Key Terms and Phrases
Discover what key terms and phrases are being used by visitors to find Web sites like yours. You can do this by simply searching the major search engines with words you presume are important or, better yet, go to http://www.overture.com and use their “Search Term Suggestion Tool” in their Advertiser Center to find the words used most to find Web sites like yours. By entering a word, you’ll see a list of related terms and how often that term has been used for a search in the previous month. Some keywords might be highly competitive or in a very crowded space in the search engines. It might be well worth your time to seek keywords and phrases in not-so-crowded search spaces.
HINT: Phrases with three or more words are often overlooked and can provide valuable and targeted traffic.
Research Competitor’s Web Sites
Go to a competitor’s Web site by doing a keyword or key phrase search on a search engine like www.google.com. Open the competitor’s Web site and go to “Source” under the “View” tab in Internet Explorer. A Notepad window will open up showing you the code for the page you’re viewing. In the source code you will see the <title>, name="description"> and <META content=name="keywords"> data, usually at the top of the code. It is here that you will see principal code that the search engines use to index a Web site.
WARNING: DO NOT COPY a competitor’s meta-data code as this might constitute copyright infringement.
HINT: Make sure your meta-data code looks similar by including key words and phrases in your title (no more than 60 characters here), description (no more than 250 characters here) and keywords (no more than 25 words and under 200 characters here).
REMINDER: If you can read it in the source code, then search engine “spiders” can read it to index your Web site, too.
Be Search-engine Friendly
Construct your Web site to be search-engine friendly with static HTML pages, text linked navigation and a site map link on all pages.
INSIGHT: Site maps are especially important to Google and Yahoo. Too much Javascript, frames or flash will make your Web site “unreadable” to search engines. Static HTML text is best to use. Text on a Web site’s page should have at least 200 words, including and repeating keywords and phrases. Make the text on your pages read as naturally as possible, using language that does not list or is not “stuffed” with key words and phrases. Variations and combination of keywords should be used, but not more than 2 or 3 times on a page.
BEST PRACTICE: Every page of your Web site should have unique meta data and readable text content in the source code.
The Importance of Alt Tags
Alt tags are comments used to identify a graphic or image on a Web page. Pictures are invisible to search engines no matter how important they are to your message. An alt tag is descriptive text that tells a user and, most importantly, the search engine what the image is referencing. Be sure to use important keywords here.
REMINDER: If an image is important to your message, you need to tell the search engine in keyword rich terms.
Be Relevant
Make the copy on your Web site relevant and provide value to the visitor’s experience. For example, if you have many similar affiliate links, compare, rate or rank the benefits of your affiliated Web sites that are of common or related themes.
REMINDER: Write copy with popular key phrases for the type affiliations you have.
Build Links
Build links to and from your Web site to establish popularity, relevancy and higher ranking. This may be the most time-consuming of search engine marketing activities. In particular, Google ranks the relevance of a Web site by assessing the relevancy of links to and from your Web site.
HINT: To read more about this, go to: http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
WARNING: Do not join so-called “link farms” that promise to get you thousands of links. These are viewed by the search engines as a form of SPAM and may be detrimental to successful search engine indexing.
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