Here
are the major factors for ranking on
internet search engines:
Internet Marketing Optimization
Factor #1
The TITLE is the
most important part of Internet Marketing Optimization. What is a search
engine friendly TITLE Tag? An Internet Marketing friendly TITLE Tag should be 60
characters or less. Why? Because not all
organic search engines are created
equally. Some internet search engines will
display 80 characters or more, but
others only 60. Your goal is to create
the ultimate TITLE tag that optimizes
for all major organic search engines.
In order to do this we
have to consider all search engines and
what their limitations are. Through
research we have found 60 characters to
work well with all major search engines
and directories.
Search engine friendly
doesn't mean Internet Marketing Optimization. In fact a
shorter TITLE tag is better with most all
engines. The shorter your TITLE Tag, the
more focused it is. Too short of a TITLE
tag and it will have no keyword value. Too
long and it could be cut off by another
search engine making your TITLE
meaningless to those visitors. Also the
more words in the TITLE Tag the less
keyword density that part of the Web
page has.
When creating a TITLE we
try to describe what the concept of the
page is about in as few keywords as
possible. Sometimes this takes the
entire 60 characters, but if we can do
it in 40 and still stay very focused and
have this TITLE include our most
important keywords, we win!
Think of your TITLE as
if you were writing a book and had to
TITLE that book. This is the same
concept of creating a TITLE for a Web
page. The optimum TITLE is not a full description.
It is the attention
grabber so people want to pick up the
book and open it and view the contents
page or back cover to learn more of what
the book itself is about.
Example of Internet Marketing Optimization
in your TITLE tag;
Let's say you had a web site selling
organic gardening supplies. What TITLE
tag do you think would best capture this?
Chances are you felt the
TITLE "XYZ Organic Gardening Material
and Supplies for the Gardener" to be
more descriptive of what the page or
site is about. While the others may
certainly be something we might put in
the site, it certainly wouldn't tell us
anything about what the site has to
offer. NOTE: This title tag is not the
final version. Normally we would
not have all the "stop" words in it
like; "and", "for", or "the". The
common words are not considered by the
search engine and only water down your
major words in the keyphrase.
We think about our TITLE
tag as keywords someone (our target market)
might search on at a search engine.
You'll start to notice that when you
type keywords at a search engine these
keywords are most always in the TITLE
tag.
At least the top ranking pages will have
this in their TITLE tag. You might create a
sub page talking about the specific
products so you can target those
specific users as well, but for now we
are promoting our main entrance page
with Internet Marketing Optimization.
Another way to look at a
TITLE tag is by picking up your local
newspaper. The front page is all about
HEADLINES. These are the attention
grabbers (titles). They contain keywords
to spark interest. They briefly describe
what that section of the paper has to
offer. That's what the TITLE tag is all
about. It's about getting attention and
briefly describing what that area is all
about.
Internet Marketing Optimization
Factor #2
META Description Tag
The META Description Tag should contain
all 150 characters if possible. The
reason for this all has to do with your
ability to describe in detail what this
page is all about using your most
important keywords. The TITLE grabbed
their attention, but the META
Description needs to promote the
click-through. You have to let the
searcher know what you have to offer.
You'll notice from our organic gardening
materials example site
we used the following META Description:
"XYZ provides organic
gardening supplies to professional and
home gardeners. Providing fertilizers,
tools, pesticides, seeds for the organic
gardener"
This contains the entire
150 characters. We are marketing those
looking for organic garden materials and
supplies. And if we were to calculate
keyword density on these main terms we
would find this to have a very high and
focused keyword density.
The META Description
tells the searcher exactly what he
wants. Our TITLE ranked high and was
focused to the terms the searcher used
and our META Description now confirms
this. It also lets the search engine
user know the
different "main" products you offer.
Internet Marketing Optimization
Factor #3
The META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords Tag is
not as important as it once was. In fact
Scrub The Web, Google and even AltaVista
no longer consider the META Keywords Tag
when calculating relevance. This doesn't
mean it is not important however.
Organic Search engines such as Inktomi
still consider and use the META Keywords
Tag when calculating relevance. So this
Tag should not be overlooked. Inktomi
(now part of Yahoo!) claims to reach
more than 50% of the Internet population
and that makes the META Keywords Tag
very important.
The META Keywords Tag
when used by an organic search engine
when calculating relevance will rarely
place extra value on the words found in
this Tag. Because of this it is not
necessary to put all your keywords in
this Tag.
Instead only place your
most important keywords and keyword
phrases here. Then make sure you have
these same keywords and keyword phrases
in the viewable content of the Web page.
Internet Marketing Optimization
Factor #4
The HTML Body
When a search engine robot visits a web
page it will extract the text and will
index that content and make it
searchable by their visitors. But
besides extracting content from a Web
page, robots also need to figure out how
"relevant" your Web page is in
comparison to other pages that contain
the same text. They do this by trying to
figure out how important "you" the
publisher feels this text is. You do
this by creating emphasis on important
keywords and phrases.
But how do you emphasize
this text? Well, how do newspapers
emphasize an article on their main page?
They create "HEADLINES". These are
usually BOLD face and have a much larger
FONT size. They want their HEADLINE to
standout from other text on the page so
they catch the eyes of people walking by
the newsstand. So how do you do this
with your web site?
Without getting too
technical we'll talk about how you can
make your words jump out and be
considered "important" to search engines
as well as the human visitor.
While viewing your
document with your browser, can you
figure out which of the words on a web
page would be the most important?
Hopefully you chose the largest and
boldest words. Now step back from your
monitor 10 feet. Again I ask what jumps
out at you? What do you think is most important
here? Guess what?
That's basically how search engine spiders work.
The largest sized font is considered the
most important.
There are ways to
increase the size of your text and bold
it using FONT and/or STYLE attributes.
You can change the
color, you can underline the
text, you can bold the text, you can
change the font style and even mix and
match them if you want. If you want to
learn how to do all that fancy stuff get
a book, but remember robots are very
basic. They look at font sizes, check to
see if it is bold, the color of text and
a few other basic elements. Robots don't
do FLASH, Java, JavaScript, graphics or
even care what font styles you use. They
read the text content from top left to
bottom right and don't really care how
pretty it all looks.
Another Internet Marketing Optimization Factor
to consider is the position within the
document these words appear. The text
closer to the top of the page is
considered more important and this is
why your opening statement needs to
contain the most important keywords and
keyword phrases you want people to find
your Web page with.
So do you think we can
improve our rankings for this other
keywords found in our document? Yes you
can! From our discussion you have
learned that the larger the FONT size
is, the more "important" the keyword
becomes. We can increase the size of
text using the FONT Tag. The FONT Tag is
actually quite easy to use. Here's an
example:
The text
here will increase
in size making
each word more
important
Internet Marketing Optimization Factor
#5
Keyword Density
A good starting point for the percentage
of your MOST important keyword terms is
between 3% and 5% and these are the
words that should be at the top of your
density list. This is a "starting" point
and is not necessarily good for the
particular keywords you wish to market,
but for the most part these figures
should work very well for most of you.
Remember to check the
density of each page individually and
you want to have different words higher
on different pages depending on what
that page is about. The order of the
keywords displayed should be in an order
that would best present the keywords and
keyword phrases you want to promote.
At this point we have
not compared our Web page with our
competition. To do this all we would do
is visit a search engine, enter one of
our keyword phrases and see who comes
up. We would then run the top 5 or so
pages through the Web Page Analyzer so
we can get a feel of where their keyword
density is for these same keywords. The
more you analyze the more you'll
understand where your particular
keywords would best benefit although you
will likely find that between 3% and 5%
works well. We suggest you analyze your
competition with a few different full
text search engines so that you can get
a better sample of what is optimized for
all engines. It's better to rank in the
top 7 or so of all engines than it is to
rank number one in just one.
Internet Marketing Optimization
Factor #6
Less use of frills
Frills like Flash and DHTML look cool
but if they don't solve any purpose
other than let you show-off how you can
make geometric figures dance around the
screen, you should avoid using them. The
search engine crawlers like the
plain-vanilla text.
Showcase frills only if
you're selling them (if you're a Flash
designer or a graphic artist). A company
selling organic manure doesn't benefit
much by having a Flash website that
shows bags of manure appearing here and
there like apparitions. Internet
Marketing Optimization follows the
golden rule of K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple
Silly)
Internet Marketing Optimization
Factor #7
Update frequently
Both search engines and people like
updated content. If your visitors expect
to see new content on your website
whenever they come, they'll come again
and again, and they'll come with greater
frequency. Internet Marketing
Optimization shows content that is rapidly
updated displaying the
latest information.
Make it a routine to put
something new every second or third day,
even if it is one paragraph.
Internet Marketing Optimization
Factor #8
Use clean HTML
Clean code loads quicker and gets
crawled (this sounds weird!) by the
search engines faster. If the success of
your website Internet Marketing Optimization really matters to you and
if you want to create your own web pages
instead of hiring a professional web
developer, you should spend at least a
few days learning HTML. A search-engine
friendly website doesn't need much HTML
to learn and it will show clean content
to your visitors without unnecessarily
increasing the load time. Avoid using
graphical tools and use a text editor
instead. It sounds daunting in the
beginning but once your realize its
benefit, you'll be more than eager to
write HTML rather than use a tool that
produces lots of unnecessary junk code
like FrontPage (the worst known to man!).
The Internet Marketing Optimization efforts mentioned
above take time to show results, but they
are long lasting and they fetch you the
desired rankings.
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