If you want your online business to be successful, it's a
good idea to optimize your site on a regular basis to make sure
it's got a good position in the Web's top search engines.
However, in order to maintain your ranking, you have to keep on top
of what's happening in the rapidly changing search engine
industry. The rules that affected your ranking yesterday may be
meaningless tomorrow.
Read on to learn more about the latest developments in the
search engine industry and what key tactics you should-and
shouldn't-use to optimize your site to make sure it gets a high
ranking with all the major search engines. Plus we'll show you
the tools and resources you can use to keep it there.
The Times, They Are a Changin'
For the past few years, the major search engines have been
preparing to square off against each other and battle it out for
the industry's top spot. Google has been No. 1 for a while now,
but Yahoo! and MSN have been making moves to steal the crown.
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With a close-to-55-percent market share, Google is still
extremely powerful. Yahoo! is the closest runner-up with about 20
percent of users choosing it as their main search engine, and MSN
is a distant but threatening third, with about 10 percent of the
global usage share.
Keep in mind, however, that Google and Yahoo! power many of the
smaller search engines. For example, Google powers the free
listings featured on AOL and Netscape, plus the paid listings
featured on AOL, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Teoma and Lycos.
Yahoo! powers free listings featured on AltaVista, AllTheWeb and
HotBot, plus the paid listings on MSN, AltaVista and AllTheWeb.
You need to be aware of the latest trends in the search market
if you want to gear your optimization efforts toward the engines
that will send you as much traffic as possible. Of course, you also
need to keep tabs on changes to the search engines themselves!
Search engines frequently change the algorithms they use to rank
sites. They don't want unscrupulous site owners manipulating
their indexing methods in order to get high rankings. By doing so,
they damage the integrity of free search. As soon as the search
engines become aware of a trick being used by "search engine
spammers" to boost their site ranking, they figure out a way
to catch them.
The search engines don't want to be manipulated by
marketers. They want to provide the best unbiased results possible
for any given search-or they'll lose users. That's why they
need to change their algorithms so frequently-to stay ahead of the
tricks people use to get top rankings.
So be careful! You don't want to catch yourself employing a
great strategy promoted by a marketing "expert," only to
find out it's a tactic the search engines hate! That could get
you booted off their listings in no time flat.
Let's have a look at what exactly the search engines are
currently looking for when indexing sites-and what they'll
punish you for.
The Dos
There are still a lot of legitimate ways you can optimize your
site to generate or maintain a high ranking without angering the
search engines and causing them to drop you from their list. Here
are some of the best things you can to do ensure your site has a
high ranking:
1. Ask relevant sites to link to your site. In the past,
scoring a high ranking with a search engine was all about
positioning your keywords in "prime real estate"
positions in your text and site coding. All that has changed,
however, because these days, links are king.
Search engines place a huge amount of importance on the number
of sites that link to yours. But it's not just the quantity of
links that matter, it's also the quality. Search engines look
at how relevant the links are, that is, how much the content of the
linking site has in common with the content on your site. The more
relevant, the better.
Search engines also look at how important the linking site is.
What kind of online presence does it have? How much traffic does it
get? For example, your site will get a higher ranking if it's
linked to by sites such as BBC.com or nationalgeographic.com
instead of, say, the personal homepage of your friend's
neighbor's kid.
2. Pay attention to keyword inclusion and placement.
Keywords may no longer be the sole determining factor of a
site's ranking, but they're still pretty important. The
most useful places to include them are:
- In your domain name-only make sure your keywords are in the
root of your URL, not the stem. For example, if your main keyword
phrase is "cell phones," try to get a domain name such as
"www.cell-phones.com" instead of
"www.mobileusa.com/cell-phones." Some search engines will
actually penalize sites for including key words in the stem of a
URL.
- In the title tags in your source code
- In the meta description of your site. This is much less
important than it used to be, but it can't hurt.
- In your meta keyword tags
And be sure you only include relevant keywords. Search engines
will penalize you if you try to sneak in keywords that have nothing
to do with the content of your site.
3. Create content-rich information pages to direct traffic to
your site. An easy way to boost the number of pages that link
to your site is to create some pages yourself. However, you have to
make sure these pages contain valuable content that provides people
with useful information. Search engines hate "pointer
pages" that have no content and exist only to add to the
number of links pointing to a site.
Be sure the information relates to the content on your site and
has your keywords placed in advantageous positions. This will boost
the ranking of your pages with the search engines and ensure they
get lots of traffic-which they can then redirect to your site.
4. Submit your site to online directories. Be sure to
submit your site to important directories such as Yahoo!, the Open
Directory Project and About.com, as well as smaller directories.
Your listing on these directories will help your ranking with the
major search engines.
5. Multiply and conquer. Create a community of related
sites that link to each other. Why stop at only one information
page? The more content-rich sites that point to your site, the
better.
You can also boost the number of links that point to your site
by dividing it into several separate sites that all link to each
other. This works especially well if you sell a number of different
products or services. If you build a different site to focus on
each of your products and services, then you can also concentrate
the use of specific keyword phrases on each site. That's
another great way to boost your search engine ranking.
The Don'ts
Now that we've covered the dos, here come the don'ts.
Although these questionable tactics have worked well in the past,
the search engines absolutely hate them. If they catch you using
any of these tricks, they may go so far as to drop you from their
listings.
1. Beware of irrelevant links. Yes, it's a good idea
to get a lot of different links pointing to your site, but the
search engines only like relevant links. If they find sites
that have nothing in common with the content on your site linked to
your Web site, they'll lower your relevancy rating.
2. Beware of irrelevant keywords. Search engines hate
finding irrelevant keywords on your site-especially in your meta
tags. If they catch you using keywords that have nothing to do with
the actual content of your site, they'll penalize you for
it.
3. Don't "keyword stuff" your meta tags. In
the past, people used to repeat their keywords in their meta tags
over and over again. This used to get them a high ranking with the
search engines-but not any more. Search engines are on to this
trick and will punish you for it by dropping your ranking.
4. Don't create "link farms." Link farms
are the evil cousins of the information pages we discussed above.
In the past, some spammers used to build multiple
"doorway" sites that existed only to multiply the number
of links pointing to their sites. Unlike content-rich information
pages, these doorway pages would usually only include a string of
keyword terms that would earn them a high ranking with the search
engines.
The search engines have caught on to this tactic, however, and
will drop you from their listings if they find you using it.
5. Avoid "free for all" link pages. Don't
bother placing links to your site on pages where everyone and their
cousin is invited to put up a link. Such sites have extremely low
relevancy ratings and will cost you points with the search
engines.
Now that you know the dos and don'ts of optimizing your
site, let us introduce you to the essential tools and resources you
need to utilize to optimize your site and stay on top of the search
engine game. There are a lot of great tools out there that can help
you optimize your site while ensuring that you stay on the good
side of all the search engines. Here are a few of our
favorites.
Tools
- WordTracker. This great online tool helps you select
specific keyword phrases that will direct more traffic to your
site. Free and paid versions are available.
- Optilink. A lot of search engine optimization experts
swear by this software. It's a link reputation analyzer that
helps you determine a site's reputation and why the search
engines like it or dislike it. It comes in handy when you're
checking out the competition or looking for reputable sites to link
to yours.
- WebPosition Gold. This is a great piece of search
engine placement software that generates Web pages designed to rank
high on the major search engines. It also analyzes your existing
Web pages, provides suggestions for improvement and tracks your
ranking on different search engines.
Resources
- Search Engine News. Planet Ocean's online
resource, "The Unfair Advantage Book on Winning the Search
Engine Wars," is updated monthly and provides excellent
optimization tips and information on the search engine
industry.
- Search Engine Watch. This free site is another rich
source of tips and information on the search engine industry. Paid
memberships are available for more advanced content.
- Search Engine Guide. This free site contains a lot of
useful information about the smaller search engines on the Web and
who you should submit your site to in order to get a better ranking
with the bigger search engines.
Final Thoughts
Recent research by search engine optimization experts suggests
that there's a surprising lack of overlap between the results
produced by the major search engines. All too often, sites that are
ranked high on Google get a much poorer listing with Yahoo! and
vice versa.
This could mean that webmasters are focusing their optimization
efforts solely on one search engine while neglecting to improve
their ranking with the other. Or they might be using optimization
tactics that work for Google on Yahoo!, without being aware that
Yahoo! uses different criteria to index a site.
Either way, sites that aren't optimized for both Google and
Yahoo! are missing out on a lot of potential visitors.
No one really knows what the future holds for the search engine
industry, but one thing's for sure: Businesses that don't
stay on top of the changes are going to find themselves slipping
behind. Don't let that happen to your business!
Corey Rudl, author of Insider Secrets to
Marketing Your Business on the Internetand founder of
www.marketingtips.com, is widely recognized as an
Internet marketing expert because what he teaches are not
theoretical approaches to online marketing but real examples of
what works.