Optimise your Site for the Search Engines Pt
2
Go directly to Part
1
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.
If you would still prefer to go down the hand
submission route -
Here's a page with links to the submission pages of around 30 search
engines.
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
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