Chapter 5 - How to Attract Search EnginesAn entire industry has grown up around the idea of making your website show up high in the search engine rankings. They are called Search Engine Optimization companies, SEO for short. A good SEO firm will make sure that your website ranks highly and that the text description the search engine provides for your site makes people want to click on the listing and actually visit your website. Big business is spending big bucks on SEOs right now. The search engine is the lifeblood of the big business. A big business that spends buckets of money on building a brand needs to rank in the first two pages to make sure that their branding and advertising works. So what are the tools the SEO firms use and how do they apply to the small business? Key Point! Meta Tag ToolsMeta tags are special "Html" tags inserted in the web page for explaining to the search engines what the page is all about. These tags are not visible to the user but occasionally some search engines display Meta description tags in their results. Meta Tags Basics Meta tags go in the <HEAD> </HEAD> segment of your html document and are especially for search engines. The important Meta tags from the search engines point of view are the "Description", Title and "Keywords" tags. Meta Description TagDescription: Some search engines use the content of the description tag as the site description in their result and look in the description tag for keyword matches Syntax of Meta Tags (Check Everything Twice Before Finishing) Meta Keywords TagDescription: This tag is not shown. It only tells the search engines what keywords are important for the particular page. Syntax of Meta Tags (Check Everything Twice Before Finishing) Normally you separate keywords in Meta tags with a comma. The search engines understand a comma as "Or", while a space is taken as "And". Meta Tag Optimization TipsYou should always arrange the keywords in the Meta tags in order of importance. When you have several occurrences of the same words in the Meta tags, use different capitalization such as: promotion, Promotion and PROMOTION. The general rule of thumb, however, is to keep everything in lower case. It is also a good idea to add common misspellings of some of your keywords into your Meta tags if you have some room. For example, promotion could be spelled promotion by someone who is typing fast. Other Meta TagsYou can also instruct the search engine robot/spider how to index your site using the robot s META Tag. This is what it looks like: <META name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> index - this is the default setting, the page is added to the search engine database To use any of these attributes simply, replace the "noindex, nofollow" text in the example above with whatever you want to use. If you need to use more than one attribute, separate them with a comma. Other Meta Tags Resources ABS Meta Tags Analyzer http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html is a great tool that checks the overall quality of your html coding. It also checks to see that the title tags are set up properly and takes a basic look at your Meta tags. Link PopularityLink popularity, which refers to the number of links pointing to and from related sites, is considered by many search engine experts as the most important element of a site's relevance in search engines. Do not confuse link popularity with site popularity, which refers to click-through popularity, and how long visitors remain at the site when they get there. There are three types of links that will increase the link popularity of your site; internal, incoming and outgoing links. Internal LinksInternal link popularity refers to the number of links to and from pages within a site. Make sure you cross-link your important related pages back and forth. This will help build up your site's theme (used by search engines to categorize the theme of a site). By doing so, you are telling search engine spiders that those are the most important pages of your site. Cross-linking your pages also helps the search engine spiders find and index the most important pages quicker, especially if some pages are buried deep within your site. Incoming LinksIncoming link popularity refers to links pointing to a site from other related sites. In addition, there are two types of incoming links:
Once you have compiled a list of related sites, add a link to them in your site. Then send an e-mail to site owners informing them that you have linked to their site and politely ask them for a link back to your site. Do not forget to tell them about the benefits of exchanging links in this manner. Finding Sites That Accept Site Submissions Replace "your keywords" with those related to your site. Include the quotation marks to ensure the search engine only returns pages with the exact search phrases you enter. Also try replacing, "add URL" with one of the following sets of search phrases: add site, add link, add a URL, add a site, add a link, submit URL, submit site, submit link, submit a URL, submit a site, submit a link. You can also find site submission pages by searching for the actual page. So, try replacing the "add URL" search phrase with addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, etc. Try using hyphens or underscores too: add-url.html, add-a-link. html, submit-url.html, add_site.html, submit_a_site.html, submit_a_link. You can also try replacing the ".html" extension with others, such as ".htm," ".shtml," ".cfm," etc. Outgoing LinksOutgoing links refer to links pointing to other related sites from your site. Search engine spiders that visit your site's outgoing links and determine that the content of the sites you link to is related to the content of your own site. This will improve the theme rating of your site. Some search engines now place a huge importance on a site's theme in determining its relevancy. It is important to name your internal and outgoing links carefully. Since keywords are important in determining the relevancy of a page, it is essential that they are used throughout a page. The page title and headings should always include the keywords describing the page. So should the page headings. Naming the page with the same keywords can help. In turn, the visible link text used on other pages to link to the page should use the same keyword phrase as the page name. For example, if the title of a page is "speaking engagements", then the page name should be "speaking-engagements.html," or "speaking_engagements.html." Make sure you include a hyphen or underscore between each word. This will ensure that search engines index each word as a separate keyword. Do not pack all the words together. For example, don t use "speakingengagements.html". You should also make sure that all links to that page use the link text, "Speaking Engagements." You notice how everything fits together? Link QualityThe quality of the links is just as important, if not more important, than the number of links to your site. The types of sites you should concentrate on getting links from include major search engines (Google), popular search portals (MSN), website directories (Yahoo and Open Directory Project), high-traffic sites, news sites (CNN), weblogs and sites related to your site's niche or theme. Search engines consider links from major search engines and portals as a big thumbs up for your site. Incoming Links Mistaken as Link Popularity Boosters There are two types of incoming links that some people mistake as links that will boost their link popularity: Unless you host your own affiliate program on your own server and the links point to your theme site, those incoming links do not boost your site s popularity. Links from PPC sites and affiliate programs actually point to their own sites, which then redirect the visitor to the correct site. Key Point! Link Exchanges and FarmsNever use links from link exchange sites and link farms. Link farms are networks of heavily cross-linked pages on one or more sites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites. Many of the major search engines consider such links as spam, so stay clear of these types of links. A better strategy is to create your own directory pages on your website. Creating your very own personal directory pages provide high value links going out of your site, valuable resources for your visitors and if done correctly can provide all of the important incoming links that you need for a high search engine ranking. Linksmanager.com is a service that quickly organizes all of your links in categories and makes reciprocal linking with other sites simple. The service is free for the first 30 days, followed by a monthly fee depending on the number of categories you include. Better yet, you can get the service for free if you refer one new customer each month. ConclusionDo not underestimate the influence link popularity plays in the ranking of your web pages. It is actually possible to achieve a top ranking almost entirely on link popularity alone. So spend time improving your site's link popularity. Keyword densityThink of one or two main keywords for your site, and make them appear 5-6 times each on your front page. Some search engines will look for "keyword density", meaning how far apart the keywords appear. Some will only look at the first 200 characters of your site, and count the number of times the keyword appears. Others will index a bit from the top, middle, and bottom parts of your website, and search those areas for keywords. Generally, 2-5% of the text of your web page should be made up of the keywords. Key Point! 
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