SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Understanding Search Engines - Part II

Posted by SEO Expert Team October 24, 2009

The Search Engine ‘Index’

While it is important to know how a search engine ‘reads’ websites and stores them in its ‘index’, it is even more important (or more relevant) to know how to get included in it.

There is only one ‘serious’ way to get included into search engines, and it is this:

Get links from other websites to point to your website.

Submitting to search engine inclusion forms, using software that ‘guarantees’ to get your website included in search engines, paying spammers who offer to get your website indexed in 100+ search engines …

All of that is a waste of time. Avoid any such schemes like the plague, and steer clear of ‘search engine submission forms’.

Why?

Because getting indexed by search engines is a piece of cake IF you know how to do it.

But how do I get links?

There are several ways to easily get links for free pointing to your website (and if you are willing to pay, more
power to you) and you can usually have your website (or at least your site’s front page) indexed in Google in 2-4 days of launch.

Note: Later on in the book you will find a whole chapter on building links for the site launch phase, so do not worry too much now (or skip ahead to that chapter if you wish).

Crawling Frequency

Crawling is a term used to describe the behavior of search engine spiders (also known as ‘bots’ (short for robots) which are computer programs written to ‘read’ websites. These spiders use links to go from one website to the other (hence the need to get links to your website).

Crawling frequency is a measure of how often a website gets ‘read’ by a search engine. This frequency depends on a number of factors but the two main factors you want to worry about are:

• Freshness (how often is the site content updated)
• Site importance (measured by the number of links pointing to that website)

If you get links from a website that is updated daily and has a lot of links pointing to it, you are bound to have the link to your site found quickly and get your website indexed.

Example:

Performancing.com is a very popular online resource for professional bloggers – it is updated daily and has tens of thousands of links pointing to it.

A link from such a website would have the search engine spiders knocking on your website’s proverbial door
very soon.

Another example:

Article directories such as EzineArticles.com are usually updated several times a day (with new articles uploaded every day) and have thousands of links pointing to them as well. Submitting an article to such article directories (if done the right way) will also help you get your website indexed quickly.

Recommended Resource: Article Submitter (http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com)

This is a free program that will submit your articles to hundreds of popular article directories across the internet. Note only will this get you a quality link pointing to your website from the article directory, but many other websites will likely pick up your article and syndicate it on their website, which will lead to many more links pointing to your website!

A paid example:

The Yahoo Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/) is the biggest and most popular online directory. Inclusion costs $299/year, and as such it is not a cheap proposition.

The benefits, however, are often worth the costs. Inclusion in the Yahoo Directory (a process that takes a week’s time as they review your site) will not only guarantee that your website gets indexed in all search engines, your site rankings should also receive a boost (especially in the Yahoo Search index, which mixes directory results in its search results AND gives more importance to sites included in its directory).

These are just a few examples of how you can use high-powered links to get your website indexed quickly.

There is one caveat though – the examples I gave above, and other such sources of ‘power links’ are easy to get, but only if you know HOW to get them. I will explain how later, so for now let us look at the next part of the puzzle – search engine results.

Recommended Resource: Directory Submitter (http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com)

This is another free program that will submit your website to literally thousands of other website directories across the internet. While the Yahoo directory is an excellent, “paid” directory to submit your website to, there are also thousands of completely FREE website directories you can submit to.

Doing this submission manually will take you days and days of time, but using out free Directory Submitter software, you can do this much faster. Directory Submission is something that I highly recommend doing at the time I am writing this post. The more directories you can submit your website to, the more one-way links you’ll get pointing to your website, and the higher you will rank.

Do you think it's easy to understand the search engines ?

Until next time! See you around ;-) ...

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Quick Review

Posted by SEO Expert Team

Review

We have covered a lot of basic ideas here, so it is time for a short recap:

What is SEO?

• Identify audience and set targets (research)
• Do on-page and off-page tasks to increase search engine rankings
• Track progress and adjust as necessary

SEO is NOT:

• A short-term solution
• Online advertising or public relations
• Free

Understand How Search Engines Work

To be successful as an SEO, we need to know how search engines work, how they have evolved in the last few years and in which direction they are moving.

Customize your SEO Strategy

Each project and website is different in scale and targets. A non-profit website has different goals than a site
that is geared to earn money from ad clicks. Do your research, and adapt accordingly.

Think Long Term

Long term planning where SEO is concerned allows you to do things once and then not worry about periodic
changes to the search engine algorithms.

Search engines are using time as a variable in evaluating several ranking factors, so expect to be in it for the
long haul.

Think For Yourself

Do not blindly follow what other people tell you – there is a LOT of misinformation spread about SEO, and the funny thing is that no one knows for sure what they are talking about.

SEO is an art, but more importantly, the only thing you can trust is what WORKS (in the long run).

Create a System

Having a system to do your SEO will save you a lot of time as well as help you be more effective.

Prioritize Your Work

Follow the Pareto principle (80-20 rule) and make sure that you do the most important things first.

Rankings Are NOT Everything

Rankings and traffic are not worth much if you cannot convert them to meet your site’s initial targets.
I hope that the ideas presented in the last few pages have helped you understand better what SEO is about and why it helps to approach it with a specific mindset.

This chapter was just the first part in building that SEO mindset. In the next chapter, I will discuss how search
engines work and how you can use that information to streamline your SEO strategies and build a search
engine-friendly plan to dominate search engine rankings.

And once that is done, we will move on to the actual process of doing SEO on a project, from start to end.
Everything we have talked about here – customized approaches, SEO systems, prioritization, long term planning – will show in the processes and strategies that are discussed in this book.

But I am getting ahead of myself – first, we must understand how search engines work.

1 comments

Think Long Term - Part II

Posted by SEO Expert Team

Think For Yourself

Quite often I meet people in the SEO industry who blindly follow what a certain ‘guru’ says, or believe everything that Google says to be gospel.

But as I told you earlier – there is no one way of doing SEO, and there definitely is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. It is all about what tactic is most effective in taking you to the top of the SERPs, and that is all that you should be really focused on.

Blind faith in Google’s idea of SEO, or some guru’s idea of SEO, is usually a bad idea. Listen to all sides of the argument, see the results for yourself and if possible, carry out your own experiments if you have to.

One such example involves paid links. Google has explicitly said that paid links for ranking purposes are not acceptable and will be penalized, where as paid links for traffic purposes are fine. This has caused a lot of debates in the SEO industry on whether paid links are right or wrong vis-à-vis.

Don’t be a slave to Google or what other people tell you about SEO – there is no set pattern on doing SEO and there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ either.

The most successful SEOs I know of publicly question some of Google’s policies and ‘preaching’ when it comes to Search Marketing. That’s not to say that you should go against Google, but that you should keep an open mind and focus on what works and what is guaranteed to be successful in the long run.

Everything else, whether told to you by Google or the SEO gods or me, is irrelevant. Stay on top of the ball as far as developments in the SEO world are concerned; focus on what works, and what your experience tells you works.

Create A System

Having a ‘system’ to accomplish goals is a natural progression for anyone that has to do one type of project more than once. Web designers who put together 10-20 sites every year have a system, programmers working on large projects swear by their ‘system’ of doing things, and so on.

If you do not already, it is time to think of SEO in terms of developing an effective system of activities and processes that will help you bring in targeted traffic to your website from the search engines.

A system is only effective if it can help you achieve your targets each time you do a similar project.

And as I said earlier, makes sure that continue doing that which is most effective in the long run, not what is easy or cheap to do, or what saves time, or what the search engines tell you to do.

Do what works now, and what will work in the future.

Prioritize Your Work

Once you have a basic system to do your SEO activities, you will find it much easier to prioritize which task gets done first.

In SEO, as in real life, there are some key activities that take less time and effort but have a large impact on search engine rankings. Remember the 80-20 rule (the Pareto principle) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_
principle) ? It works quite well in SEO, thank you very much, and it certainly makes life easier for us SEOs.

The most important SEO tasks will take roughly 15-25% of your time, and will yield 70-85% of the benefits associated with search marketing. For example:

• Optimizing your blog’s Title tags takes less than 2 minutes, but it has a major impact on how your web
pages are ranked in SEs.
• Paying for (and submitting) a directory listing in Yahoo takes 5 minutes, but that link is more valuable
than submitting to 100 free directories that have been spammed to death.

Make it a habit to ask yourself the importance of any SEO task before you do it – it will help you save time as
well as refocus you on the more important things in SEO.

Rankings Are NOT Everything!

The hard truth about search engine marketing is that sheer traffic (achieved from page 1 or #1 rankings) does
little good to you if you have no way to use it.

If you have set specific goals for your website, you will also have a clear idea of what audience you are targeting and what exactly they are supposed to do when they arrive at your website.

This could be asking for signups, selling them a product or service, getting them to click on ads, getting RSS
subscriptions, etc.

And if your website is not doing this part of its job properly, those rankings and all that traffic will be wasted.

Bottom line – Search Engine Optimization is great when it works well, but you also need to know how to make best use of that traffic.

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Setting Goals - Part III

Posted by SEO Expert Team

You might read the above and think – that’s not SEO!

And you would be right. That’s not traditional SEO.

But in the last couple of years, SEO has radically changed as more and more people realize that it is just one part of the process in building websites that make you money. It is still a separate skill set from web designing or copywriting, but you need to know elements from both of those sectors in order to have a website that brings in search engine traffic AND converts them properly.

After all – what good is free traffic if you have no way to put that to work into making you money?

We will do a more detailed conversion analysis later on, but for now I want you to make a list of:

• What information / pages / functionality your site will provide to its users?
• How does each item in the above list work towards fulfilling your website’s primary and secondary goals?
• What steps do you want your readers to take on these pages?

Once you have all that, it is time to review your website and see where you stand now as opposed to where you should be. If you do not have a site (and are building one), skip to the next section that talks about incorporating this advice into new sites.

Existing Site Analysis

Evaluate your website using the following checklist:

• Does it focus on your audience’s core problem? If not, why not, and what can you do to fix this?
• Does it provide users will all the necessary information? If not, why not, and what can you do to fix this?
• Does each page tie in with your primary / secondary goals? If not, then why is it there? Can you remove it and place the information on a more relevant page?
• Does each internal page have one clear objective? The main page and category pages usually have to ‘share’ attention, but internal pages can focus on and should have one main objective only.

Put yourself in the shoes of a random user, who has just landed on an internal page of your website from a search engine query.

What will you want them to do?

This will depend on the context and purpose of your website, but if you can adopt this mindset for every page, you can have a laser-focused website that not only brings in traffic but converts it as well.

Building a New Site

It is easier to build a new site from scratch focusing on conversion and good on-site SEO than it is to optimize
and improve an already existing website.

On the other hand, existing websites already have a set of backlinks pointing to them, so the link building efforts are definitely easier (plus you already have some search engine visibility).

Incidentally, a site redesign is an excellent time to focus on SEO – you can treat the project as a new website and do SEO, content writing and conversions right from the start.

Success Objectives and Tracking Progress

The flip side of setting goals is that you also need to set success markers and then track their progress.

For example, for a recent site I setup, my success objectives were (for 1 year):

• To reach 5,000 hits / day. The niche I’m working in has room for lots more, but that’s my bare minimum target.
• To reach $1,000 per month. I am using a combination of affiliate programs, direct ad sales and AdSense here.
• To hit page #1 for my main keywords, and top 5 for all second and third tier keywords.
• To build a community (forum) of at least 300-500 active members.

These are very achievable goals, and definitely on the low end of what I would expect to achieve in terms of traffic and revenue if I worked on the website fulltime.

How will you measure your success? For some items – such as AdSense revenue or keyword rankings, your goals could differ drastically based on how competitive your target niche is and how much traffic your keywords get every day. A #1 ranked site for a popular term could easily garner 10,000 hits a day – but then the competition would be equally tough.

You will probably need to do some keyword research and competition analysis before you can have a complete picture of your success objectives, but for now simply focus on completing a picture of what it would mean to accomplish your primary goal.

Once you have set your objectives, monitor them monthly (for traffic and search ranking numbers I will show you a few tools that you can use). Keep working hard at your website and if you see that you’re not making month-to-month progress (i.e. your traffic / rankings go stagnant), it would be time to do a review and figure out what you are doing wrong.

Until next time! See you around ;-) ... D7Y3FH3ZHPU4

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Setting Goals - Part II

Posted by SEO Expert Team

If you want to be successful, it is far easier and simpler to find a specific type of audience, build your ‘ideal client’ image and then work your socks off in serving that client. Once you are dominating your niche of the market you can afford to spread out and broaden your focus, but till then, it is niche, niche, niche.

Brian (a freelance web developer) talks about his audience:

“I’m targeting serious entrepreneurs and small businesses that need an impressive and quality web presence that helps them achieve their online business goals. I want to target people who place a high value on quality and results.

However, I also know how hard it is for people to pay for quality web design, so I want to provide a low-cost way for people to get started and to teach them the same techniques I use to build websites for my clients.

I want to target web-savvy people with a basic understanding of how websites work. Age is no barrier to entrepreneurship, and thanks to the Internet I have a worldwide audience. However, I will be targeting an English-speaking audience because web design and getting clear requirements from the client is hard enough without getting tangled in language problems.”

In an effort to allow for different (and possibly overlapping) audiences, Brian is using his skills to provide website templates and web design tips on his website. These will in turn get his design skills more exposure so
they benefit him in several different ways.

You need to use your website goals to paint a detailed picture of your audience – web-savvy, English speaking and an understanding for web design. Unfortunately, we realize that Brian’s goals are detailed but not specific enough, and as a result he will have trouble competing in this already-tough niche.

So what does Brian do?

He rethinks his goals and his audience, and decides to narrow down his area of expertise to WordPress (a
popular blogging software) - http://wordpress.org/

That’s a smart move, because more and more people are moving towards WordPress and blogging, and as big companies start to embrace blogging as part of their marketing and branding strategy quality designers like
Brian will always be in demand.

Brian also decides to target local businesses first, so that he can build a local, community-based profile and use that as a launching pad for the future.

You don’t have to ‘go local’, but it’s a good idea to give more attention to your own community / pick a narrow niche to start in. Dominating them is easier, and it gives you the momentum to move up to bigger niches.

What Does Your Site Do?

• How does your website solve the core problem your target audience has?
• What information does it provide to its users?
• What are the steps you want your readers to take on each page, and how do they tie in with your primary
goal?

Keep reading ... our next post will be Setting Goals - Part III

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Understanding Search Engines - Part II

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Quick Review

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Think Long Term - Part II

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Setting Goals - Part III

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Setting Goals - Part II

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