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Tech Tip for February 24, 2008
Max-out Your Website's Search Engine Results: info@drakehs.com Once you have chosen your business and purchased a domain name, the next step before submitting your site to search engines is to find useful and relevant keywords. Without this step your Web site will get lost in the millions of Web sites competing for your business. 1. Choose Your Keywords Carefully To start our keyword research we need to utilize some very useful tools. To give you a good idea a web site you can view is Google Keywords, which is a free tool that displays the amount of searches and competition for specific keywords. It also allows you to find more specific keywords that can better describe your site. A better tool would be to purchase some type of software such as Word Tracker, which offers detailed information about keywords. Unfortunately Word Tracker is not free, but there are other services that are. 2. Find your Niche This cannot be stressed enough, as it is much harder to receive top search engine rankings for a new site than an established site. A new site will have to fight among web sites that have established high search engine rankings. Over time new sites will gain better position where it can compete with these generic terms. At first new sites new to choose their keywords carefully. For example, let's say you have a web site geared toward weight loss. You would not use the keyword "weight loss" because it has too much competition. You may find the keyword "weight loss surgery" or "weight loss techniques." These phrases are much better keywords than generic terms like "weight loss." Use the list of a few keywords and check out the competition that word or phrase has on Google. Look at the number of competitors. If this exceeds a few million, then you need look for a more specific keyword. The next step is to observe the top listed pages and see how well they are optimized. You can download Google Toolbar and add Page Rank to your browser for free. Here's a quick definition of Google Page Rank. Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular a Web site is. It is based on the number of "votes" other Web sites cast for another Web site. A "vote" is simply when another Web site places a link on their Web site that is pointing to another Web site. Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your Web site, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be. Page Rank is one of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking Web sites. In order to see your own Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get that for free at toolbar.google.com. A low Page Rank between 0 and 3 means that you can easily compete with these Web pages. A Web site with a Page Rank of 4 to 6 is a bit tougher to compete with, but is manageable using guided steps and expertise. You do not want to compete with Web sites that have a Page Rank above 7. Check the domain's homepage, not a sub page, to get an accurate Page Rank. 3. View Competitors' Source Code It is important to view potential competitors' source code to see if they have efficiently performed on page search engine optimization. To do this on your browser, click "view" and then click on the "source" option as displayed. This will bring up a page with all the HTML (hypertext markup language) code on it. You do not need to be an expert with HTML to understand what we are looking for. We need to see if our competitor's web site is properly optimized. The keywords are most likely to be held in META tags. These should all be located near the top of the HTML code. An example of Drake Hardware and Software's META tags are below. META NAME="description" CONTENT="Burlington Iowa Computer and Business Consulting Firm, Drake Hardware and Software" The last thing you want to look at is the body content to see if the keyword is used a few times there. A site lacking in keywords in the body content is a poorly optimized page. 4. Keyword Placement on Your Site After you have selected a few keywords to use, we want to combine the ones that have like terms. For example, suppose you have selected three keywords: As you can see that all three keywords contain the words "weight loss;" therefore, we can combine the words to better optimize your page. When your new site is created, it needs a name. The name of the page is held in the title tag. For the title tag, the fewer the keywords used, the better the search engines will rank your page. The title should NEVER be: Welcome to our website!. It should also NEVER look like this: weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight loss The way it should look is: Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture You should always remove prepositions such as "and," as this will only hurt your search engine optimization. The fewer, more relevant the words there are, the higher your search engine ranking will be. The body content of your web page should be rich with keywords and relevant content. You should have each keyword appear at least once for every 1 to 2 paragraphs. Do not stuff your body with keywords, as this will only hurt you. The text has to be written in a way that makes sense to a reader. Do not write the same word over and over trying to raise your rankings, the programs that read for keywords are smarter than that. You want to give your body a clean, natural look, meaning do not overuse or under use keywords. Image tags "alt tags" should also be keyword-rich. Search engines often look at the alt tags of images on your Web site to get a feel of what your Web site is about. If the alt tags do not have your keywords, then you will be ranked lower than if you had keywords in your alt tags. Managing the keywords in your website is an easy and relatively quick way to boost your rankings. Repetition in important areas will not only tell the search engines what your site is about, but your target audience as well. |
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