The process of designing and improving the content of websites for better rankings is called "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO).

We have an extensive library of articles on search engine and internet marketing.

We also offer several online training classes that teach SEO.

The following is an excerpt from Teach Yourself Search Engine Strategies in 7 Days.

Search Engine Positioning Strategy

To be competitive on the Internet you must be in the top 30 of the top ranking search engines and directories. It has been estimated that up to 80 percent of all website traffic comes from the major search engines. To reach this goal you need to follow a process that can take time, effort, and careful planning.

As you work to improve your site’s rankings in the major search engines, keep your main strategy in mind, but if one process does not seem to work, always be prepared to make necessary changes.

The general strategies required by most major search engines include keywords, titles, descriptions and meta tags. Meta tags consist of HTML code that is created specifically to help search engines index your page. Meta tags are not seen by your visitors but are viewed by the search engine spiders or robots that visit your site.

There has been some debate as to whether or not Meta Tags should be used in HTML documents because they are ignored by some search engines. Meta tags may or may not be used, depending on the rules of each search engine.

Spiders & Directories

Search engine databases are compiled and maintained by server-based software applications called spiders (also know as robots). Spiders received their name because they "crawl" the Web to gather information to be archived in a search engine database.

Directories rely on submissions from users and website owners to build their database. A site is looked at by human editors. Yahoo! and Open Directory are examples of Directories. The distinction between engines and directories is that with engines you can usually submit separate pages and get them ranked, while directories look at the website as a whole.

Search Service
Type of Search Service

AltaVista search engine
Excite search engine
Google search engine
HotBot search engine
Lycos search engine
Northern Light search engine
WebCrawler search engine
Open Directory directory
LookSmart directory
Yahoo! directory

How Spiders Work

Theoretically, a spider can begin traveling the internet from a single web page and follows networks of links to grab information from your Web pages. The information it grabs is sorted according to specific algorithms or different criteria when determining their ranking system. One problem of search engine positioning is that search engines are always changing their algorithms. This means that each one will sort out the information that is needed for their database. One engine may consider a particular factor such as "popularity" to be important while another may look at "themes" to be the most important information. You have to keep a watch on your pages continually and make adjustments accordingly. What works today may not work tomorrow.

The spider will visit the web page and perform the following tasks:

1. confirm the existence of the web page; may index at that time or come back at a later date
2. index page content (using partial or full-text indexing)
3. identify all hyperlinks to other Web resources (this is an indication of popularity and is becoming increasingly important)
4. proceed to follow the hyperlinks, visiting the referenced Web pages and repeating steps 1-3 above

AltaVista will index old pages if there has been at least a 50-70 byte change. Always update and keep fresh content on your pages.

Most spiders "crawl" the Web on a schedule and when Internet network traffic is at its lowest, such as during the middle of the night.

Query Terms and Keywords

A search engine compares a query term that you submit to the millions of records in its database. The most fundamental elements of any query term are keywords. Keywords are simple terms that are derived directly from a user’s search topic that are used by a search engine to conduct a sorting operation on database records. The most simple query term consists of only one keyword. However, query terms can contain keyword phrases and even sentences. The figure below displays what a simple query term containing two keywords would look like in a keyword phrase.

Query terms can very simple or as complex as "miniature short-hair French poodle."

Selecting Keywords

Keywords are terms or short phrases that describe your company, product(s), or service(s). Targeting keywords are critical to the successful promotion of your website. If you choose the right keywords for your site, you are on your way to Web promotion success. Choosing the wrong keywords, however, could defeat your efforts.

Remember the following points regarding website keywords:

Most people search for word phrases comprised of two or three keywords versus single keywords because they do not want to receive too many irrelevant matches. Do not make the mistake of targeting very general keywords. Typically, these keywords will not make it into a search engine top 10 for your website.

If you pick a keyword phrase that produces 6,548,000 search possibilities, consider some major fine tuning of that phrase. Try to choose keyword/phrases that produce results of approximately 10,000 or fewer hits. Achieve a high ranking in this manner first, then move up to a phrase that produces more hits when you become more proficient at search engine placement.

Choosing the right keyword/phrases for your site doesn’t have to be rocket science. It just takes a little forethought.

How to Select Keywords

The following points are important—and sometimes critical—regarding your selection of search engine keywords. Each point is described in detail in the section following this list.

Start with specific keywords and not generic keywords.

Generic Keyword
Keyword Phrase
More Specific

apples
"New York apples"
"Granny Smith apples"

car dealership
"Ford dealership"
"Neptune Ford Dealership"

software
"software sales"
"Quicken software sales"


Use a Thesaurus

Web-based Thesaurus
URL Address

Phrase Finder
www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases
Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus
www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus
Roget's Internet Thesaurus
www.thesaurus.com

Think like your customers

Write out a short description of your business. Keep what you say focused. Determine your customers demographics (sex, age, income, education, employment, residence, region, hobbies, and recreation).

What do you do? Sell a product or service? Describe such items. Example: you sell accounting software, not just software.

What is your business’s overall objective? How is it unique?

Brainstorm at least 50 keywords and think of as many ways as possible to describe your business and its products. Use two or three word phrases instead of single words.

Include more specific brand names if you sell these products. Legally, you need to put the reserved symbol or trademark symbol after the names when you do mention them on your page.

Your name: Unless you are a well known company/organization, it is generally less important to emphasize your name as a keyword.

Do not pick too obscure a keyword phrase, or one that very few people would be searching for. You maybe in the top ten but no one will find you anyway.

Remember a lot of these words can be put in a keyword power combinations. Review your list and sort your keywords by descending order of importance. Do a search on the different search engines and search on these combinations of words. Try combining just two words, then try three-word phrases. These are called "commanding combinations". It will do two things for you: 1) provide combinations which will be searched by customers. 2) offer exclusive combinations which will return only a few listings but will target your prospects.

Use Quotes

Put "quotes" around your phrase. Many people will use multiple word phrases to find products and services. The results can change considerably. The results can change considerably. If you search for "Ford dealership" without quotes, you'll find 29,000+ results. With quotation marks, you'll find only 6,000+. This is because with most of the search engines, putting quotes around the term tells the engine that you are interested in that exact term, not in each individual words in the keyword/phrase. Without the quotes you are telling the search engine to look for each individual word as well as the phrase and this can return results much larger and less relevant. You may want to consider in placing your phrase in quotes somewhere in the body text.

Use Misspelled Keywords

Think of how many people misspell words on a daily (or hourly) basis, and capitalize on those errors. If some of your keywords or phrases are typically misspelled, include them also. If you include the misspelled versions, you may also capture the Web traffic of the bad spellers.

Use Regional Keywords

Are you offering regional services or products? If so, capitalize on this. Many search engine users fine-tune searches by using regional keyword phrases, such as "Maine recipes" or "New England recipes" versus simply using the keyword "recipes." If searching for information regarding the purchase of a Ford automobile, a user may query "Neptune Ford" instead of simply "Ford." More examples are shown in

Keyword / Keyword Phrase
Regional Keyword Phrase

"auto supply"
"Belmar auto supply"

"real estate"
"Spring Lake real estate"

"Ford dealership"
"Red Bank Ford dealership"

Take Advantage of Word Stemming

Some search engines use word stemming, a process in which the engine searches for root words that also include variations of that term. You should utilize this process by using longer forms of your keywords whenever possible.

For example, use "teacher" and "teaching" instead of "teach." Another suggestion is to simply add an "s" to each of your keywords.

When writing your text be sure to include all variations of the keyword for the search engines that do not recognize word stemming.

Case-sensitive keywords

Viewers usually search using all lowercase letters, if they are looking for "New Jersey," they'll type in "new jersey." Be sure that you put proper nouns in lowercase. AltaVista and some other search engines are case-sensitive or partially case sensitive, meaning that they will need keywords with their first letter in capital, "New Jersey" or even in all uppercase, "NEW JERSEY."

When using trademark terms, don't forget the generic name. There have been lawsuits involving words that are commonly used such as "Kleenex" -- the generic name would be "tissue."

Avoid Kill Terms

Kill terms (also called stop words) are very common words that are usually ignored by search engines, such as conjunctions and prepositions. You should avoid the use of kill terms in your keyword phrases.

a
an
and
at
by
for
in
it
of
that
the
to
too
Web
with

This is not a full list.

Search engines ignore kill terms (there is variance among search engines) as a strategy to save storage space and speed searches. Time is saved when the search engine excludes searching for certain small words (meaning it will not "stop" to find them).

Remember the following points regarding kill terms in your Web pages:

if your site contains kill terms in areas where a search engine spider looks for information to index, it will ignore the kill terms, possibly affecting how you are indexed.

if the prominence of a particular keyword in your title is crucial for a particular engine’s ranking scheme, having "the" as the first word in your title could damage your ranking.

if a stop word is part of your site name or title, put it in quotes or devise another name that does not include the stop word.

if you are not sure your word is a stop word, do a search, and if you come up with a statement such as "No document matches your query," you will know that word is a stop word. Each search engine will have their own list so check each one.


Exercise: Writing & Testing Keywords

Track everything you do in your efforts to boost your search engine rankings with a notebook or log file on your PC. Document everything as you proceed so you can determine what works and what does not. Fine-tune your steps and try again.

Your ranking within a search engine may suddenly move up or down; you should understand why. If your rank decreases after submitting a revision, you can analyze your actions to determine why the previous submission produced better results.


Choose Keywords According to Hit Results: Visit
http://inventory.goto.com/inventory/Search_Suggestion.jhtml Go to "Keywords" on top of the toolbar. You may research words for five different search engines. Put in the keyword "real estate" and see the different terms that people search on. This is a great tool to work with. Now put your keywords in and obtain a listing for a keyword/phrase, from the most popular query to the least popular. Some keywords may not be relevant, but it will help you to brainstorm. You will find other handy tools there also to use.

Another great place for looking up keywords: Word Tracker they have a database of over 40 million results that is updated every 2 hours. Enter a phrase that describes your business or service, and you'll see how many people are actually searching for that keyword.

A few more places to try: Keyword Wizard, at Jim Tools, http://www.keywordwizard.com/word.html, and Good Keywords, http://www.sofnik.com .

Describe your business in detail for your own benefit. If you do not have a business, fabricate one, or describe what you are trying to do with your website. Seeing this description in writing may help you discover aspects of your business that you might have otherwise overlooked or not included in your promotion strategy.

Brainstorm a listing of at least 50 keywords/phrases for your site, including misspelled keywords. Justify your reasons for using those keywords. Combine your keywords into phrases. Putting your keywords in order of importance may help you see possible keyword combinations. Review the list of things to keep in mind mentioned earlier in this Lesson.

Example of brainstorming -

real estate listings
Real Estate
Florida Real Estate
real estate sales
Century 21 Real Estate
Commercial Real Estate
florida real estate
land real estate
Real Estate Canada
real estate multiple listing
real estate listings
commercial real estate
real estate loans
mortgage loans
real estate agency
real estate service


Determine what are your top five keywords/phrases are?

Visit the AltaVista (http://altavista.com/) search engine or Google (http://google.com/) and search for your top keywords and keyword combinations. Look for power combos--those specific keyword combinations that return a limited set of websites when searched.

How many websites/Web pages did you find for your top five keywords?

Remember that you may not want to pick a keyword or keyword combination that has a large number of Web pages competing for the top ten positions. Instead, you may choose to pick keywords/combinations where you would have a fighting chance of succeeding to the top.


Wrap-up

When designing your site, ensure that you are on the right track and progressing properly. Keeping the following questions in mind will focus your efforts in the right direction:

1. Have you brainstormed a listing of 50 keywords/phrases for your site, based on all the information in the "How to Select Keywords"?

2. By doing a search on your top three or five keywords, were they too general and do they need to be put in power keyword combinations?

3. Did you try your keyword phrases with and without "quotes"? All in capital letters for "case-sensitive engines?"

4. Have you explored the many sources of information regarding search engines?

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