of your site. Start with the important and most relevant content based pages and work backwards from there.

Finally one more online tool to help you check your site for errors.

About the Author
Darren Yates is owner of PPC Accelerator. An advance Pay Per Click advertising booster. Source, edit, format and manage your keyword lists in one place.

This article comes with reprint rights. You are free to reprint and distribute s you like. All that we ask is that you do not make any changes, that this resource text is include, and that the links above are intact.

regards,

Darren Yates