Search Engine Fast Start!

Search Engine Fast Start!
A concise, step by step guide to positioning your website with the new breed of search engines. Themes Referrals
Hubs & Authorities Reciprocal Links Themes
Link Popularity
Relevance Theme Networks
Excite Domain Names Traffic FAST/AllTheWeb Deep Content Altavista Keywords Off-The-Page Factors Site Structure
4th Edition January 5, 2004
Google
Inktomi
Canned Books
www.cannedbooks.com
By Dan Thies
Editor, Inside Out Marketing
Search Engine Fast Start:
A Step By Step Guide For Busy People

Fourth Edition, Published January 5, 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies. All rights reserved.
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start, 4th Edition, is Copyright 2004 by Daniel Thies. Some supplements may have been added since the original publication date, and are copyrighted as noted. No part of this work may be reproduced, reprinted, or electronically transmitted in any fashion without the author's permission. This does not in any way limit your rights to "fair use" of the material, including the right to print this book out for your own use, to make backup copies and store these copies on whatever electronic media you choose, or the right to quote limited portions of the work as part of an editorial review or other citation. Disclaimer: This document is intended for information purposes only. While the author has attempted to provide the most accurate information possible at the time of publication, some of the contents are a matter of opinion and/or speculation. Search engines do not publish the details of their inner workings, so this information is based on observation, experience, and reasoning. The author of this book shall not be held responsible for any loss or damages resulting from the use of this information.
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start:

Revised Fourth Edition, Published January 5, 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................ 6

Advice For Really, REALLY Busy People ....................................................................7 Setting The Stage ........................................................................................................7 Following The Steps ....................................................................................................8 Optional Extras ............................................................................................................8 Reiterating The Obvious ..............................................................................................9 I Want You To Succeed! ..............................................................................................9 Can You Believe Me? ................................................................................................10 About Website Promotion Central ..........................................................................10 About Inside Out Marketing.................................................................................10 About SEO Research Labs .................................................................................11 Our Business Model: Why We Offer Resale Rights To This Book .........................11
Chapter 2: How Search Engines Work..................................... 13

Why It Matters To You ...............................................................................................14 What A Spider Does ................................................................................................14 How They Find You....................................................................................................16 What Gets Indexed ....................................................................................................17 How Pages Are Ranked.............................................................................................18 Themes Explained .....................................................................................................18 How People Use Search Engines & Portals ..............................................................19 Takeaways what we've learned ..............................................................................20 Meet The Players: Where Traffic Comes From ..........................................................22 Where Searches Happen .......................................................................................22 Who Provides Search Results................................................................................22 Google Rules? ...........................................................................................................24 Recommended Reading ............................................................................................25 Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practices Guide .............................25
Chapter 3: Keyword Strategy (Step 1)...................................... 26

The Keyword Hierarchy..............................................................................................27 Major Keywords (single words & short phrases) ....................................................27 Keyword Phrases & Qualifiers................................................................................27 Localize! .................................................................................................................28 Ask For It By Name! ...............................................................................................28 Singular or Plural?..................................................................................................28 Stemming & Misspellings .......................................................................................28 Stop Words & Common Words ..............................................................................29 Researching Keywords ..............................................................................................30

ii
Obvious Keywords .................................................................................................30 Related Terms........................................................................................................30 Keyword Tools: Overture.com ................................................................................30 Keyword Tools: Google Adwords ...........................................................................31 Keyword Tools: Wordtracker ..................................................................................31 Keyword Tools: SEO Research Labs .....................................................................31 Prioritizing & Targeting Keywords ..........................................................................31 Assessing Your Keyword Strategy .........................................................................32 SEO Research Labs: Outsourced Keyword Research Reports .................................33
Chapter 4: Organizing Your Website (Step 2) ......................... 34

Don't Take This Too Far! ........................................................................................34 How Search Engines See Your Site ..........................................................................35 The Theme Pyramid ..................................................................................................35 Top Level: The Network (a.k.a. The Internet) ........................................................35 First Tier: Your Website (a.k.a. Homepage, Index Page, Domain).........................35 Second Tier: Directories ("Roadmap Pages") ........................................................36 Third Tier: Content ("Destination Pages")...............................................................37 Tier Four: Deep Content.........................................................................................37 Organizing Your Site Into Themes.............................................................................38 An Off The Shelf Theme Site ...............................................................................38 Redesigning Existing Sites .....................................................................................39 Developing Themed Content .....................................................................................39
Chapter 5: Optimizing Individual Web Pages (Step 3)........... 40

How To Use This Chapter..........................................................................................41 Network Level (The Internet)......................................................................................41 Tier 1: Domain Level (Your Home Page) ...................................................................41 Title, Keywords, & Description ...............................................................................41 Headings ................................................................................................................42 Site Map: Roadmaps & Destinations......................................................................42 Page Design & Layout............................................................................................42 Special Considerations: Product Sites (a.k.a. Mini-Sites).......................................43 Tier 2: Roadmap Pages .............................................................................................43 Directory Names.....................................................................................................43 Title, Keywords, & Description ...............................................................................43 Headings ................................................................................................................44 Layout & Other Factors ..........................................................................................44 Keyword Placement: Destinations & Deep Content...................................................44 Directory Names.....................................................................................................44 Title, Keywords, & Description ...............................................................................44 Headings (H1-H6) ..................................................................................................45

iii
Page Content .........................................................................................................45 Links: Stay On Theme............................................................................................45 Rules For Search Engine Friendly Design .................................................................46 Frames ...................................................................................................................46 Dynamic Pages ......................................................................................................46 Plug-Ins etc. ...........................................................................................................46 Javascript ...............................................................................................................47 Image Maps & Fancy Site Navigation Tools...........................................................47 HTML Validation.....................................................................................................47
Chapter 6: Linking and Off-The-Page Factors (Step 4).......... 48

Whats Happening Off The Page? .............................................................................49 Evaluating Outbound Links ........................................................................................49 Relevance ..............................................................................................................49 Context ...................................................................................................................50 Value ......................................................................................................................50 Reciprocation .........................................................................................................50 Targeting Inbound Links ............................................................................................50 Top Keywords ........................................................................................................50 Theme Search Engine Ranking .............................................................................50 Site Popularity ........................................................................................................51 Getting Out Of Links Programs ..............................................................................51 Recruiting Link Partners.............................................................................................51 Simple Link Swaps .................................................................................................51 Content Links .........................................................................................................52 Content Swaps.......................................................................................................52 Look For Synergy ...................................................................................................52 Inbound Links: Other Sources ...................................................................................53 Directories ..............................................................................................................53 Important Minor Directories ....................................................................................53 Unsolicited & One-Way Links.................................................................................54 Create Your Own Linking Code! .............................................................................54 Publishing Articles ..................................................................................................55 Affiliates & Customers ............................................................................................55 Domain Names & Links Pages...............................................................................55 Link Swapping For Mini-Sites: The Two-Domain Two-Step ...................................56 Google's Toolbar, PageRank, And Linking.............................................................56 Checking Traffic With Alexa ...................................................................................57 Outsourcing Your Links Campaign ............................................................................57 Conclusion Don't Ever Stop Working On Links! ......................................................57 SEO Research Labs: Link Targeting Reports ............................................................58 Recommended Reading: The Free "Linking Matters" Report ....................................59

iv
Chapter 7: Getting Listed........................................................... 60

Should You Submit? ..................................................................................................61 Automated vs. Hand Submission ...........................................................................61 Paid inclusion programs.............................................................................................62 One Good Use For Paid Inclusion..........................................................................62 Major Directories........................................................................................................62 General Guidelines.................................................................................................62 Yahoo! ....................................................................................................................63 Open Directory .......................................................................................................63 Looksmart...............................................................................................................65 Minor Search Engines Who Cares? ....................................................................65 Minor Directories Of Major Importance! ..................................................................65 FFA Pages Don't Do It! ...........................................................................................66 Finding Niche Directories ...........................................................................................67
Chapter 8: Controlling Search Engine Spiders....................... 68

Why You Might Need Control ....................................................................................69 Visitor Content vs. Spider Food..............................................................................69 Rogue Spiders & Spambots ...................................................................................69 Robots.txt Tutorial......................................................................................................69 Robots.txt Format...................................................................................................69 Robots.txt User Agent Reference...........................................................................71
Chapter 9: What Now?................................................................ 72

Pay-Per-Click Strategy...............................................................................................73 Traffic Counters, Site Statistics & Other Measuring Sticks ........................................73 Statistics Services ..................................................................................................74 Web Log Analysis...................................................................................................74 Measuring Rank .....................................................................................................75 Checking Links.......................................................................................................75 The Google Toolbar................................................................................................75 Dirty Tricks & Gotchas ...............................................................................................76 Warning About Taking Shortcuts............................................................................76 Links Programs ......................................................................................................76 Top SEO Expert Caught Cheating Direct Hit..........................................................76 Page Cloaking (a.k.a. Stealth, IP Delivery, etc.).....................................................77 Revising Your Strategy ..............................................................................................77 Change Never Stops - Don't Panic! ...........................................................................78
Chapter 10. Advanced Topics & Updates................................ 79

The New Teoma 2.0: Best Search Ever?...................................................................80

Getting Your Site Listed By Teoma ........................................................................81 What Makes Teoma Different: Did Anyone Say "Themes?"...................................81 Teoma Ranking Tips..................................................................................................83 Keyword Research For Teoma:..............................................................................83 Off The Page Factors, Or "Establishing Authority" .................................................83 At Teoma, It's About Community............................................................................84 Managing Multiple Domain Names ............................................................................84 Scenario One: Multiple Versions ............................................................................84 Scenario Two: Merger & Acquisition ......................................................................85 Scenario Three: Multiple Websites.........................................................................85 Scenario Four: Spam, Spam, Spam .......................................................................86 What's Your Scenario?...........................................................................................86 Using Adwords For Keyword Research .....................................................................87 Keyword Research Challenges ..............................................................................87 What Adwords Can Tell You About Keywords .......................................................87 Why Adwords Provides The Most Accurate Data...................................................87 Setting Up Your Adwords Account .........................................................................87 Bringing Keyword Strategy Into Focus With Adwords ............................................88 Setting Your Bids, Budget, and Distribution Options ..............................................88 Interpreting The Results .........................................................................................89 Is A Yahoo! Listing Worth The Cost? .........................................................................89 Argument #1: Yahoo! Listings Mean Link Popularity..............................................90 Argument #2: Listed Sites Look Better In The Search Results...............................90 So, Is A Yahoo! Listing Worth It?............................................................................90 How Can You Profit From The Changes At Yahoo!? .............................................90 Finding Quality Link Partners Through Google.......................................................91 Don't Complain, Act! ...............................................................................................91 Useful Online Resources ...........................................................................................91 Discussion Forums & Newsletters..........................................................................91 Technical Information .............................................................................................92
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies
Chapter 1: Introduction
The most important question anyone has asked me about this book is why write another search engine book? After all, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of books on this subject. Surely, in a market as crowded as that, someone must have already written a definitive reference to search engine positioning. Unfortunately, thats just not the case not that a definitive reference would tell you how to get good rankings. Ive got one book in my library, written by a very well informed expert, thats over 550 pages long. In all of those pages, not once does the writer provide a simple step-bystep formula for increasing a sites search engine traffic. As an introduction to the field, its a nice guide (although at this point, it's a bit dated) but for those of you who just want to see some results, its a long way from what you need. This book is different. Im not going to spend a lot of time on concepts and theory here well learn that as we go. The central focus of this work is how to get the job done, and get it done quickly. Ive accomplished that by breaking the search engine positioning process down into a four-step formula. I know that some of you are dying to skip ahead, so heres my secret formula in a nutshell. Select the right keywords, build a content rich website around them, optimize the individual pages, and work to improve off-the-page factors like link popularity. Four steps, and youre ready. In most cases, its not even necessary to submit your site to search engines. How quickly can you start seeing results? Realistically, you can expect to wait a month or two after you've put this system into practice before you'll start seeing significant traffic. This system is designed to let you optimize your site quickly, so that you'll almost certainly get some early benefits, but you will need to keep working on your site's incoming links to reap the full benefits. The more content you have on your site, the more traffic you'll receive this also makes your site a more attractive destination for visitors. The more links you have from other websites, the more traffic you will receive not only from search engines, but from the links themselves. Search engines are just one part of a good website marketing strategy. An ongoing links campaign is essential optimizing is not enough. Ready? Let's get started!
Advice For Really, REALLY Busy People

This book was written with you in mind. Instead of burying you with 500 pages of concepts and technical details, Ive condensed it all into simple step-by-step instructions. If you can, I encourage you to read through the entire book, then start again and follow each of the steps in turn. With a focused effort, you should be able to get through at least the first steps within about 10-20 hours work. If youre really impatient, and cant even take the time to read this whole book, there are a couple things you really should do. First of all, read through Chapter 2 its very short, and it contains a lot of important information that you really shouldnt miss. There are a lot of little gotchas in the search engine positioning game, and Chapter 2 will help you avoid falling into these traps. Chapter 3 (Keyword Selection) is important, even if you can instantly name the top 5-10 keywords/phrases that you want your site to be known for. Keyword selection is critical to your success with theme-based search engines. Knowing your top keywords and understanding how theyre related can make the difference between getting a big increase in search engine referrals or just a little trickle of hits. After youve read Chapter 3, if you just dont have enough time for the rest, go ahead and skip to Chapter 5. In Chapter 5, youll learn about a very quick method of optimizing the pages on your site to rank better. If you can at least optimize your home page, and the next few pages that are most critical in terms of your keywords, youll at least be better positioned than you were before. If you can afford to spend a little more time, read Chapter 4, and fix your sites navigation to link everything together better, before you optimize the individual pages. This will help the search engines find your pages, and when your site is properly optimized, it will also help the rankings of every page. Search engines will send more traffic to a well organized, content rich site.
Setting The Stage

The first two chapters of this book are intended to set the stage for your success with search engines. While Ive tried, as much as possible, to keep irrelevant concepts and technical explanations out of this work, it would not be complete without a few of these things. In the interest of saving you time, Ive loaded almost all of this into the first 3 chapters. Chapter 1, which youre reading now, explains how this book is put together, and how to use it. Its a short chapter, and well worth the short time it will take you to read it. Skip the final section on planning if you dont think you need it. Chapter 2, How Search Engines Work, provides a little bit more background information on search engines. If you skip this chapter, a lot of things in this book will not make sense to you, unless you already know quite a bit about the subject. Even if
you think you know it all, Id recommend that you at least skim this chapter to make sure youre not missing anything important.
Following The Steps

The rest of the book will take you all the way through the process of improving your search engine results. This four-step process proceeds in a logical sequence, so if you have the time, its best to go through them in the order that they are presented. When youve finished, you should begin to see a dramatic increase in your sites search engine traffic within a few weeks. Some search engines can take a couple of months to index your site, update their database, and start showing traffic. The second section (Chapters 3 through 5) takes you through the entire process of preparing your site. In Chapter 3, youll develop your keyword strategy. Chapter 4 teaches you how to organize your site work with the new theme based search engines. Finally, Ill show you a simple and effective way to optimize your sites individual pages in Chapter 5. The next section covers the activities that take place after youve done the heavy lifting of optimizing your site for search engines. Chapter 6 discusses off-the-page factors that are important to your sites success. Ill explain how to handle your submissions to the major search engines and directories in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 explains how to use a robots.txt file to control what search engines see on your site. Chapter 9, What Now? shows you some of the other options you have to improve your search engine referrals, increase traffic and better manage your site. From pay-perclick search engines (such as Overture.com), to software packages like WebPosition Gold, I hope youll find this information helpful. Chapter 10 is simply titled "Extras." It contains short lessons that are "a little too heavy" for the main book, but which will help to round out your knowledge of the search engine game. As I send out updates, you can add them to Chapter 10. This way, you won't have to worry about any major changes until the 4th edition, which will be released in June 2003.
Optional Extras
Some chapters contain optional material that you can delve into at any time. While these little bits arent strictly necessary if youre in a hurry to get started, each of them contains valuable information that may help you boost your search engine rankings and traffic even further. Because these optional extras tend to take a little more time to execute, and often cost a bit of money, you may want to go through the four-step positioning process first, then consider doing a little bit more after youve gotten your site launched.
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies If your site generates revenue based on the number of visitors, for example by participating in affiliate programs, the extra traffic you generate by using the four-step process might even pay for some of these extras.
Reiterating The Obvious

It might be obvious to some readers, but let me say this for the benefit of everyone else: youre never really done promoting your website. Thats doubly true for search engine positioning. Even if your website doesnt change, you need to continually monitor your search engine rankings and traffic, and be prepared to take action if the results start to drop off. The best way to handle your promotion effort is to dedicate a little time each week to improving your sites link popularity, and periodically look over your entire website to make sure it still fits your goals. If you do begin to notice a decline in your rankings, or search engine traffic, dont wait too long to address the problem. Because even your best efforts can take several weeks to have any effect on your results, theres already a built-in delay. Dont compound the problem by ignoring it. So, what can you do if your results begin to drop? Plenty! For example, you can look at your keyword selection, and possibly expand it or change your focus to more popular keywords and search phrases. Each step in the search engine positioning process can be revisited, with an eye toward improving your results. Some keywords and phrases are highly competitive, with a lot of your competitors using dirty tricks and throwing hundreds of doorway pages up in an effort to fool the search engines. In this environment, theres only so much you can do against a heavily-funded competitor. Be realistic about the results you can achieve. It's relatively easy to achieve top ten rankings on several search engines for a given 3-word search phrase, but very difficult (and sometimes practically impossible) to get and keep such a position for a single word, or for popular two-word phrases like real estate or clip art." If you go after what you can get now, and keep working the system, you may find that you can even conquer some of these highly competitive terms.
I Want You To Succeed!

I sincerely believe that I'm giving you all the ammunition you need to be successful, if you really apply what you learn. I only have one favor to ask of you: when you start to see results, when your site is landing in the top ten search results, let us know with an email to results@cannedbooks.com.
10
Can You Believe Me?

You don't have to read this section. If you're curious about who's behind this book, and why I think I can help you, read on. There are a lot of people who claim to be experts. I don't claim to know everything about search engines, but I do know what's worked for me. I've done this with more than one site, and I'm going to keep on doing it as long as it works. There are undoubtedly other ways to accomplish the same thing. One thing that's important to me, and I hope that it will become important to you, is that the pages I position to rank well should be satisfactory results for the search engine user. I feel badly if my pages outrank more deserving ones. About Website Promotion Central My first commercial website was called "Website Promotion Central." I first put it online in 1999, at my "email domain" www.cannedhelp.com, registering a new domain name (www.websitepromotioncentral.com) a year later when ICANN started allowing longer domain names. It was a collection of articles and tutorials on the right (and wrong) way to promote a website. Well, at least as I saw it back then. Website Promotion Central was a great success for me. For most of the time that I owned it, it was ranked in the top ten on multiple search engines. It was even ranked in the top ten on the Google search engine for a time, until I managed to get it banned from Google with one too many experiments. Even without Google, it did very well, and within a couple years it had become one of the most popular website promotion resources on the Internet, according to the "popularity search engine" DirectHit, which eventually ranked it at #2. DirectHit's not around any more, but Website Promotion Central still is. I sold Website Promotion Central in 2002, because I just didn't have the time to maintain it any more. Our visitors deserved better, and the new owner (Greg White) has put a lot of effort into creating new content and new tools. You can check out the new Website Promotion Central in the same place (www.websitepromotioncentral.com). I learned a lot from running Website Promotion Central. I made more mistakes in two years, than most of my readers will ever make with their own websites. About Inside Out Marketing Many readers have found this book after reading one of my articles on another website, or in an email newsletter. I don't publish a lot of articles (I may send out a dozen a year), but when they do go out, they tend to be in demand. When I sold Website Promotion Central, I didn't have a place for website and newsletter editors to find my articles.
11
One of the editors at WebProNews asked me to put some of my articles online, so they could go grab one if they needed something to publish on short notice. Inside Out Marketing started out as just another place to put my own articles online, but it's also been a place where I can put the system in this book into practice. Inside Out Marketing (www.insideoutmarketing.com) went online in late 2002, using a great "content management system" called Ionpanel. This software lets me put a new article online in a hurry, without uploading any files. This solved the biggest problem I'd had with Website Promotion Central, where I may have had time to write, but keeping things organized became impossible as the site grew. So far, Inside Out Marketing has done very well with Google. Although I haven't made any major efforts to build links yet, the content has attracted a lot of links by itself. As I write this (September 2003), we have top ten listings for a lot of search terms, all directly related to the content we've built up. Just to give you an example of how well you can do with a simple system and good content, I posted an article on Google's "Froogle" shopping search engine in early January 2003. For a good solid two weeks, that article was the #1 result on Google for searches about "froogle," even ahead of www.froogle.com. At the moment, it's listed at #4, which makes me feel a lot better than the #1 listing did. It's a nice article, but it certainly isn't more relevant than the Froogle website itself. About SEO Research Labs I stopped taking on new clients for my consulting business before I published the first edition of this book. It took over a year to transition the last client to another consultant. Once that was done, I started work on a new business endeavor, to support my readers. After getting a lot of feedback from readers, I found that there were two things they still found very challenging. Keyword research was one big challenge, and the other was link building. In response to this demand, we now offer support services through SEO Research Labs (www.seoresearchlabs.com). You'll learn more about these services, and how we perform them, in Chapters 3 and 6. Our Business Model: Why We Offer Resale Rights To This Book There's a lot of bad advice out there. Some of it can get your website into hot water with the search engines. The best way I can imagine to fight back is to get this book distributed as widely as possible. The best way to get this book distributed is to let people make a profit by distributing it.
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies The downside of offering reprint rights is losing contact with the readers my major concern is how to get updates distributed. To solve this problem, those who purchase reprint right licenses are also invited to join our affiliate program for SEO Research Labs. Resellers will be able to add their affiliate links to each update, so there is an incentive for them to keep distributing the periodic updates to their customers.
12
I'll probably send out 3-4 updates a year, and if you are concerned that you aren't receiving them, please send me an email at updates@cannedbooks.com, let me know where you purchased your copy, and when you last received an update. If you've missed any updates, I'll send them to you, and try to get in touch with the distributor to make sure they've got your contact information.
13
Chapter 2: How Search Engines Work

Its impossible to write a book on search engine positioning without a chapter on the search engines themselves. What I hope to provide for you in this chapter is a slightly different slant on the subject. The actual technical details are much less important than youve been led to believe what matters most is the implications for your strategy. Therefore, instead of boring you with a set of charts describing which search engines have which features, Ill explain whats generally true for all search engines, as well as what significant differences youll encounter. Throughout, youll be given concrete steps to take that minimize or eliminate the need to worry about specific search engines. In the long run, market pressures ensure that search engines will converge toward each other anyway. While there are still significant differences between them in some areas, the methods youll learn in this book will help you stay on the right side of those differences. The "fast start" system is based on the current state of the art, but we haven't ignored the many changes that are already in the wind. The same strategies will continue to apply, regardless of any short-term changes in the industry. At the time of this writing (September 2003), Google is in a very dominant position in the search industry. With AOL and Yahoo delivering Google results, and the Google search engine itself also a popular portal, 3/4 of all searches on a given day probably originate on a portal utilizing Google's results. This is great news if you follow my system, because Google loves content-rich sites with clear structure, which is exactly what I will teach you to build. If Google goes away tomorrow (highly unlikely!), that wouldn't really force us to change our strategy.
14
Why It Matters To You

Theres a lot of very bad advice out there on search engine positioning. A lot of this bad advice is for sale, and this market has created a lot of self-reinforcing myths about the subject. Many of these myths are really just self-serving propaganda created by various players in the search engine positioning industry, and repeated by well-meaning writers in e-business publications and other media outlets. Think about this for a moment. Where does conventional wisdom come from? Well, it comes from various media outlets, such as television, radio, print, and the Internet itself. But where does a writer from a business magazine find out about any industry? From the experts in the industry itself. Reporters dont have a lot of time to do research, so a lot of what you see in print is just repackaged press release material and the industry line. In reality, following conventional wisdom can do you a lot of harm. The best example of this is the often-cited fact that you need to constantly resubmit your site to search engines. Once upon a time, this may have been true, or at least relatively harmless. Today the truth is that submitting your site to search engines can actually damage your ranking if its done to excess. In the process of becoming search engine literate, youll learn that a lot of the things youve been told are just plain wrong. In this book youll also discover that this whole subject is much less intricate and mysterious than many experts want you to believe. There are three kinds of experts those who have a vested interest (industry players), those who are being led around by the nose (writers and reporters), and those of us who have done our homework to uncover the truth (thats you and me). My intent here is to share the knowledge I have, and let you make your own informed decisions. Every chapter in this book was written with that goal in mind. Why should you care about how search engines work? By investing the time it takes to read this chapter, youll be better prepared to understand the rationale behind everything we do throughout the rest of the book.
What A Spider Does

The first thing that you need to understand is what a search engine spider is, and how it works. A "spider" (also known as a "robot" or "crawler") is a software program that search engines use to find whats out there on the ever-changing web. There are a lot of different types of search engine spiders, but they all contribute to the overall goal of keeping their search engines index as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Not all spiders are operated by search engines, and some of these are a real nuisance youll learn more about how to control them in Chapter 8. The first type of spider is one that actually crawls the web looking for websites and pages. This program starts at a website, loads the pages, and follows the hyperlinks on each page. In this way, the theory goes, everything on the web will eventually be found,
15
as the spider crawls from one website to another. Search engines run anywhere from dozens to hundreds of copies of their web-crawling spider programs simultaneously, on multiple servers. When a "crawler" visits your home page, it loads the pages contents into a database. With some spider programs, thats all they do load the home page, so that another spider can actually index it. Once your site has been found, the text of your page is loaded into the search engines index, which is a massive database of web pages. The last time I checked, both Google and FAST claimed to have over 2 *billion* pages indexed. Google has over 3 billion documents in its database. Some search engines dont do any more than load the home page, but this is becoming more rare. A search engine that only indexes your home page, or a few pages linked from it, is doing whats known as a shallow crawl. Most search engines nowadays do a deep crawl, which means that they follow the hyperlinks on your home page, loading the pages they find, successively getting deeper into your site. Some of them have a limit on the number of pages theyll index from a given site, others try to index everything. There are other types of spiders as well. 404 spotters are used by search engines to help avoid referring searchers to pages that no longer exist online. These spiders go through the search engines index page by page (or site by site), trying to load each page. If the page cant be found, the web server returns a 404 error which indicates that the page or site isnt currently available online. When the spider (some of them will check later to verify that a page really is offline) doesn't find a page, its deleted from the index. This is why its important to use a good web hosting provider. If your server is offline at the wrong time, your site may be dropped from a search engines index, and it can take several weeks before its indexed again. Another term you may hear is spider food. This is shorthand for anything thats placed on a web page (mostly hyperlinks) that is intended to attract a spiders attention. Sometimes, these are invisible links that a web surfer would not find, and are intended to direct the spider to keyword-rich doorway or hallway pages specifically designed to fool the search engines. I dont use these kind of tricks, but you should be aware of them. I'll explain throughout this book why you should avoid using dirty tricks to fool the search engines. The first thing a spider is supposed to do when it visits your site is look for a file called robots.txt. This file contains instructions for the spider on which parts of the web site to index, and which to ignore. The only way to control what a search engine spider sees on your site is by using a robots.txt file. Chapter 8 provides detailed instructions on how to control spiders, and why youd want to do this.
16
All spiders are supposed to follow certain rules, and the major search engines do follow these rules for the most part. One rule is that spiders should load only one page a minute this rule came about when early spiders visited early web servers and tried to load entire web sites all at once. The result of this was that access for the sites real visitors often slowed to a crawl. Since the web was much smaller then, a spider might visit your site several times a day! With modern, high-speed web servers, and spiders only visiting infrequently, this rule doesnt make as much sense as it once did, but its still followed.
How They Find You

The most common way that search engine spiders find a website is by following hyperlinks from other sites. In search engine terminology, these are known as found pages. Many search engines will rank a page or site higher if they found it while crawling the web. This is explained, and explored, much further in later chapters. Most search engines also have a submit URL form, where you can request that they add your web site to their index. Typically, you just give the primary URL for your site (like http://www.cannedbooks.com), and this address is added to their list of links to crawl. There are services (some paid, some free) that let you submit your site automatically. This is not really a good deal, even if its free. There are fewer than a dozen search engines that matter, and really less than half a dozen places where youd want your site submitted. If a service automatically resubmits your site, you may even be paying them to lower your search engine rankings. Some search engines give higher rankings to pages that they find while crawling the web, so it's not always a good idea to submit to them. The same applies to software that submits your site to thousands of search engines. As Ive just stated, only a few search engines actually matter. The thousands are actually free-for-all (FFA) links pages. FFA pages wont send you any traffic, but you will receive a lot of SPAM (junk email) from them after you submit to them. Some search engines, in fact, may penalize a site thats listed on a lot of FFA pages. If all of this sounds like Im recommending you let the search engines find you, rather than submitting your site, I am. I haven't submitted anything to the search engines in almost two years, and it rarely takes more than about 3 weeks for them to find and crawl my new sites. Read Chapter 6, and focus on getting links set up this will not only improve your rankings, it will ensure that the search engines can find you on their own. Many search engines offer a paid inclusion program. Although you get no special advantage from using it, in terms of your sites ranking, it does ensure that your site is always in their index, and up to date. More on this in Chapter 7. You'll definitely want to consider using paid inclusion if your budget permits and the search engine in question is delivering significant traffic to your site.
17
What Gets Indexed

When a search engine indexes the pages on your site, they dont actually store the entire page. What they do instead is to store information about the textual content of your pages. Images, scripts, and rich media may also be indexed and stored, but these are only found through specialized searches. People use words to search, so search engines mainly care about the words that are on your web page. In addition to the text of your site, some search engines also index the content of your META tags. The description META tag is sometimes used to display a description of your page when a web surfer sees the results of a search. Some of them also read the keywords META tag, although its pretty rare these days that a search engine will actually care what this tag contains. Along with the textual content, search engines store information about the hyperlinks on each page. This helps the search engine to determine what the page is about, because the text in hyperlinks often reveals something about the subject matter of the page. It also enables them to determine the link popularity and relevance of the pages each site links to. This is the main way that search engines find out about new websites and pages. There are a lot of differences between search engines in terms of what actually counts as text content. Some search engines will index the content of the ALT property in <IMG> (image) tags on the page, which is often erroneously referred to as an ALT tag. Others only index such content if the image is also a hyperlink. Other odds and ends, such as file names, are occasionally indexed as well. All search engines find it challenging to index dynamic pages, such as those created by form input, or by other means. A few of them make an effort to do so, but its not realistic to expect a dynamic page, which is created on the fly by the web server, to be properly indexed by every search engine. There are some things that you can do to make your dynamic content more "search engine friendly." There's more on this in Chapter 5. Anything that the spider cant find will not be indexed. If your site uses frames, some spiders will be unable to read the content of the site, unless you provide a no frames version. Fancy Javascript navigation menus may work fine for your visitors, but unless you provide some plain old hyperlinks somewhere (a site map page is essential), your sites internal pages may remain invisible to some search engines. Few search engines maintain a live index. In fact, its a dirty little secret that some of them only update every couple months. Even if a search engine finds your site right away, it may be several weeks before anyone using the search engine can find you. Typically, it doesnt take more than 2-3 weeks for the spider to reach you, the delay is caused by the time it takes for the database to get updated. Unfortunately, the only way around this is paid inclusion. Google doesn't have a paid inclusion program, but they also do a very good job of keeping their index up to date.
18
How Pages Are Ranked

Every search engine has its own algorithm, or process, for determining where your pages rank for a particular search term. There are common elements to many of them, but they all apply their rules a little differently. Its probably not possible to create a single web page that satisfies every traditional search engine completely, but the system we use in this book has proven to be effective across all of the major search engines. In some search engines, the most critical factors in determining your pages rank are keyword density and the position of keywords on the page. If your page is about hamster food, the density is the number of times that the phrase appears on the page, as a percentage of the text on the page. Keyword position is where the phrase appears. If the phrase appears in headings, page title, and description, a search engine will see this as more relevant than a page which only has the words hamster food appearing once in the middle of the page. In addition to keyword density and position, link popularity and other off the page factors contribute significantly to your pages ranking. This is because good web sites usually have other sites linking to them. Since there will usually be a good number of pages that have just the right mix of keyword density and position, link popularity makes a good tie-breaker for search engines to use when ranking pages. Closely related to link popularity is link relevance and weighting. This means that a link to your "hamster food" page from a page that actually contains those words is more relevant than a link from an unrelated page. For Google, the text used in the link itself is most important. A listing on popular sites like Yahoo! or the Open Directory is given greater weight than a link from Bobs Garden Tool Emporium. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, most of the search engines now use themes to categorize web sites, whether they intend to or not. This is definitely the next big wave in search engine technology, and it wouldnt be surprising to see all the search engines transition to a theme-based system in the near future.
Themes Explained
There has been, and continues to be, a lot of misunderstanding of themes. Some folks have contended that search engines are examining your entire website and determining a few search terms that define its content. Search engines, today, still index and rank individual web pages, not websites. However, because search engines consider the context and content of the links that point to each page, a "theme effect" arises from a well organized website. Well delve more deeply into themes in Chapter 4, but for now let me summarize. Theme engines put a great deal of stock in the linking relationships between web pages. The concept of hubs and authorities is found throughout the academic literature on the subject of themes and searching. Essentially, a hub is a page that links
19
to a lot of other sites on a particular theme, and an authority is a page to which a lot of related sites link. The concept is similar to the use of citations in scholarly and scientific research the more people who quote you, the smarter and more authoritative you must be. Likewise, if you cite a lot of noted authorities, its assumed that youve done your homework. Because web searchers are often looking for a mix of hubs and authorities, theme based search engines tend to deliver both types in their results. Like it or not, themes are the next generation in search engine technology. Although not all search engines use themes now, its safe to assume that all of them will have to consider it very soon. Between Altavista, Fast, Google and Inktomi, its hard to find a search engine that isnt somewhat dependent on themes. Such portals as Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Hotbot, and even ICQ all get at least part of their search results from theme based search engines. The newest search engines, Teoma and Wisenut, partially base the rankings of a page on the entire content of the pages that link to them, and even attempt to consider related concepts and search terms. While Google doesn't appear to have gone beyond considering the text contained in hyperlinks, they have at least one patent on file (US Patent #6,526,440) that would take them in the same direction as Teoma and Wisenut. By designing your site around themes, you are not only doing the right thing for the current generation of search engines, you are, in a sense, "future-proofing" your website to prepare for the next wave. Keep in mind, a few years ago, Google was a research project today they control more than half of all searches. On the positive side, the widespread use of themes will create a fantastic opportunity for you, since many of your competitors will not have the knowledge or resources to adapt. Although modifying a site to create consistent themes can be laborious, the effort definitely pays off. Sometimes, all it takes is a change in the navigation scheme for the site that was definitely the case for my Website Promotion Central site.
How People Use Search Engines & Portals

One of the most often overlooked factors in search engine positioning is what the people using the search engines are trying to accomplish, and how they go about it. Its an oversimplification to say that people get online to find information, but its a useful starting point. When a web surfer visits a search engine to find information, they type a keyword or phrase in, and wait for the results to be displayed. The first rule of keyword searches is that there are 1000 ways to say real estate and 50 ways to spell it. What this means to you is that even if your website is about hamster food, people will not always use that exact phrase when theyre looking for what you offer. They misspell words, add words, put them in seemingly random order, etc.
20
Typically, there are two types of searching people do from a search engine. Drill-down searches are done by someone trying to research a subject. In this type of search, the surfer usually finds a hub or authority on a particular topic, and doesnt return to the search engine for quite a while. More often than not, this is the way I search I use a search engine to find a few authoritative sites, then follow the links from those sites. The most popular search terms (for example, "Pokemon") are usually searched in this manner. If your site isnt one of the top authorities or hubs, youd better try to get them to link to you. The second type of search is what I call a targeted search. In this case, the surfer is looking for a specific site, person, or product. Its amazing how many people get onto a search engine like Altavista, only to type in Hotmail and click away to the Hotmail site. Its almost as if they forgot the address. In many cases, though, the searcher is trying to find the official website for a particular product or company, and doesnt know the URL. Once presented with a listing of search results, how do people decide which site to visit? Theyll scan the listing looking for the first result that appears to meet their need, by reading the title and description. Page titles like UNTITLED or Home Page are less likely to attract attention than Wide World of Hamsters. Likewise, a page without a concise, attractive description is less likely to be visited. Searchers working on a drill-down search will usually gravitate toward those listings that offer a wealth of information and links. One of my websites saw more than a 40% increase in search engine click-thrus after I added the words links to top website promotion resources to the description. Searchers often want to get away from the search engine, and onto an authoritative website, so give them what they want. If you are operating a web store, youll probably be more interested in targeted searches. If youre selling products that are available elsewhere, you can get a lot more attention and traffic by providing such valuable resources as reviews, independent testing, and side-by-side or feature comparisons. I know of one affiliate of a software company who nearly outsells the parent companys website, by offering additional documentation on the product which isnt available from the company itself.
Takeaways what we've learned

Understanding key concepts in the search engine world was our primary goal in this chapter, and I hope weve accomplished at least that much. The information Ive introduced to you will come into play throughout this book, as we work through the stepby-step process of creating a search engine strategy for your website. Although this fact is not emphasized to a significant degree here, a big part of the puzzle is off the page and not under your direct control. Although we can tune up your web pages to better fit what search engines like, your rankings depend on whats happening out there on the web at large. In fact, the quality of the inbound links to your website may, in many cases, be more influential with the search engines than the content of your website itself.
21
Weve spent a little time inside the web surfers mind, and I hope you wont forget about that. Depending on the nature and character of your website, understanding the anonymous person on the other side of the search engine could make all the difference in the world. Its not enough to have your site ranked well, if nobody clicks on the link you have a tremendous opportunity to increase traffic without even changing the content of your site. Finally, I hope Ive gotten you to start thinking strategically about search engines, and helped you understand a little bit about why they exist, what they do, and who they serve. In the highly competitive world of web portals and search engines, traffic equals revenue. Whereas a small content site that gets a few hundred visitors a day might provide a living for one or two people, a portal (like Yahoo!) that gets millions of visits a day might employ thousands. When someone comes up with a clever trick to fool a search engine into delivering less relevant results, that search engine loses customers, and people can lose their jobs. Id hate to be caught using such a trick when that search engine discovers it. With their very survival at stake in the current market conditions, search engines are very active, and very aggressive, about maintaining the integrity of their product. Search engines dont care about you, they dont care about your website, but they do care about their customers. If I get what Im looking for when I use a search engine, Ill use it again. Search engines are trying to deliver the most relevant results possible for every search. When you understand this, youll have a leg up on everyone whos trying to fool the search engines. By working with the search engines, instead of against them, youll win in the end.
22
Meet The Players: Where Traffic Comes From

Most of the good information on search engine traffic comes from Nielsen/Netratings, StatMarket, comScore, and a few other media sources. There is no single authoritative source of data that tells us which search engines are the most popular, which of the multiple results they display actually gets clicked on, etc. As a result, I've had to do a little "detective work" to come up with my best guesses here. My first educated guess is that there are about 350 million searches by users in the United States, on an average day. Much of the data below is based on this estimate. Where Searches Happen Out of those 350 million searches, here's my best estimate of where those searches are performed today. Google.com (for searches on Google.com only), 32% AOL + Netscape (both owned by AOL), 28% MSN search (owned by Microsoft's MSN), 14% Yahoo (web searches on Yahoo.com), 12% Ask Jeeves + Teoma (both owned by Ask.com), 4% Various "Metasearch" Engines, 4% Infospace (Dogpile, Excite), 2% Altavista, 2% Overture (direct searches at Overture.com), 1% Earthlink (Internet Service Provider), <1% Looksmart (searches at Looksmart.com), <1% Lycos, <1% Hotbot, <1% Who Provides Search Results The major players in the search industry are few indeed. Yahoo has acquired Inktomi and Overture in the past year. Overture had acquired Altavista and AllTheWeb prior to being purchased by Yahoo. Here are the major players driving the search results today. Google Search: (search engine) Google's search results are shown on Google.com, AOL/Netscape, Yahoo, and Earthlink. They're also available through many "metasearch" engines, and Google is one of the options on Hotbot. Add it all up, and Google results are probably displayed on 75% of all searches. That will probably change soon, if Yahoo (with their 12% share) begins using results from Inktomi search, which they now own. Google Adwords: (pay-per-click) Google's Adwords is a "pay per click" program, displaying text ads alongside search
23
results on many search portals. The order in which they are displayed is based on the advertiser's bid, as well as the user response (click through rate) for each ad. Adwords ads are displayed on Google.com, AOL/Netscape, Ask Jeeves, and many smaller portals. Add it all up, and Adwords ads are probably displayed on 65% of all searches. Adwords is not limited to search results, though, so the actual reach of this program is much greater than that. Overture.com (pay-per-click) Overture is a "pay per click" advertising service, with sponsored listings displayed on several major search portals, along with regular search results. Advertisers bid for position on keyword searches, and the highest bidder gets their listing displayed first. Overture listings are shown on MSN, Yahoo, Infospace, Altavista, and many metasearch engines and other small portals. Add it all up, and Overture's listings are probably displayed on 35% of all searches. Looksmart (directory) Looksmart is a directory using a "pay per click" model. They provide the primary search results for MSN, and provide search results through their own Looksmart.com portal. Looksmart also has a volunteer edited directory called Zeal, whose results are mixed in with the paid listings. Looksmart results, based on my best guess, are probably shown on 10% of all searches. Looksmart's relationship with MSN will come to an end on December 31, 2003. After that, Looksmart will be "just another pay per click," unless they can find new partners. I would recommend against spending any money with Looksmart, at least until they establish new partnerships. It's possible that they will never recover from the loss of MSN traffic. Inktomi Search (search engine) Inktomi provides search results to multiple search portals, but they do not operate a search portal of their own. Inktomi provides secondary search results to MSN and primary results for Hotbot as well as several small portals. All together, Inktomi results are probably shown on 6% of all searches. That will probably change soon, if Yahoo (with their 12% share) begins using results from Inktomi search, which they now own. MSN will begin showing Inktomi results as their primary search results on January 1, 2004. When Yahoo makes the expected switch to using Inktomi search results, their share of the search market will rise even further. Inktomi is once again a rising player. With Yahoo and MSN added, Inktomi results may well be shown on 30% or more of all searches. Altavista Search (search engine) Altavista's search engine provides search results at Altavista.com, and are therefore shown on about 2% of searches. Altavista was once the king of the search engine
24
jungle. Acquired first by Overture and now owned by Yahoo, their days are probably numbered. Yahoo is putting considerable effort into Inktomi, and my guess is that they don't need another search engine. Look for some of Altavista's cool features (like PRISMA, which suggests related searches) to live on. FAST/AllTheWeb Search (search engine) Results from FAST are displayed on Lycos, and the "AllTheWeb" search portal. All together, probably less than 1% of all searches. Yahoo owns the AllTheWeb search portal now, but it's unlikely that FAST results are going to grow significantly beyond the Lycos portal, and Lycos may make a switch at some point. FAST's main business is corporate search solutions, so it's unlikely that they will make significant efforts to retain market share in the public search market. Findwhat (pay-per-click) Findwhat rates a mention here, because they appear to be gaining some ground. My best guess is that their listings are probably shown on around 2% of searches, but it's very hard to be sure. They're an important part of the results on many metasearch engines.
Google Rules?
Because of the dominant position Google currently holds and the relative dearth of "free" access to the remaining share of searches, many do it yourself webmasters focus on Google exclusively. This may be a shortsighted strategy, but in many cases it's the most practical approach. The only major search engine likely to gain market share in the near future is Inktomi. It's very likely that Yahoo will switch to using Inktomi's results shortly. This wouldn't change our overall strategy, since pages optimized using our system tend to do well on either Google or Inktomi. In fact, this is one more reason to think of Inktomi first when optimizing pages. Many professional search engine optimization consultants prefer to optimize pages for Inktomi first, because their paid inclusion program indexes pages every 48 hours, allowing them to make repeated changes to a page until it ranks well. Once it ranks well on Inktomi, they can release it onto the web, and feel confident that it will also do well on Google. The main reason that Google doesn't have a lock on the search market is Microsoft, though. The team at Microsoft is working on search engine technology. Presumably, this would be deployed on the MSN search engine, but it's unlikely that they would stop there. Because of Microsoft's dominance in desktop operating systems (Windows), they have
25
the ability to put Internet search tools in places that Google can't easily reach. If Microsoft finds a compelling way to integrate web search functions into a future version of the Windows operating system, it could make a significant dent in Google's market share. Google is fighting back with their own desktop search tool. For the moment, Google rules. Anyone who wants to topple Google will have to come up with a more useful search engine, and that's proven to be a very difficult task indeed. Microsoft may come up with something great, but even that may not be enough. Google has hundreds of researchers on the payroll, and they hold a lot of key patents. Stay tuned, but don't worry too much about any of this. As long as people search with words, search engines will read text, and nobody can quickly change the fundamental structure of the web.
Recommended Reading
Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practices Guide Mike Grehan, a search engine marketing professional from the UK, has compiled what must be the most complete guide to "how search engines work." If you're interested in the down and dirty technical details of search engines, this is the book for you. Along with all of that technical detail, Mike also provides a lot of sound advice, especially worth while to those who are considering search engine marketing as a full time profession. Click here to learn more: http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/grehan
26
Chapter 3: Keyword Strategy (Step 1)

The goal of our keyword strategy is to get you the best total quality return on your investment. If that sounds like a mouthful, its because theres more involved here than just how many people visit your site. If they find your site but theyre looking for something else, you didnt do yourself any good. Its far better to get 50 visitors who want what you have, than to get 1000 who leave before the first page finishes loading. Understanding keyword strategy begins with knowing how people search. For any given topic, there are literally thousands of ways that people will select a keyword or phrase when using a search engine. The more different keywords and phrases your site ranks on (in the top 10 listings on the search results), the more often it will show up when a member of your target audience conducts a search. Every time your site appears in the search results, theres a chance your site will be visited. Obviously, the higher your site ranks, the better your chance for success. Ranking is very important, especially when youre in the top ten. But the difference between #1 and #3 is not as significant. What matters most, once your site appears in the search results, is whether your title and description match what that particular web surfer is looking for. The total formula, then, involves how many keyword phrases your site can rank well on, how high your site ranks for each of those searches, combined with how relevant and enticing your page titles and descriptions are. Obviously, then, increasing the number of keyword phrases your site covers will often deliver far better results than trying to rank well on one extremely competitive keyword. The best part of this, from our perspective, is that increasing the number of keywords actually helps you target the right audience. This only makes sense a #1 ranking for real estate, even if you could achieve it, only attracts a very general audience. A #1 ranking for Dallas TX condos and related phrases is much easier to attain, and far more targeted.
27
The Keyword Hierarchy

Major Keywords (single words & short phrases) One of the worst mistakes that novices make is trying to focus on a single word (like books) or phrase (like real estate), and attempt to build a website that will rank well. This just isnt possible in 99.9% of cases. Highly general terms such as these are very competitive, difficult for search engines to handle, and hardly worth the trouble in the first place. Lets imagine that, after spending hundreds of hours tweaking and perfecting your site, you managed to get a #1 ranking for real estate. Unless you sell real estate of all kinds in every part of the world, a substantial amount of the traffic youll get will come from people who are looking for something you dont have to offer. Although we wont try to optimize your site for such keywords, its very important that you know what they are, as it applies to your site. As you work through this chapter, make a list of the 5-10 major keywords that describe your website. These should be mostly single words (like homes), with perhaps a couple of commonly-used phrases (like real estate) mixed in. These major keywords form the backbone of any good theme-based site design effort, as they define the keyword themes that search engines will use to separate one site from another. Dont worry too much about them right now, because this is one of the many cases where you can easily correct an omission at a later time. In other words, if you forget a major keyword today, you can do something about it next month. Keyword Phrases & Qualifiers The next level in the keyword hierarchy consists of the two and three word phrases that will attract the bulk of your keyword traffic. While these may not fully encompass even the majority of search phrases used, they should represent the most common phrases. As you work through this chapter, try to build a list of at least 20-30 keyword phrases for your site. This list will continue to grow as long as your website exists. Whenever possible, try to keep these phrases organized under the major keywords youve listed. The major keywords serve as a means of categorizing the vast universe of keyword phrases. For example, if youre working the real estate category, under the major keyword homes you might list such phrases as homes for sale, beachfront homes, etc. In addition to the keyword phrases, youll also want to come up with a list of qualifiers that will frequently apply to your keyword phrases, such as free. One of my old sites, Website Promotion Central, for example, used qualifiers such as free, help, tips, info, etc. along with keyword phrases like website promotion and email marketing. Since these qualifiers will often work with most (or all) of your keyword phrases, it helps
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies to create a list of them as they come up, so you dont miss opportunities to create a valuable keyword phrase.
28
Localize! Location is another important qualifier. If your business is in any way local, dont forget to include a list of geographic names in your list of qualifiers. City, state, county, names used for the local region, etc. could be important qualifiers. Ask For It By Name! One of the most overlooked types of keyword is the brand name. One of the sites I worked with last year was selling heavy equipment, but it never occurred to them that people might look for "Komatsu" or "Caterpillar" equipment. Those keywords were worth far more traffic than "backhoe" and "forklift." Singular or Plural? It would be great if every search engine knew that someone searching for "concert ticket" is probably looking for the same thing as someone searching for "concert tickets." Unfortunately, that's not the case Google doesn't recognize them as the same, so for every singular word we target, we also have to think about whether the plural might be important, and vice versa. Stemming & Misspellings Now that youve found a bunch of keywords and phrases, its time to consider a couple of real-world problems with them. Although most experts consider these two concepts unrelated, the fact is that the practical problems (and opportunities) they present are virtually identical. Theyre also not nearly as important as the rest of our keyword strategy. Word stemming is the use of root words as synonyms for many other words. For example, boat is the root of boating. Many search engines use word stemming, and in many cases it actually works, by delivering the same search result whether the user has typed boat or boating. This doesnt mean you can get away with using only one word, but that you should list each possibility, and identify the root words. Remember, the goal is to match the relevant search phrases that people actually use theres no point trying to cover every version of toast if all youre selling are toasters. Misspelling is a whole other problem, with the same basic outcome. The fact is, a lot of people cant spell to save their lives, and we still expect to get search results. By incorporating common misspellings (and keyboard typos, like swapping adjacent letters) into your keyword list, youll be able to squeeze a little extra traffic from the search engines. Dont waste too much time on this, though its a marginal increase at best. In fact, I recommend that you completely ignore this the first time through. Google does a good job of helping searchers correct their misspellings. Try it go to www.google.com, and search for "aito repair." Google will give you the best results they
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies can for that, but at the very top of the search results they ask, "Did you mean auto repair?" with a link to the corrected search results.
29
Stop Words & Common Words Some words are in such common usage (a, and, the) that they appear on almost every web page. It makes little sense for a search engine to index every occurrence of the word and on the internet there are just too many, and they dont mean very much. Search engines dont stop there, though. There are, in fact, a couple of hundred such stop words. Different search engines, naturally, use different lists. If your keyword phrases contain any stop words, nearly all search engines will ignore those words anyway. This doesnt mean that you shouldnt use them. Search engine A might read your page where it says computer programming and ignore computer as a stop word. If someone searches for computer programming on the same search engine, the same stop word is removed. Because different search engines have different lists, it doesnt help all that much to try to eliminate stop words from your keyword list, as long as you are aware of them, and dont use them in critical positions on the page (such as the first word in the title or description). In addition, most search engines allow for searching by phrase, where the exact words used in the search query, including stop words, are located. I see a lot of traffic to Website Promotion Central under the search phrase website promotion, even though website is a stop word for many search engines. The phrase is treated differently than a normal search in many cases, I have top-ten rankings for phrases but not for the standard keyword search. If youd like to find out whether a particular engine treats a certain word as a stop word, just do a search for that word. To see how this works, just go type and, without the quotes, into the Altavista search engine. The search returns zero (0) results, and you know that its a stop word. Now try the same word in quotes if you get results, youre dealing with a search engine that allows phrase searches and indexes the full text of a page. In many cases, common words might act like stop words, because they dont seem to affect the search results. This is because common words are, well, common. Even those search engines that dont use website as a stop word deliver almost the same results for promotion as they do for website promotion. Its easier for the search engine to distinguish between top matches for the less common words (like promotion) in the keyword phrase. A fairly recent development among the theme-based search engines is full-text indexing, which means that stop words are, in many cases, no longer used. Google, for example, offers visitors an archived version of the indexed page. Altavista, FAST, and
30
Inktomi are also, reportedly, indexing full pages again. Together, these are the major players in the industry. Just one more reason not to worry too much about stop words.
Researching Keywords
Obvious Keywords The process of researching keywords is still a bit difficult. Although there are tools you can use to help the process, its still sometimes a bit more art than science. The best place to start is with those keywords and phrases that are obvious to you. Starting with a list of such words will make the rest of the process easier, so begin by listing the most obvious keywords that describe your site, your products, the type of information you have to offer, etc. Related Terms The next important group of keywords is the set of related terms that are used to describe things similar to whatever your site is about. My own site, Inside Out Marketing, is about internet marketing, a subject that is closely related to web site development, search engine positioning, etc. In many cases these related terms will be in your main list, but if theyre not, start making a list. These related terms will become more important to you later on, as you work to expand your site's theme and traffic. For example, a site with a strong theme of website promotion will often be linked to sites with the strong theme of search engine positioning. It would be logical, when expanding the site, to add content around these new terms. Youll also use these terms later as you work to strengthen your sites off the page factors like link popularity and link relevance. Related sites that aren't direct competitors are great candidates for partnerships, such as content sharing and link swaps. Keyword Tools: Overture.com Fortunately, youre not alone in your need to research keywords. As a result, there are a number of quality tools on the market to help you with this effort. The first, and in many ways best, is the Term Suggestion Tool" at Overture. Overture is a pay-perclick search engine, and their customers want to know which keywords and phrases are searched most often. Overture is happy to oblige, since higher demand for popular keywords leads to greater revenue for the search engine. You can find this free tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion although it has moved a couple times. If you are a Overture bidder already, you can always find it by logging in to your account. To use the Overture tool, type in a primary keyword to see how many searches were conducted in the past month for that term. Youll see how many searches were done for
31
that particular keyword phrase, along with a list of related terms. Add as many of these related terms to your list as you feel is appropriate. For every keyword in your list, try to get a count from Overture. This will help you set priorities later on. When you get ready to create a theme-based site, you may discover that the job is a little too big to take on all at once. Its often easier to start with a single category or major keyword, and build a theme around that. Why not start with the keyword that gets the most targeted traffic? Keyword Tools: Google Adwords One of the most innovative new services is Google's Adwords program. This allows you to purchase a small text ad, targeted for specific keywords, and pay for it on a perimpression basis. I can't recommend it as a great way to advertise, but they do offer a very nice tool for doing keyword research. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox for Google's keyword suggestion tool. Keyword Tools: Wordtracker The next tool in the arsenal is not free, but its reasonably priced, particularly if youre operating a for-profit website. The Wordtracker service (http://www.wordtracker.com) will help you build a large list of keywords, and tracks the number of searches for each keyword. Wordtracker is due for an upgrade, which should be coming in early 2004 at the latest. Keyword Tools: SEO Research Labs My own SEO Research Labs (http://www.seoresearchlabs.com) provides keyword research reports for $99.95 each, with a turnaround time of about a week. We'll use a variety of tools, including Wordtracker, to prepare your report. This service was created to help readers get a jump start on their search engine strategy. If keyword research isn't your bag, why not give us a try? Prioritizing & Targeting Keywords Now that youve got a good list of keywords, phrases, qualifiers, etc. its time to set some priorities. If youve done your research well, you should have little trouble. High traffic comes from a lot of searches, so your top priority should be those keywords or phrases that show the greatest number of searches per month. Cover your bases by making sure that for all of your top-priority keywords and phrases, you also list out the various qualifiers that can add to the list. Before you instantly jump on the most popular keywords, take a moment to consider how closely each will target your desired audience. A search term that gets 10,000 searches a month might look great at first, but is it really a good fit? If only 10% of those using it are actually looking for what you offer, the effective value is really only 1,000 searches a month.
32
I recommend that you decide on 5-10 top priority keywords/phrases at most, which will become the primary keywords used in your site. Your overall theme could be summarized in one keyword/phrase, and the rest will be closely related keywords. Additional keyword phrases in your site will be variations of these top keywords (using qualifiers, etc.). If you cant encapsulate your theme within this number of keywords, pick the most important keywords/phrases to start with. Assessing Your Keyword Strategy If you dont have any kind of website traffic analysis software or service on your site now, see Chapter 9 for a listing of the different software packages and online services. Its absolutely vital that you track where your visitors are coming from, and what keywords they use to find you. Once youve got your site positioned, give it three months before taking stock of your keyword strategy. Of course, your primary goal is to increase traffic, and within three months you should begin to see results. Almost as important as total traffic is the number of keywords or phrases that visitors have used to find your site. The most successful sites will show referrals from hundreds of different keyword phrases. This is the result of your primary keywords combining with different qualifiers. As you add optimized content to your website, the number of searches where your site can appear will increase. I wish you all the success you can imagine. I hope that your keyword strategy takes you even further, to thousands of search phrases delivering traffic to your site.
33
SEO Research Labs: Outsourced Keyword Research Reports
SEO Research Labs was born out of reader requests for assistance with the important work of keyword research and analysis. Since I launched this service to my readers early in 2003, it's grown rapidly. Our reports have become a favorite for web designers and search engine consultants, because of our fast response and thorough research. Why guess at the best search terms to target on your website? The SEO Research Labs team will perform a detailed analysis to identify the most popular keywords for your website. This report will help keep your search engine optimization and pay-perclick marketing campaigns on track. This package is priced at just $99.95, and includes: Listing of Targeted Keywords / Search Terms These represent the major and minor keywords and related search terms that describe the products, services, or information available on your site. Our reports typically run to around 150-200 search terms in total. Keyword Metrics Report This report details the popularity of each keyword phrase found. In addition, for the top 25 search terms, we report on the level of competition, including an assessment of how difficult it will be to obtain a top ten ranking. This will help you focus your efforts on the best opportunities. Click here to learn more: http://www.seoresearchlabs.com
34
Chapter 4: Organizing Your Website (Step 2)

A couple years ago, when I redesigned Website Promotion Central, I made an important discovery. My intent was only to create a more user-friendly navigation scheme. What I ended up with was a sudden surge in search-engine rankings (and traffic) starting about 6 weeks later. I hadnt changed any of the pages - all I had done was change the way they were linked together. What I had done, quite by accident, was reorganize my website by keyword themes. Some of the themes had fallen into place very nicely, and others had not, and this was clearly seen in my logs. My Marketing section had taken off like wildfire, but my Search Engine section was still the same as it ever was. After doing a little more research into what the search engines were up to, and learning more about themes, I know exactly why one part of my site took off, while the rest didnt. The promise of theme-based search engines is that they will reward websites that provide significant, valuable content over those that have simply been created to fool the search engines. Website Promotion Central is a great example I created the site to help people, by providing clear information in a concise format. In this chapter, youll learn how to redesign an existing site to take full advantage of the underlying themes it already has; how to develop content to improve the strength of a theme, and how to tie together related themes into a cohesive whole. You can do this in such a way that your visitors wont even know the difference, but the search engines will. Don't Take This Too Far! It's easy to get caught up in themes, and try to force your website into supporting a structure that just doesn't work. This is not an exact science, and breaking a few rules will not destroy you! While I am presenting a formula to you that has worked for me, that doesn't mean that there aren't other ways to build your site. Don't be afraid to experiment, especially if it makes your site easier to use. Think of your visitors first, and search engines second. In my experience, organizing your website the way your visitors are likely to think about your subject is the closest thing to a "perfect" theme-based design. What happens after people get to your website is just as important as how they get there.
35
How Search Engines See Your Site

Search engines look at two things when determining what a given web page is about. The content of the page itself is a big part of the equation, but they also look at the context of links that point to that page. If you have a page on your site about "hamster food," it's better to link to it from a page about hamsters, than from a page about dogs. Because they look at the links between pages, search engines are in effect looking at entire sites. The key to establishing a theme for your site is to focus on a limited number of keywords and phrases, which are closely related to each other. Your chosen set of 5-10 keywords and phrases is then woven into the pages throughout the site, as you develop additional pages to cover each of the more detailed (second tier) search terms on your list. By consistently applying my page optimization formula (in the next chapter), and creating a strong theme-based design for your site, you should see a steady increase in your search engine referrals. Consistency in keyword usage, and an applied understanding of how the theme-based engines view your site, is really all you need.
The Theme Pyramid

The best analogy Ive seen to describe how themes work is to look at the theme-based website as a pyramid the capstone on top of the pyramid doesnt support nearly as much weight as the stones which make up the base. So it is with search engine themes. Its not really possible, or desirable, to make your home page the sole focus of your search engine optimization efforts. Success comes only by establishing a consistent theme throughout the site, from top to bottom. Top Level: The Network (a.k.a. The Internet) The very top of the theme pyramid is what I term the network level. I dont recommend that you attempt to create a network of sites, unless you already have one and need to operate at this level. Your initial efforts at search engine positioning should begin with the first tier of the pyramid, your website's home page. For most of us, who are operating a single website, the top level of our theme pyramid is made up of all the related sites that link to us. This part of the pyramid is important to you, and we will deal with it later on, in Chapter 6. First Tier: Your Website (a.k.a. Homepage, Index Page, Domain) The first tier of the pyramid, the homepage or domain, is where most readers will begin to establish a theme. This is the home page of your website. In the past, the home page for your domain was the often most critical to optimize for specific keywords. Now, its really more like a map to guide your visitors (including search engines) to your keyword-rich content.
36
Your homepage should link to the entire second tier, and to as much of the third tier as is practical. Search engines have a definite preference for indexing and ranking pages that are linked from the first page of a domain. The bulk of your content will be on the third tier, and you want to make it as easy as possible for visitors (and search engines) to find the most important destination pages. For example, your site might be built around a home improvement theme. This theme is then divided into 5-10 other related keywords that expand upon that theme. For most themes, its probably best to stick to 5-8 keywords/phrases total, including the primary theme. Dont fall into the trap of thinking that adding more primary keywords is necessarily a good thing. If your home page simply can't be set up this way, you will want to set up a site map page instead (with an organized set of links to your site's major content), and provide a simple text link to it from your home page. Second Tier: Directories ("Roadmap Pages") The second tier, or "roadmap" page, is intended to help guide your visitors, and the search engine spiders, to your content. Roadmap pages for theme-optimized websites usually exist in their own subdirectories, along with the content. Each directory/roadmap is focused on one of the 5-10 primary keywords you selected for the sites theme. It's not essential to put these sections into their own directories, but it's usually easier to manage your content that way. The roadmap pages are, of course, optimized as pages on their own and do carry some content, but the important content lies in the third tier. The purpose of the second tier is to reinforce one specific keyword/phrase within the sites overall theme, and lead visitors (including search engines) to the keyword-rich content on the third tier. Since much (if not all) of your content will be linked from the home page, some of your sites visitors may not see these pages. There will be one roadmap page for each of the 5-10 primary keywords, and they will be linked from (and link back to) the home page. Of course, every roadmap page carries links down to the third tier content within its directory. Unless two directories are closely related, you don't necessarily need to link them together. Sticking to our example theme, a typical roadmap page in our home improvement site might be about landscaping. Notice how landscaping and plumbing might fit into an overall theme of home improvement, but the two are not necessarily related. By putting a virtual wall in between these two subjects at this tier, instead of linking them together, we help the next generation search engines understand the overall theme. A site that has two such directories, and home improvement woven throughout the site, shows a clear theme.
37
Third Tier: Content ("Destination Pages") The third tier consists of keyword-rich content, or what have been traditionally referred to as doorway pages. Since the term "doorway pages" has also been used to describe pages designed solely for search engines, I prefer to call them "destination pages." This is because your visitors have probably come to these pages in search of information, and have now reached their intended destination. Each of these pages will reinforce the theme, by emphasizing the keyword/phrase from the second tier. This is where we make use of our secondary keyword list, and qualifiers, to build a set of pages that would rank well on traditional search engines under their own keywords/phrases. We do this by providing useful content for our visitorsthat fits these keywords. For each second-tier roadmap page, we will typically have 5-10 destination pages in the third tier. Each of these pages will link back up to the roadmap on the second tier and the homepage on the first tier. They will not, however, link to each other, unless the contents of two pages are closely related. If there is deeper content on the fourth tier, these pages will link downward to related content that expands upon the keyword/phrase being established. To follow our example further, our home improvement site with a roadmap page on landscaping would have destination pages on subjects like landscape design, trees, etc. There might be a further layer of deep content beneath this layer. Not all third-tier pages must have a roadmap page above them for example, I have experimented successfully with linking major destination pages directly from my home page, on a site that had a fairly narrow theme. In this case, the home page is very much like a roadmap page. Tier Four: Deep Content Creating a third tier may be all that is needed in many cases. With Inside Out Marketing, I made a roadmap page on Search Engine Positioning that leads to multiple "destination" pages (my articles) on keyword strategy, optimization, etc. To attract significant traffic in that highly competitive arena, though, Ill really need to go further, into a fourth tier of content. Instead of basic content, like a destination page with an article on keyword selection, I can further strengthen the sites theme by adding additional, deep content, on things like keyword searches, etc. basically, every section in Chapter 3 would make at least one good page of deep content. The fourth-tier pages can of course be linked to from the higher levels. These pages, can be safely linked together within their own particular area for example, my 10-15 pages of deep content on keyword selection can be cross-linked to each other. You may not need to develop this much content, but when you find that your search engine
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies referrals are declining, it may be time to shore up the content which supports the declining keyword/phrases.
38
Organizing Your Site Into Themes

Before we get into optimizing your pages, its helpful to map out your new sites organization. I like to use a whiteboard for this, then commit the design to paper. Whatever tools you use, its important to have the overall design and structure in mind. That way, when you (or other members of your web design team) begin to develop pages, you know exactly how the whole thing fits together. An Off The Shelf Theme Site The diagram below was part of my plan for the complete redesign of Website Promotion Central as a theme-based site. As you can see, Ive broken my theme down into four primary keywords, which represent the second tier. Ive only shown you one example for the third and fourth tier. In practice, youll want to map out the third (and fourth, if you have one) tiers completely before you start building your site.
One of the most important areas of the site is the bookstore, where I could write reviews and offer books for sale. These pages won't necessarily be optimized for my theme keywords, but they will still bring in traffic from targeted searches. Someone who is searching for one of these books by name might also be interested in a review this is another potentially rich source of traffic, outside of my site's basic theme.
39
In Tier 3, Ive planned for 9 destination pages to cover my bases, and another 60 or so pages of deep content (Tier 4), with 4-7 pages of deep content underneath each destination page. As I mentioned previously, you may not need to go to a fourth tier, unless youre working on extremely competitive keywords. Search engine positioning is, of course, the most competitive area of them all, so Ill need some deeper content. Redesigning Existing Sites It may seem easier to start from scratch with a brand new domain name, but if you already have a site with significant traffic coming in, and existing links from other sites, it's probably not worth it. Instead, you can simply redesign your site. When you do this, the search engines may take a couple months to properly re-index your site, but its worth the wait. If you decide to redesign your site, there are a couple important things to keep in mind. First, make sure that you arent creating broken links or moving/eliminating pages that past visitors may attempt to visit, unless you have a plan to deal with this. If you can modify the 404 error page that your web server returns when it cant find a page, stick your site map on that page so anyone who gets lost can find what theyre looking for. If youre not sure, ask your hosting provider to help, or check out the great set of tutorials at http://www.plinko.net/404/custom.asp. Finally, keep your visitors in mind, and dont eliminate useful content that doesnt exactly fit the theme. Just make sure that you optimize the content you already have, and add more content where your site is weak.
Developing Themed Content

Before we move on to Chapter 5, lets take a moment to consider an important factor in building a theme-based website: content. Reworking existing content is probably the easiest way to go, in terms of time. If your site already has some good content, your job comes down to linking the content together, and using the optimization techniques in Chapter 5. If you dont have enough content for your destination pages, you can always create some. Writing from the top down (also known as the outline method) is the best way to develop new content. Create an outline, using theme keywords and phrases at the top level, and write the content around the pages theme and critical keywords. Read the optimization guidelines (next chapter) before you start developing new content. Acquiring content from others is the fastest way to build a theme site, but only if you have the authors permission to do a little editing. Due to the narrow focus any particular page will have, and the need to control the headings, you will have a hard time finding content that fits perfectly without a few changes. Explain the process to the author, and get explicit permission they may want to use the edited version themselves, once they understand the reason.
40
Chapter 5: Optimizing Individual Web Pages (Step 3)

I dont miss the old days of search engine positioning, when optimizing pages came down to measuring keyword density, page length, and other hard to measure factors. Everybody had their own formula, and most of them were wrong. We wrote content to fit the "optimum" page size, stuck in keywords where they were "supposed to be," and generally wasted a whole lot of peoples time. With the advent of the theme-based search engine, the analysis of keyword density, etc. has almost become a thing of the past. When I build a website for themes, its keyword selection that makes the big difference. Positioning those keywords on pages, and within the site, is now a very simple exercise, with simple rules. You just stick to the formula, and everything seems to work. The prominence of keywords is much more important than how many words are on the page. The system I use to optimize pages is really very simple, and the work should proceed fairly quickly, if youve done a good job of organizing your site and selecting keywords. Youll find out when the traffic starts to come in. If search engines are delivering referrals for searches that dont really fit your intent, you may want to remove the offending words. If my "search engine fast start" site starts getting hits for fast diesel engine, I'm going to take the word diesel out of my site if possible. Pick your keywords carefully, organize your site correctly, and the rest is a piece of cake. Don't be afraid to break a rule or two if it's better for your human visitors. Got it? Okay, lets get started. Note: this chapter requires a basic understanding of HTML if you need a refresher course, or an introduction, there are a lot of great resources online. I like these: NCSA "Beginner's Guide To HTML": http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html Dave's Interactive HTML Tutorial: http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/ HTML For Rookies: http://www.htmlprimer.com/
41
How To Use This Chapter

This chapter is organized along the lines of the theme pyramid. For each tier in the pyramid, I provide specific guidance on where to place keywords, and how to build and lay out the pages. We conclude with some guidelines on links, and a few basic rules for search engine friendly design.
Network Level (The Internet)

Chapter 6 provides much more detail on improving your positioning at this level. You don't really control the pages at this level, but you can influence them. Ideally, links from other websites to your site should: Be placed on pages that are closely related to your content Include some of your keywords in the text of the link
Tier 1: Domain Level (Your Home Page)

The home page for your site, in a theme-based site, is sort of like a glorified site map. You can dress it up however you like, and strong copy is important to tell your visitors what your site is about, but the primary purpose of this page is to lead visitors (including search engine spiders) to the rest of your content. Title, Keywords, & Description Page Title: The page title should be 5-10 words long at most. It should contain the primary theme keyword/phrase for the site. It should also be designed to attract clicks from those who find it in a search. I like to use 3-5 keywords, followed by a vertical bar (right above the Enter key), then the name of my site:
<title>search engine optimization positioning ranking | Search Engine Optimization Fast Start!</title>
Keywords META Tag: The keywords META tag should contain all of the roadmap keywords/phrases, as well as the overall theme keyword/phrase for the site. If you use a separate keywords META tag for each page, you should only use keywords in the tag if they appear on that page. The alternative is to use the same one for your whole site most search engines don't believe what your META tags say anyway. Description META Tag: The description META tag should contain the same keywords as the Keyword META tag, with the same proviso about whether you use the same one for your whole site, or do one for each page. I highly recommend writing a separate description for every page. Use the first 10 words or so to attract visitors, working in keywords where it makes sense. After that, its pretty safe to lapse into keyword-ese and try to get your keywords in. Other META Tags: Unless you have some compelling reason to use other META tags, dont. The more you add, the longer it takes for the page to load.
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies Headings If your site has a single keyword/phrase that sums up your overall theme, use it in an H1 or H2 heading at the top of the page. If you want to follow this with a short (20-30 words) introduction to your site, feel free, but stick to your overall theme and roadmap keywords in this area. Site Map: Roadmaps & Destinations List all of your roadmap keywords as H2 or "H3" headings, hyperlinked to the corresponding roadmap page. I like to use a separate table cell in my layout for each roadmap (H2) heading. The basic layout looks like this:
42
Each of the section headings (H2 or H3) is hyperlinked to a roadmap page. Under these headings, create text links (by page title) to your destination pages. If your destination pages have important fourth-tier content underneath them, you can use smaller headings (or even plain text) for the links to your destination pages, and regular text links to your fifth-tier content. Page Design & Layout Make the design functional & clean. Your sites visitors still want to be able to find what theyre looking for, and you want to make it as easy as possible for them. When you start submitting to directories, remember that directory editors have a lot of sites to look at. Your home page should load quickly, get to the point, and have useful content that they can easily find from the first page.
43
Links to About Us, FAQs, etc. are important to visitors and editors alike. If you have a links page, you can link to it from here as well. These are usually separate from any "roadmap" sections. Don't use any banner ads or external links on your home page or any roadmap pages, unless you absolutely have to. Every external link on your home page will slightly reduce the rankings of your other pages. External links, for the most part, should be placed at the bottom of the pyramid, in the third or fourth tier. Special Considerations: Product Sites (a.k.a. Mini-Sites) If your site is built to sell a product, you shouldnt have to change your sales copy much, but you can still have roadmap and destination pages that are linked from the homepage, and through a Site Map page. Any site with more than a few pages needs a site map, for your visitors and for the search engines. Use roadmap keywords in your headings, and link those keywords to the roadmap pages. When destination keywords appear in your page text, link to the matching destination page. Use the right keywords under the right heading, as if you were designing a site map, and dont worry if you cant link to all the destination pages from your sales copy thats why you created roadmap pages.
Tier 2: Roadmap Pages

The roadmap pages are pretty basic. A description of that section's contents, with links to the destination pages is all you should need. Directory Names Roadmap pages should preferably be located within their own directory, and the name of the directory should include the primary keyword/phrase for the roadmap. For example, a roadmap page on keywords should be in a directory called keywords. This helps strengthen the theme, as well as keeping your site well organized. Title, Keywords, & Description Page Title: The page title should be 5-10 words long at most. It should contain the primary theme keyword/phrase for this roadmap. It should also be designed to attract clicks from those who find it in a search. Keywords META Tag: The keywords META tag should contain all of the destination keywords/phrases, as well as the overall theme keyword/phrase for the roadmap. Description META Tag: The description META tag should contain the same keywords as the Keyword META tag. Use the first 10 words or so to attract visitors. After that, its pretty safe to lapse into keyword-ese and try to get your keywords in.
44
Headings Take your roadmaps primary keyword/phrase, and put it in a big H1 or "H2" heading at the top of the page. Follow this with a short (20-30 word) paragraph describing the content to be found in this roadmap, sticking to the roadmap and destination keywords. List each destination page with an H3 or "H4" heading (use the page title) hyperlinked to the destination page add a very short (around 25 words) description in plain text if you like. If you have deep content that you'd like to link to from here, use plain text for your deep content links, with the page title in the text of the link. Layout & Other Factors Keep a clean, functional layout for your roadmap pages. Search engines are the primary audience, but dont make it hard on visitors or directory editors. Dont use any banner ads or external links on roadmap pages, unless you absolutely have to. They are the pathway for your visitors (and search engines) to find your content don't put any unnecessary side roads on your site. A paragraph or two of actual content, describing what the roadmap section is about, and maybe highlighting some of the destination content, is good for your visitors as well as the search engines.
Keyword Placement: Destinations & Deep Content

Writing destination pages is really much easier with a theme-based strategy. Each destination page should be between 200-700 words in length. Beyond that, you should follow these simple rules to ensure that you have the right keywords in the right places. Every destination page should use 3-7 keywords/phrases, with one primary keyword or search phrase. Directory Names Destination pages should usually be located within the roadmap directory, and the name of the directory should include the primary keyword/phrase for the roadmap. If your destination keywords are not a simple variation of the roadmap keyword (for example, a roadmap on keywords and a destination on keyword selection), create a directory using the destination keyword/phrase. Title, Keywords, & Description Page Title: The page title should be 5-10 words long at most. It should contain the primary theme keyword/phrase for this destination, with at least one qualifier word added if it makes sense. It should also be designed to attract clicks from those who find it in a search. Keywords META Tag: The keywords META tag should contain all of the supplemental keywords/phrases that you create using the primary keyword/phrase for this destination (using qualifiers, etc.), as well as the primary keyword/phrase. Use only those keywords/phrases that you will include in the content of the page.
45
Description META Tag: The description META tag should contain the same keywords as the Keyword META tag. Use the first 10-15 words or so to attract visitors. After that, its pretty safe to lapse into keyword-ese and try to get your keywords in. Headings (H1-H6) Top Heading (H1 or H2): Use primary keyword/phrase for this destination, with a top qualifier word. Section Headings (H2 or H3): Primary keyword/phrase worked in one more time, with another qualifier. Remaining section headings use additional supporting keywords, and closely related keywords from the roadmap. Roadmap keywords are the roadmaps top keyword/phrase, and the top keywords/phrases for the other destinations. Paragraph Headings & Subheadings (H3, H4 or H5): Additional supporting keywords, and closely related roadmap keywords. Page Content Use the top keyword/phrase in the first paragraph, within content (1-2 times w/ stemming), and in the last sentence of the last paragraph. Work in related roadmap keywords (2-3 times) following their appearance in headings. Each page should 3-7 keywords/phrases in total the primary keyword/phrase for this destination, the primary keyword/phrase from the roadmap, and additional related/supporting keywords, such as roadmap keywords. Links: Stay On Theme Writing good content on the web means linking to resources on other pages and sites. Unrelated links weaken the theme, so when you include links to external resources, make sure theyve got a keyword/phrase associated with them, or at least have some relationship to your site's topic. Internal links within the 3rd and 4th tiers should use absolute addressing, as opposed to relative addressing. Absolute addresses are the full URL for the resource (HREF=http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html). Relative addresses are the shorter URLs you can use within a site (HREF=page.html). Dont trade links with other sites unless the outbound link will be relevant to your theme, as well as the inbound link. This will be covered in greater detail in Chapter 6. If you have existing linking arrangements with unrelated sites, you should consider moving those links to a separate page, on their own. Follow the linking rules in the preceding chapter carefully, and dont cross-link unnecessarily between pages on your site that arent grouped together under a theme. If you must link between pages for the sake of your visitors, do it if the link makes sense to your visitors, it probably makes sense to search engines, too.
46
Rules For Search Engine Friendly Design

Some basic rules apply to designing pages for search engines. Keep them in mind as you build your site, or you could be in for trouble. These all have to do with creating a site that search engine spiders can navigate. If you have to break one of these rules, youll have to sort out the details of making your content accessible to the engines. Frames Search engine spiders dont handle frames very well, and some dont read them at all. In either case, youre better off avoiding the use of frames altogether. If you must use them, create a NOFRAMES version of your site that links all of your content together. Better yet, dont use frames. Dynamic Pages Dynamic pages are another potential search engine no-no. These are pages that get created on the fly by your web server, like http://www.domain.com/page.cgi?page=14. Some search engine robots wont index them at all, while others will index them, but won't follow any dynamic links on them. As a general rule, if a particular page has a stable URL (your "hamster food recipes" page is always at www.yoursite.com?page=123) then the search engines can probably index it, provided they can find a link to it. If you must use dynamic pages, create a static version of your homepage and roadmaps, and link it together through a site map. If you have dynamic pages that you dont want search engines to see, you can use robots.txt to keep them away from that part of your site. I'm not saying that search engines can't or won't index dynamic sites. They do, and they get better at it all the time. But they tend to index less content, and they can have problems finding it all. A site map that links to your most important content will help a lot. I have an online archive of my articles (http://www.insideoutmarketing.com) that Google has completely crawled, which is a 100% dynamic site. One advanced technique that can be very effective is "URL rewriting." What this does is change a URL like www.yoursite.com?topic=3&page=4 into www.yoursite.com/3/4/, which looks like any other URL to a search engine. Users of the Apache web server can read the documentation for "mod_rewrite" here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html. There is also a low cost URL rewriting module for Microsoft's IIS server: http://www.iisrewrite.com. Plug-Ins etc. It should be obvious, but the use of plug-ins like Flash to run your site will not work very well with search engines. If you must use them, give search engines and other visitors a path to get around them. Better yet, dont use them at all a large percentage of users would rather not deal with them. You can always create a link to this content, and let users load them if they want to.
47
Recently, search engines have begun to improve in this area. The FAST/AllTheWeb search engine, which also powers Lycos search, has begun to index the content of Flash pages. Google is capable of indexing several different file types, such as Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word documents. In time, it may not be as important to have HTML versions of your key content, but right now, the search engine world still runs on HTML. Javascript Javascript also gives search engines trouble. A great example of this is pop-up windows. I used to use pop-ups on Website Promotion Central to provide a glossary when users clicked on a technical term, a window would pop up to explain it. I did this until I realized that spiders would never see the pop-ups because they dont handle Javascript. The best way to handle this would be to use some scripts on your server to use pop-ups only when a real browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape is detected, and give the search engines a regular page. Ive successfully used server-side includes (SSI) with the Apache web server, but that is a technical subject far beyond the scope of this book. Another simple technique is to use a normal hyperlink for your pop-up windows, using the 'target="_blank"' attribute in the anchor tag. Instead of setting the size of the window before it's opened, you can insert Javascript code in your popup window so that it will resize itself after it opens. Image Maps & Fancy Site Navigation Tools The use of form buttons, images, image maps, Javascript menus, rollovers, etc. for site navigation is fine from a designers perspective, but search engines may not be able to keep up. When you decide to use these types of navigational tools, make sure that you give the search engines a version of your site that doesnt need them. Using them on your home page, without providing a little help to lead the search engines to the rest of your site (through a site map or plain text links to your roadmap pages), virtually guarantees youll see little to no search engine referrals. HTML Validation Before you upload any pages, or submit them to a search engine, you really should run them through an HTML validator. Get one at http://www.htmlvalidator.com, or use the online version at http://validator.w3.org. Whichever way you go, dont submit until you validate. These programs generate two kinds of messages: warnings and errors. "Warnings" are little things that probably won't hurt you. "Errors" have the potential to trip up a search engine spider, and your visitors. Search engine spiders can choke on bad HTML, and your effort is wasted if they can't read your page.
48
Chapter 6: Linking and Off-The-Page Factors (Step 4)

When search engines were new, the number of links pointing to a site didnt even matter. That began to change within a year or two, as search engine operators recognized that the best sites would be referred to more frequently by other sites. For a long time, the key to search engine positioning was optimizing pages (easily done, more or less, with tools like WebPosition Gold) and recruiting as many inbound links as possible. The problem with simply measuring link popularity was that people quickly learned to cheat the system by creating link trading cooperatives. Free-for-all links pages and formal programs like Links To You made it possible to create hundreds of inbound links in a short time. Anyone who wanted to take advantage of the system could move their site up the charts just by adding a set of links pages to their site. Thus was born the concept of link relevance, which attempts to measure the context of any links to your site. If the text of the hyperlink has relevant keywords, and the page where the link resides does as well, its more likely that the site it points to is truly relevant as well. This concept has proven to be quite effective in improving search results. Still, it might be possible to cheat the system, for a short time, by joining forces with other website operators within a similar set of topics. For example, a group of 50 websites on gardening could join a mutual linking program and improve each others rankings. However, even these types of links are now coming under scrutiny. Search engines have now begun to recognize these programs for what they are, and have taken countermeasures. Altavista penalizes identical pages (which is what links program pages are), to prevent such programs from spoiling their results. Google has gone a step further, and appears to be, in many cases, permanently removing sites from its index when theyre caught participating in an illicit links program. Its only a matter of time before affiliate program links and other artificial tools are systematically identified by search engines. In this particular arms race, the search engines hold all the cards. So, what can you do? The best approach is to take the high road, and only establish links that are truly relevant and useful to your visitors. Not only is this easier in the long run, its a good precaution against having your entire domain banned by a search engine. In this chapter, youll learn how to take the high road to success.
49
Whats Happening Off The Page?

Now that search engines have become more sophisticated, a significant part of your sites ranking consists of factors beyond your site itself. Without paying attention to these matters, you will never see strong results from your search engine positioning activity. Link Popularity is a measurement of the number of other web sites and pages that link to your site and its pages. Once a primary measurement of the value of your site, it is now almost a secondary measure. The number of links is not nearly as important as who the links come from, and what words are contained in the text of the link. Link Relevance is a measurement of the context and content of the links to your site. Links with your keywords in the text, and links from other sites and pages that are relevant to your keywords or theme, have a higher value than random links. This means that incoming links to your roadmap and destination pages are often of greater value than links to your home page, depending on the context of the link. Outbound Links are those links on your site that point to other sites and pages on the web. The relevance of these links, in terms of how the resources they point to rank relative to your sites keywords and theme, add or subtract from your sites theme. Hubs & Authorities are the two types of sites that theme-based search engines consider most relevant. Hubs are sites with outbound links to a lot of other high-quality sites. Authorities are those sites that are referenced (linked to) by a lot of other high-quality sites. A site can be both a hub and an authority. Your strategy should take these four factors into account. If your site is well positioned as a hub already, you can improve your ranking by increasing the number and relevance of incoming links, thereby making your site more authoritative. Likewise, a site that has a high number of good inbound links (an authority) may improve its overall rankings by becoming a better hub.
Evaluating Outbound Links

Relevance Any outbound links you create should point to resources that are highly relevant to your sites theme and its primary keywords/phrases. This means that you should evaluate the sites and pages you point to, and determine whether theyre strong enough to add to your sites theme. Typically, any site or page that ranks in the top 50 on at least one search engine for a given keyword/phrase is strong enough to add strength to your theme. Dont feel obligated to link to a sites home page link directly to the most relevant pages. Ive been able to improve the results for several sites just by changing the
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies outbound links from homepages to content pages which best support the sites keywords.
50
Context When placing outbound links onto your site, the context in which they appear will impact how well they strengthen your theme. A destination page on keyword selection with links to 4-5 very strong pages with content on keyword selection has better contextual value than the same page with links on search engine positioning. Value For sites that lack deep (Tier 5) content, one of the best ways to enhance the theme is to link to specific resources that support the destination (Tier 4) keywords. For example, a destination page on keyword selection with links to pages that provide more details on the subject. This is how your site can become a top-ranked hub. Reciprocation Obviously, when you link to highly relevant resources, a link back to your site is worth pursuing. Given a choice between two possible outbound links (for example, to expand coverage of a particular topic), Ill always choose the one thats going to get me a link back. Two pages on two different sites that link to each other make both pages better authorities, as well as better hubs.
Targeting Inbound Links

Establishing inbound links with other website operators should not begin until youve identified and evaluated other sites that can contribute to your sites theme. Top Keywords Your first priority will be to establish inbound links that support your top 5-10 (theme and roadmap) keywords/phrases. Ideally, youre looking for at least 5-10 good incoming links for each keyword/phrase. This can become the most time-consuming area, so targeting those sites that will give the biggest payoff makes a lot more sense than swapping random links. To get the maximum benefit, incoming links should include your keywords in the text. So, a link that looks like this: www.yourdomain.com is nice, but a link that looks like this: your keywords here is better. You may hear this referred to as "anchor text" or "link text." Whatever you want to call it, the words that are used in linking to a page are a powerful indicator to search engines, because these words tell them what that page is about. Theme Search Engine Ranking For each of your top keywords/phrases, conduct a top 20 search on Altavista.com, AllTheWeb.com, and Google.com. Some of the top sites will be the same, but this should give you about 40 candidates for each keyword/phrase. You can print these searches out, and use them as your shopping list for recruiting link partners.
51
If you dont find enough potential partners with a top 20 search, expand to the top 30, 40, or 50. With highly competitive keywords like real estate, even a top 100 site makes an excellent link partner. Google, in particular, will reward you for following this strategy, due to their PageRank algorithm, which puts more emphasis on links from websites that themselves have a lot of inbound links. Since these sites generally rank higher, you're also benefiting from their link popularity, at least with Google and Inktomi... and it certainly doesn't hurt you with anyone else. Site Popularity Although were trying to improve our sites relevance to search engines, it doesnt hurt to get a little traffic from all these links. If youd like to find out which potential link partners have the most traffic, download Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) and find out. Alexa is a browser plug-in that shows you how many users have visited a given site although its not a perfect measure of a sites traffic, you can get a good idea of which sites are the most popular. Getting Out Of Links Programs If youve participated in a links program (such as Links To You), it can take months to get rid of even half of the irrelevant links. In this case, its almost easier to start over with another domain name, or add an additional domain name to your site. It helps, when asking other participants to remove your links, if you mention Googles policy on links programs. They may not want their site to be banned, and may be completely unaware of the risks.
Recruiting Link Partners

Ill assume that you know how to compose a nice, friendly email to another website operator, and focus on the different types of linking relationships you can establish, how they add value to both parties, and how they impact your theme. Any time you set up a link, you would prefer that the text of the link would include some of your keywords, rather than just your site's URL or name. Simple Link Swaps Simple link swaps, where you and another site operator agree to link to each other, are the simplest type of partnership. Theyre usually easy to set up, but they dont add as much value as the other types. That doesnt mean you shouldnt pursue them if the other site has strong support for your theme. Its best to have your link on a page that adds appropriate relevance and context to your theme. Putting each others links on links pages only makes sense if the links pages roughly stick to a theme. If your potential partner swaps links with everyone who asks, ask to have your link on an appropriate page or at least under a good keyword heading, with your home pages title and description.
52
If your partners site best supports a roadmap keyword or yours, ask them to link to that roadmap page. Likewise, you should offer to link from an appropriate page on your site to a relevant page on your partners site. This way, the theme of both sites is enhanced, and the value of the link increases for both partners. Any time you set up a link, you should prefer that the text of the link will include some of your keywords, rather than just your site's URL or name. Content Links An even better way to create a strong link relationship is to establish links between closely related content (destination) pages on each others sites. In this type of relationship, its not uncommon to link together several pages, so instead of one pair of links between the sites, you have several. This type of relationship enhances the theme of both sites, by establishing them as both hub and authority on the keywords/phrases of the linked pages. I prefer to use this type of linking relationship, as opposed to developing Tier 5 content. Its easier to do, and it helps to kill two birds with one stone I give my visitors a reason to come back (lots of good content and resources), while strengthening my theme and ranking. Any time you set up a link, you should prefer that the text of the link will include some of your keywords, rather than just your site's URL or name. Content Swaps The obvious next step, beyond content links, is to swap actual content. This essentially means that each partner puts a destination page (or several) on the others site, with links back to relevant content on their own site. This type of relationship can take a while to establish, but it can greatly enhance the theme of both sites. When you decide to do a content swap, make sure that both partners agree on the actual content. You need to have some editorial control or influence to make sure that the keywords are in the right place, the headings are set up correctly, etc. If your partner doesnt know how to do this, by all means tell them where to buy this book! Any time you set up a link, you should prefer that the text of the link will include some of your keywords, rather than just your site's URL or name. Look For Synergy The way to persuade other website operators to join forces with you is to point out the ways each partner will benefit from the relationship. In many cases, this means explaining how themes work. Convincing your potential partner to add links to their content pages (as opposed to a links page) can be difficult unless they understand the way such links can improve their search engine ranking, and the relative weakness of a simple link swap.
53
If my product is great for your customers, and your product is great for my customers, an exchange of testimonials works very well I put your testimonial on my site, with a link to your site. You do the same with my testimonial. In this case, we both win, in more ways than one.
Inbound Links: Other Sources

Swapping links is only one way to create inbound links to enhance your theme. There are a lot of other ways to get links to your site, without creating outbound links. If youre selling a product, and dont want any outbound links taking your customers away, then these will be the most important type of links. Directories The best type of link you can get is a listing in Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) and the Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org). Theme-based search engines consider these listings highly relevant, because of their importance and relatively high standards for inclusion. Paying Yahoo! to review your site may not be justifiable by itself, but when you consider the value of the link, it may be worth the cost. At the moment, I am not paying for any Yahoo listings. See "Is A Yahoo Listing Worth It?" in Chapter 10. In addition to the major directories, there are a wide variety of minor directories. Seek out any vertical portals (vortals) in your theme, and submit your site to them. Look for informational sites within your theme, as many of them will have directories. Every time you find such a directory, submit your site and make a point of following up to make sure you get listed. Submit under the best categories for your top keywords, and submit a roadmap or destination page if it best matches the category. A lot of minor directories ask for a reciprocal link in exchange for a listing. This is perfectly reasonable, and can be done without compromising your sites theme. If they will allow it, link back to the section where your site is listed. If they allow multiple listings, get listed in every category thats appropriate, and point some of your listings to a roadmap page, or even a destination page, if it fits the category. When setting up reciprocal links to a directory, keep in mind that outbound links ought to be relevant. If you see value in getting a directory listing, but they insist on a link back to their (less relevant) homepage, set up a special page on your site for irrelevant links, as discussed in the previous chapter. You may already have such a page set up, if youve been swapping links at random. Any time you set up a link, you should prefer that the text of the link will include some of your keywords, rather than just your site's URL or name. Important Minor Directories There are a couple of new minor directories that may become very important. As you submit your site to directories, don't forget these three: GoGuides: http://www.goguides.org JoeAnt: http://www.joeant.com
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies Gimpsy: http://www.gimpsy.com
54
Not only are both of these directories regularly crawled by all the major search engines, they are, at the time of this writing, not so busy that they can't get around to adding websites. Simply getting a listing in all of these directories may make Chapter 7 irrelevant. Unsolicited & One-Way Links As more visitors find your site, and its presence in the search engine rankings improves, a lot of these new visitors will decide they like your site, and add links to it from their own sites. Sometimes theyll tell you about it, often they wont. These unsolicited links dont really do you any harm, but they help you more if theyre in the right context. When you find such a link, offer a brief description (loaded with your top keywords) for the website operator to use on their site. If you find it easier, just use the META description from the page theyre linking to. If they agree to use it, youve just enhanced your link relevance with very little effort. Likewise, you can often get a link back to your site by suggesting it to another website operator. If they have relevant content on their site, and you think that a link to some content from your site would add value for their visitors, suggest that they add a link. Ive gotten links from a lot of sites that way for every site that has covered a subject in depth, there are at least 20 others that only have a few pages on the subject. These sites are perfect candidates for a one-way link. Any time you set up a link, you should prefer that the text of the link will include some of your keywords, rather than just your site's URL or name. Create Your Own Linking Code! When you're asking another site to link to yours, don't leave it up to them to decide what that link should say... not if you can help it. Ideally, your links should contain some of your keywords. The easiest way to accomplish this is to create "copy and paste" linking code that you can send along to other webmasters, and include it on the "link to us" section of your website. Example: I want you to link to my Canned Books sales site for "Search Engine Optimization Fast Start." Instead of letting you set up a hyperlink that just has my URL in it, I send you this code, which you put on your website: <a href="http://www.cannedbooks.com">Search Engine Optimization Fast Start Turn Your Website Into A Top Ranking Search Engine Magnet!</a> or maybe you only have space for: <a href="http://www.cannedbooks.com">Search Engine Optimization Fast Start!</a>
55
Either way, if you use my code, I've gotten my keywords into the link, and more traffic is headed my way. By the way, feel free to put either one of these links on your site. Publishing Articles If youve gone to all the trouble of developing content for your site, you may have destinations or deep content that didnt end up on your site. These pages can be edited a bit and turned into articles for publication. Submitting articles to other websites and ezines is a great way to enhance your theme, by planting destination pages on other peoples websites that link back to your site. When you find a website or e-zine that carries articles within your theme, submit the article to them. There are some websites (http://www.ideamarketers.com is one) that carry nothing but guest articles it never hurts to have your content on one of these sites, because the link back to your site will always appear in a great context. When you publish articles, you typically get a short bio/credits section at the end where you can include the URL for your site. Unless your article is primarily relevant to your sites overall theme, dont link back to your homepage unless you have to. Link to the most closely related roadmap or destination page instead. Any time you set up a link, you should prefer that the text of the link will include some of your keywords, rather than just your site's URL or name. Affiliates & Customers If you have an affiliate program, encourage your affiliates to link to your content as well as their affiliate URL. If you have the resources to develop your own affiliate program, its best to have the affiliate sites set up as a regular URL (http://www.site.com/123/) instead of a dynamic URL (like http://www.site.com/affil.cgi?id=123). The link may not count towards link popularity, but it doesn't hurt. Testimonials and endorsements from satisfied customers are also a good source of incoming links provided that you encourage the practice (perhaps with some kind of incentive or discount on future purchases) and offer some sample endorsements that have the right keywords in them. Domain Names & Links Pages In terms of simply attracting traffic, one of the most successful sites Ive seen is just a single page with a long listing of Website Promotion Resources. Because of the care that was taken to link to high-quality resources, this single page is recognized as an important hub. Because it is such a great hub, a lot of other sites link to it, thereby making it one of the top authorities. This combination of factors makes this one-page site rank extremely high, even on theme-based search engines that usually prefer a lot of content. Creating a separate domain name for the sole purpose of creating a top-notch links page may seem like a lot of work and expense for very little return, but controlling such
56
a resource could bring a lot of long-term benefits, as the number of links to it increases. If you later decide to expand from a single domain to a network of sites, you could use this links page to create instant credibility for the entire network by linking to each site, or even to all the roadmaps. Link Swapping For Mini-Sites: The Two-Domain Two-Step One of the biggest challenges for many of us is that we're operating a mini-site. A minisite is a one-page website, which is designed to sell a single product or service. While we might want to swap links, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to do so right on our sales site. Many minor directories ask for a link back in return for a listing so what can you do? I use a simple technique called the "two domain two step." In addition to my sales site (let's call it Site #1), I register another domain name and set up a second website (Site #2). On Site #2, I include as much content as possible (my sales site can't carry much content, either), and I use it for link swaps. This site provides a valuable resource to visitors on its own, while serving the additional purpose of helping you build links. Here's how it works: when I want someone to link to Site #1, I send them the linking code I want them to put on their site, and explain that because Site #1 is a sales site, the link back will come from Site #2. If that's acceptable, I then suggest that they link to both of my sites, since doing so will increase the link popularity of Site #2 and boost their rankings as well as mine. Google's Toolbar, PageRank, And Linking I'll cover the Google toolbar again a little later. It's a nifty tool that Google offers (go to http://toolbar.google.com) which lets you perform Google searches directly from your browser. It also has a set of "advanced features" which provide some information about any web page that you view in your browser.
Among these is a graphical display of Google's "PageRank score" for that page, represented as a number from 1-10. While this is not a perfect representation of the exact value (the real number has a much larger range than 1-10), it does allow you to quickly assess the "weight" of a potential link partner. The higher the score, the more valuable a link from that site may be. Another place where PageRank comes in handy is in searching for top-ranking sites to link with. When you search in the Google Directory (http://directory.google.com) instead of the search engine, the top sites are displayed with a graphical PageRank score to the left, with the highest ranking sites listed first. Again, this is an excellent way to find out which sites have the greatest potential as partners or competitors.
57
Checking Traffic With Alexa Alexa.com offers a browser plug-in that tracks the sites users visit, and provides some handy information about those sites. Among the most useful information Alexa provides is a ranking of which sites get the most traffic. I'll let you decide if you really need another toolbar on your browser, but I don't use it myself. What I do, when I want to know how a potential link partner compares in terms of traffic, is go to http://www.globalpromoter.com/alexa_ranking.cfm and check their Alexa ranking for free.
Outsourcing Your Links Campaign

While it's not cheap, there are services now that will seek out relevant link partners for you. I haven't used any of these services myself, but several of them come highly recommended by their customers. Jill Whalen of the High Rankings Advisor (http://www.highrankings.com) has recommended Alliance-Link (http://www.alliance-link.com). Another service that's been recommended, and I am familiar with is http://www.linkagexpress.com I've spoken with them at length about their approach. These services are not cheap typical fees can start at $500 and up for an initial linking campaign. They focus on providing high quality links, which takes a lot of time. If you'd rather do some of the "leg work" yourself, SEO Research Labs provides a service you might like see the details at the end of this chapter.
Conclusion Don't Ever Stop Working On Links!

In the short term, even 20-30 high-quality inbound links will improve your rankings a great deal. In the long run, your goal should be to have in excess of 250-300 highquality, relevant inbound links. This number seems to be good enough right now, at least to ensure that your site stays listed by all of the major search engines, but you shouldnt rest on your laurels once you hit this target. Keep an eye out at all times for new opportunities, and keep working your hit list of the top-ranked sites for your major keywords. You should never really stop working on inbound links. Websites come and go, and the links they carry go with them. If you don't invest a little time in building up links, your rankings will begin to fade since it can take a month or two for links to be properly indexed. By the time you notice it slipping away, you're a good month or more away from fixing the problem. The importance of link popularity is not a secret any more, even if everyone doesn't understand it very well. Your competitors are probably not sitting still. Take at least 20 to 30 minutes a week, and dedicate that time to link swaps or other linking tactics. You'll be glad you did. The more time you can dedicate to this, the better. I spend at least an hour or two every week looking for new partnerships, submitting articles, etc. These links don't just help with search engines, they also generate a lot of traffic on their own.
58
SEO Research Labs: Link Targeting Reports
Our link targeting service was born of reader demand, and has taken considerable time to develop. Instead of offering a full-blown link building service (which others already do very well), we opted for a different approach to provide a lower cost alternative. SEO Research Labs will provide you with a detailed listing of related websites that are ready and willing to trade links with sites like yours. This package is priced at just $149.95, and includes: Link Targeting Report Your link targeting report includes a minimum of 20 websites that are already welcoming reciprocal links or providing free directory listings. We search for quality sites, and provide all available contact information to you so that you can establish profitable linking relationships. It will be up to you to contact these websites. We can not guarantee response rates but will guarantee that these are useful resources related to your website. We will make sure that these websites are well designed, without excessive pop-up ads, and that they are not visibly participating in any links program that does not meet established search engine guidelines. Directory Listing Report Your directory listing report will tell you exactly which category your site should be listed in for all of the applicable major directories, including GoGuides, Looksmart/Zeal, the Open Directory, and Yahoo. We will provide the appropriate submission page address for each directory. It is up to you to submit your site, and we can not guarantee that the editors will accept your site. Outgoing Links Table: Your linking campaign will be most effective if you first establish links to these other sites. To make this as easy as possible for you, we'll provide "copy and paste" HTML code that you can edit as needed and insert into any page on your site. Click here to learn more: http://www.seoresearchlabs.com
59
Recommended Reading: The Free "Linking Matters" Report

I can't tell you whether their link building services are better than anyone else's, but I can tell you that their free link building guide is the best single resource I've seen on this subject. Click here to get this free report: http://www.linkingmatters.com
60
Chapter 7: Getting Listed

Let me tell you how it was back in the early days of the web. as if I havent done enough of that already. There was a time when you submitted a page to Infoseek, it spidered it right then and there, and you could see in a couple of minutes whether the changes youd made had improved your ranking or not. Well, it doesnt work like that anymore. Now, if you want the search engines to index your site, you have to know when its right to submit, how to submit, how much to submit well, lets just say things are a little trickier in these modern times. In this chapter, Ill teach you the right way to submit your site to the major search engines and directories. The old wait 4-6 weeks for delivery applies here if youre expecting instant results, youll be disappointed, unless you decide to pony up for paid inclusion. If you took my advice in Chapter 6 to heart, and set up enough incoming links, theres a good chance that several search engines have found you already. If you have access to your web logs, take a look for recent visits from the search engine spiders theres a listing of the major search engines user-agents (spiders) in Chapter 8. Simply getting your site into a few directories is probably all you need get into the Gimpsy, GoGuides and JoeAnt directories, and you can expect the spiders to come crawling around to see you soon enough. The more popular the directory, the more it helps, but any directory you can get into is a good place for your site to be.
61
Should You Submit?

Since search engines follow links wherever they find them, it may not be necessary to submit your site at all. If there are enough inbound links to your site, to enough pages, the spiders will come crawling even if you dont submit. Some search engines (especially Inktomi, which drives several other engines) give greater weight to pages that are found while crawling the web, and temporarily penalize submitted pages. One of the most important questions is how many pages you should submit. There are different guidelines for different engines, but the basic limit is no more than 5 pages per domain per day, and no more than 20 per week, to any search engine. Once the search engines identify your site as having a lot of content, they tend to revisit fairly often anyway. Reaching critical mass with the search engines, where they start crawling your site regularly, seems to occur once you have about 15-20 pages and several dozen inbound links in their database. Most search engines will tell you that you only need to submit your home page, but our results tell a different story. Currently, only Google, Inktomi, and FAST (AllTheWeb) appear to be crawling entire sites, and then only when the right conditions are triggered, such as a high number of inbound links (Google) or enough pages found (Inktomi). FAST usually crawls the whole thing, sometimes it doesnt more incoming links, and fresh content, seem to be the best ways to trigger a full crawl. Automated vs. Hand Submission Automated submission tools may seem like a big time-saver, but I dont use them. Search engine operators dislike automated submissions. Hand submission, on the other hand, is a little more time-consuming. Submitting a single URL to all the major engines will probably take 10 minutes. I think submitting your pages to the major search engines is a waste of time the only one I'd submit to today is Wisenut, and they're not really a major search engine yet. Most search engines actually rank your pages higher if they find them on their own, and at least one of them (Google) can't include your pages in searches until they find at least one link to your domain from another page in their index. However, since I know you can't resist the temptation, here are the 5 places to submit your site for free (Teoma does not offer free submission): Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html FAST http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php Altavista http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl Wisenut http://www.wisenut.com/submitsite.html MSN/Inktomi: http://free.submit-it.com/msnsubmit.htm
62
Paid inclusion programs

For those who don't want to take their chances with free submission, or getting found via links, there are also paid inclusion programs. If you can afford it, its a nice convenience, but it can be very expensive. Altavista, FAST, Teoma and Inktomi offer "paid inclusion" programs, where you pay them a fee and they keep your site's listing up to date. It isn't cheap. Altavista's program costs $39 every six months for a single URL, and Inktomi's is $39 a year for the same thing. Of the search engines offering this service, FAST and Inktomi are the two most important. Altavista Paid Inclusion: http://www.infospider.com Inktomi Paid Inclusion: http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/pagesubmission.html FAST Paid Inclusion: http://searchservices.lycos.com/searchservices Teoma Paid Inclusion: http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/addjeeves/submit.html You know, Id pay for a program that guaranteed my entire site would get indexed and stay in their database, but its hard to justify paying per URL, unless its important to you to keep your homepage in the index. Your situation may justify it, and thats up to you. Get enough links to your site (Chapter 6), and it will probably be a moot question. One Good Use For Paid Inclusion I've been asked if there's anything good about paid inclusion. Well, of course there is they guarantee that the page you've paid them to include will be included. They also (usually) guarantee that it will be revisited frequently, like every 48-72 hours. If you like to play around with optimizing your pages, why not pay Inktomi to have a single URL included, and use that page to play around? You can make changes, wait a couple days, and see if it moves up or down in the rankings.
Major Directories
The major directories (Yahoo!, Open Directory) provide traffic on their own, as well as secondary results for several search engines. In addition, they provide the best kind of link popularity, because directory listings are considered more relevant and therefore more valuable than ordinary links. General Guidelines Before submitting your site to any directory, make sure that it has a good, clean, functional layout, that all the links work, and that you dont have any banner ads (especially banner exchanges!), rich media, plug-ins, annoying JavaScript tricks, etc. that might make the editors think less of you.
63
Your site should provide some kind of unique content thats not available elsewhere. If you are the manufacturer or primary reseller for a specific product, thats easy. If this isnt the case, be warned that not every site makes it into a directory. I wish I could give you more guidance on this, but its a very subjective thing. Ask yourself whether your site really ranks among the best resources in its category, then decide whether to submit now, or keep working on it. Whether your site is of a commercial, non-profit, or just-for-fun nature, directory editors expect to find full contact information on the site. A business name if you have one, physical address, phone number, etc. Weve been told more than once that Yahoo! editors cant list your site without seeing this. Make sure its easy to find, or at the bottom of every page. Yahoo! Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) is the toughest nut of all to crack. Their standards are very high, and they expect you to follow their rules completely. Since Yahoo! provides all the guidance you need on the submission process, I wont repeat that information here. As far as I can tell, there is no more free submission for commercial sites at Yahoo! you pay them $299 and they review your site within a few days. They now charge $299 a year, with the first $299 out the window if you don't make the grade. Two tips weve been given on Yahoo! submissions that appear to be valid are: use a regional category if it matches (Yahoo! explains their position very clearly), and dont use hyperbole in your site description (Yahoo! tells you this, but Ive heard that this dictum is frequently ignored.) If there are multiple categories that fit, go for the category whose name comes first in the alphabet, and list the others as secondary choices. When submitting to Yahoo!, keep in mind that your goal is to get as many keywords into your site description as possible. They do reserve the right to edit, so make sure it sounds like good English and accurately describes your site. Read their guidelines several times and understand them before you submit your site. In October 2002, Yahoo! changed the way that they deliver search results. Ultimately, I believe that this change reduces the value of a Yahoo! listing, but you must decide for yourself. I have included a short article on these changes in the "Extras" section at the end of this book. Good luck! Open Directory Everything you can say about Yahoo! goes for the Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org) as well, except for the part about paying for a review. As much as it annoys me to pay for the review at Yahoo! and Looksmart, at least someone will stop by and look at my site. With the Open Directory, you may not get a review at all.
64
Of course, there are submission guidelines for the Open Directory, but you can read them for yourself on the site. Theyre pretty similar to Yahoos guidelines, and it all boils down to following the process theyve set up for you to use. The #1 pet peeve of Open Directory editors is people submitting descriptions that are full of hype. Follow the style that the editor has used for other listings in your category a directory listing is not an advertisement. There is an online forum hosted by Open Directory editors, who are trying to help webmasters understand how to get listed, and how to work with the directory go take a look before you submit: http://www.resource-zone.com. Some folks have reported that simply posting to check that they've found the right category was enough to get their site added, without even submitting. As you try to decide on a category to submit to, be careful not to be too broad. If your site is about remodeling kitchens, and they have a category on that, dont try to sneak it into the home improvement category. Try to find all the possible categories. Once youve found the possible categories, surf around and find out which of the categories has an editor. Click on their name (its usually something fanciful like wonderbunny or milktoast) to see their profile. The profile should tell you how long its been since they actually did any editing. Many editors disappear and never return, so youd like to see some activity in the past 7-10 days. Once youve found a category with at least one active editor, where your site actually fits, go ahead and submit it and wait. Give them at least six weeks before you bother anyone about your submission. If you didnt get any response (your site hasnt been added, and your logs dont show any referrals from dmoz.org), its time to go up a step. To improve your chances the second time around, check again at http://www.dmoz.org to make sure that youre not listed, and go to the category above the one where you originally submitted. Check the profiles of all the editors, and find the one whos the most active. Send them a short note explaining that you submitted a site to this particular category and when, that it doesnt appear to have been looked at, and ask them if you should submit it again. Be polite these people are volunteers. Give it another six weeks. If that doesnt work, go back to square one. Keep trying. Be patient. Maybe your site just isnt good enough yet, maybe the editors are just too busy. Whatever you do, dont complain. Theyre volunteers. Nobody can fire them. Dont make them mad. Open Directory listings can be harder to get than Yahoo!, because theres no profit for anyone in processing the reviews. Id love to see them adopt a paid submission model at $20 per site, and use the money to give something back to the most active editors.
65
Now, here's the really good news. Just because your site has been added to the Open Directory, dont expect a flood of traffic right away. Most of the referrals youll get will come from the search engines that use Open Directory, and some of them take their time updating their listings you could be in the directory at DMOZ.org today, but not make it into Googles Open Directory index for several more weeks. Looksmart Looksmart (http://www.looksmart.com) used to be a directory like Yahoo is now. You paid them a one-time fee to review your site for inclusion. Now they have started charging listed sites for traffic, at 15 cents per click, and existing sites in the directory will eventually be removed, once they've used up their initial setup fee... unless they decide to pay some more. Since Looksmart had advertised their fee as a one-time deal, a lot of folks who are now being charged by the click are more than a little upset with them. I wouldn't put any of my own money into Looksmart right now, because I have a hard time trusting them. You will have to make your own decision, of course. A listing in Looksmart will improve your rankings on the MSN search engine for any keywords in your listing's title and description. Currently, MSN shows Looksmart listings before Inktomi results, so you need to be in Looksmart to get found on a lot of searches. As with any directory listing, Looksmart can boost your link popularity scores. Looksmart's relationship with MSN will end on December 31, 2003. After that, the primary results on MSN will come from Inktomi, and Looksmart will be a minor player in the search engine world. For non-commercial sites, and even some commercial sites which have useful free content, a listing in the "Zeal" directory is a free ride into Looksmart. You can find the submission guidelines at http://www.zeal.com. Minor Search Engines Who Cares? There are a lot of minor search engines. My advice, based on years of experience, is that theyre a waste of time. If you happen across one while youre surfing the web, go ahead and submit your homepage, but dont waste time seeking them out. Your time is much better spent building relationships and getting more inbound links set up.
Minor Directories Of Major Importance!

Minor directories are another potential time-waster, but they do provide the benefit of a strong inbound link to your site. Use Yahoo! and Google to search for (insert keyword here) web directory if you want to find vertical portals within your theme. When you find them, submit your site. If you take the time to submit, follow up and make sure you get listed.
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies One minor directory that may be worth your time is About.com they have a very selective directory thats edited by human experts. For example, the section on marketing is edited and managed by a professional with expertise in the field. As a result, a listing in this directory is very worthwhile, but very hard to obtain. Other important minor directories, that you should not ignore: Gimpsy: http://www.gimpsy.com GoGuides: http://www.goguides.org JoeAnt: http://www.joeant.com Zeal: http://www.zeal.com (non-commercial sites only, feeds into Looksmart) Websavvy: http://www.websavvy.cc
66
FFA Pages Don't Do It!

Free-for-all links pages, once upon a time, actually did some good. Now theyre worse than a waste of time. If you decide to submit to FFA pages, use a throwaway email address from one of the many free web-based mail services, or youll find yourself deluged with junk mail, SPAM, porno, and all manner of other unwelcome annoyances. Even using a throwaway email address from your own domain (like ffa@domain.com) can be a problem, because spammers can use your mail server to deliver junk mail to every account on your domain. Dont encourage them and dont make it easy for them. You wont get any serious traffic from an FFA page your listing is usually gone within a few hours (or days) at best. You wont improve your link popularity, because search engines dont look at FFA pages. Even if the search engines did look at them, theyre not going to be relevant to your theme anyway. Don't do it.
67
Finding Niche Directories

Here are a few of my favorite places to seek out niche directories and minor search engines. They have lists of search engines and directories, organized by topic. Search Engine Guide: Robert Clough is not in the SEO business, which makes this one of the most unbiased sources of information available. He has put about a zillion hours into building this website, which includes a huge listing of search engines and directories. He also offers daily and weekly newsletters, with breaking search engine news, articles, tutorials, and more. http://www.searchengineguide.com Search Engine Base: A very busy and annoying layout conceals some useful information. http://www.searchenginebase.com Internet Search Engine Database: Very similar in content and presentation to Search Engine Guide. http://www.isedb.com Search Engine Colossus: International directory of search engines. http://www.searchenginecolossus.com
68
Chapter 8: Controlling Search Engine Spiders

While it's not usually a necessity, this book would not be complete if I didn't provide you with the means to control which content on your site is indexed. This chapter contains a step-by-step tutorial on creating a "robots.txt" control file for your site. I recommend that you focus your attention on controlling the major search engine spiders, and worry about the rest if you have the time. There are any number of reasons why you might want to keep spiders away from portions of your site. If you keep multiple versions of the same page (such as a printerfriendly layout) on your site, it's a good idea to limit the spiders to one copy of that page. For my own sites, I rarely worry about what the search engines will see. When your entire site is filled with good content, there's usually no reason to hide any of it.
69
Why You Might Need Control

Visitor Content vs. Spider Food If youre trying to update an existing site to themes, youd probably prefer that the spiders only found the current, up to date content you have properly prepared for them. If youre completely reorganizing your site structure, you can safely leave the old pages in place for visitors to find, and keep search engine spiders from looking at them again. Finally, you may have your own reasons for keeping search engines off of certain pages. If you have discussion forums, having spiders crawling every posting might be more of a burden on your server than you need. Whatever your reasons may be, you have the right to keep search engine spiders away from any or all of your pages. This chapter will teach you how. Rogue Spiders & Spambots Some spiders dont follow the robot exclusion protocol at all. These rogue spiders will index whatever they want. Unfortunately, there arent as many options when it comes to controlling them. The worst kind of rogue spider is the SPAMbot or screen scraper. These little lovelies crawl the web in search of email addresses. Once they have your email address, you can expect an endless flood of junk mail to your inbox. I have written a short tutorial on using Javascript to conceal your email addresses, which you can find online at http://www.insideoutmarketing.com/index.php?p=pages&pid=15.
Robots.txt Tutorial
Robots.txt is a simple text file that you upload to the root directory of your website. Spiders request this file first, and process it, before they crawl your site. It helps to work through an example to really understand how this works, so thats what were going to do. Robots.txt Format The simplest robots.txt file possible is this: User-agent: * Disallow: Thats it! The first line identifies the user agent an asterisk means that the following lines apply to all agents. The blank after the Disallow: means that nothing is off limits. This robots.txt file doesnt do anything it allows all user agents to see everything on the site. Now, lets make it a little more complex this time, we want to keep all spiders out of our /faq directory:
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies User-agent: * Disallow: /faq/
70
See how simple it is? The trailing slash is necessary to indicate that this is a directory. Without the trailing slash, not only the /faq directory, but any file whose name begins with faq, would be disallowed. We can also add more directories to the disallowed list: User-agent: * Disallow: /faq/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /info/about/ That was easy, but what if we want to disallow access to only one file? Its simple: User-agent: * Disallow: about.html Disallow: /faq/faqs.html Now lets get specific. So far, weve created rules that apply to all spiders, but what about an individual spider? Just use its name: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /faq/ Now, lets combine individual spider control with a catch-all: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /faq/ This set of commands tells Googlebot to take a hike the slash character (/) by itself means that the entire site is disallowed. For all other user-agents, weve just kept them out of the /faq directory. Each record in a robots.txt file consists of a user-agent line, followed by one or more Disallow directives. The blank line between the two user-agent records is necessary for the file to be processed properly. If youd like to add comments, you can use the # character like this: # keep spiders out of the FAQ directory User-agent: * Disallow: /faq/
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies You can use any text editor that saves text in a web-friendly format. I like Notepad or Unixedit, both of which are free. If you dont feel like using a text editor, or just dont want to deal with the complexity of creating your own robots.txt by hand, theres help. Visit http://www.rietta.com/robogen and download their free limited edition robots.txt creation software, or buy the full version for just $29.95.
71
Theres a nice robots.txt validator at http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~sxw/robots/check - use this site after youve uploaded your robots.txt file to make sure that it will really work. Robots.txt User Agent Reference There are hundreds of different robots out there, and some of them are "unfriendly" - in other words, they're not going to send you any useful traffic. I have a list of the robots I try to keep off my site at http://www.cannedhelp.com/badbots.html. The following listing of major & minor search engine spiders and their associated user-agents should help you get started, by helping you control the spiders that affect your search engine ranking. # Altavista (Altavista search engine only) User-agent: Scooter # FAST/AllTheWeb (AllTheWeb search engine) User-agent: fast # Google (Google Search Engine) # Google also provides secondary search results for Yahoo! User-agent: Googlebot # Inktomi (Anzwers, AOL, Canada.com, Hotbot, etc.) User-agent: slurp # Wisenut (Wisenut search engine) User-agent: Wisebot # Euroseek (European Search Engine) User-agent: Arachnoidea # Fireball (European Search Engine) User-agent: KIT-Fireball/2.0
72
Chapter 9: What Now?

Search engine positioning is not a one-time event, its a process. Now that youve built your site to rank well in theme-based search engines, youve got a little time to wait before the results start to show. In the meantime, you can begin to investigate other strategies for driving traffic to your site, such as pay-per-click search engines like Overture.com, which provide results based on the highest bidder for each keyword, as opposed to indexing pages. If youre having a hard time optimizing your destination pages (you shouldnt), there are software packages designed to assist you. The new Search Engine Optimizer program also looks pretty good. Just dont let these tools take over your life its very easy to get caught up in every last detail, when in fact many of these programs recommendations are based on statistical averages and not actual hard information about search engine algorithms. Ive done very well without them. Use them, if you must, to help you fine-tune your doorway pages for their specific keyword/phrase, but only as a last resort. Before the referrals from the search engines start coming in, you should invest some time in setting up some kind of website statistics system. There are many different options, from free counters that display a button or banner ad on your page (not recommended), to programs that analyze the log files from your web server. Since you bought this book, youve probably done a fair amount of looking at different websites, books, and programs that promise you great results through witchcraft or trickery be careful what you try when it comes to your website. In this chapter, Ill talk about a few of these tricks, and how they work, but make no mistake about it. The people who are doing these things are taking a risk. My advice, as always, is to take the high road, and dont do anything you wouldnt want a search engine operator to know about.
73
Pay-Per-Click Strategy
How much would you pay to get a targeted visitor to your site? If you can answer that question, you may be ready to join the growing number of website operators who use pay per click search engines to supplement their search engine traffic. Pay-per-click search engines, such as Overture.com, do not attempt to index the contents of the web. Instead, website operators (advertisers) place standing bids for different keywords and phrases. When a web surfer types in a search phrase on one of these sites, the results are listing in descending order by the amount of the bid the highest bidder is #1, etc. Each time a surfer clicks on the link to an advertisers site, the advertiser pays the amount that they bid for that search phrase. While there are dozens of pay-per-click search engines, I can only really recommend a few. Overture.com is, far and away, the leader of the pack, with results from Overture.com shown as sponsored listings on many leading search engines, including AOL. FindWhat.com also has some good alliances, and Sprinks.com is affiliated with About.com. The key to success with pay-per-click advertising is to bid on as many keywords as possible, so that you can get traffic at the lowest price possible. I used to receive all the traffic I could afford to buy from Overture.com, at less than 5 cents per click on average. I was able to rapidly build a subscriber base for my E-Marketing Strategy Letter newsletter this past spring, at a cost of less than 20 cents per subscriber. If you want to experiment with pay-per-click search engines, Overture.com is a pretty expensive place to learn their minimum bid is now 5 cents per click (most others allow 1 cent bids), they have a minimum start-up fee, and a minimum amount that all advertisers must spend each month. The simplest way to get started would be to bid the minimum amount for as many keywords/phrases as you can, starting with your theme, roadmap, and destination page keywords. There are a few software packages on the market that are designed to help you optimize your return on investment for pay-per-click advertising. If you decide to spend a lot of time and money on this form of advertising, it could be worth the investment to buy one of them. I am not a big fan of the pay-per-click industry. Aside from Google's Adwords and Overture, the industry is rife with fraud. Since nearly all other pay-per-click services have open affiliate programs, there are tremendous incentives on both sides to defraud the customer.
Traffic Counters, Site Statistics & Other Measuring Sticks

After all the work youve put into your sites theme, you will want to measure your sites search engine performance. There are a lot of ways to do this, and Im not offering you
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies a comprehensive review of every option. Basically, you need to do three things to measure your sites position & performance: Measure Traffic: where it comes from, what keywords were used. This comes in two main forms statistics services, and log file analysis. Do one or the other, theres not much point in doing both. Check Ranking: where your site ranks on the search engines for your keywords. Manage Links: whos linking to you, whether your site has broken links.
74
Statistics Services Statistics services provide all kinds of information about your sites visitors, which pages they visited, where the traffic came from, etc. All you have to do is sign up, add some code to your pages, and go look at your stats whenever you want to. Some services only allow online viewing, others will let you download your statistics in a spreadsheet. Hitbox (http://www.hitbox.com) is sort of the de facto ruler of this space, but a number of other companies now offer similar or better services. For example, Webtrends Live (http://www.webtrendslive.com) is from the same folks who produced the Webtrends log file analysis software (see below). I have used other services, on a trial basis, but only Hitbox and Webtrends provided the kind of information I needed. If you have a zero budget for this, both Hitbox and Webtrends offer free versions that require you to place a small image (advertisement) on your site. Of the two, I like the Webtrends button much better its smaller, and it just says Webtrends Live on it. If you can afford to pay some monthly fees, you can get rid of the images (theyre replaced by invisible code). Web Log Analysis Web servers maintain detailed logs of all traffic and activity. Another way to generate useful statistics about your site is to use log file analysis software. Unless you can afford to purchase a professional package like Webtrends Log Analyzer (http://www.webtrends.com), youre better off using a statistics service. There other log analyzers on the market. Some are freeware or shareware, but this is a complex task and you get what you pay for. Ive used several free packages, and none of them measured up to Webtrends, or even came close. If you want a "budget" package, SurfStats (http://www.surfstats.com) and Mach5 FastStats (http://www.mach5.com/products/analyzer) are also excellent products. If you want to use a log file analyzer, make sure you have access to the actual log files from your hosting provider, and that you understand how to handle the technical details of downloading them. While youre at it, check to see if you already have statistics available to you. Many hosting companies provide good statistics for their customers, who dont even know its included in the price.
75
Measuring Rank Checking your rank can be as simple as going to a search engine, typing in your hallway keywords, and seeing where your site appears in the rankings. This is, in fact, the way that I do it for the sites I operate. Its easy to do, and its very unlikely to offend any search engine operators. There are software packages available that do this work for you, but be very cautious. If a search engine catches you, they may ban your site. Automated rank checking tools work by generating hundreds, even thousands, of search requests to the search engines, then looking at those results to see where your site ranks. Understandably, search engine operators dont appreciate the use of a tool that makes their servers work overtime in that way. Google has already taken a stand against these tools, and the other major search engines could follow their lead at any time. I recommend that you check your rankings by hand, at most once a month, and dont obsess about it too much. Your goal is to get more referrals ranking is only one part of the equation. If your sites theme is well established, youll get referrals from search engines with hundreds of different keywords/phrases do you really want to check your ranking for all of those, or just the big ones (theme and roadmap keywords)? Checking Links Your first mission is to make sure that your site doesnt carry any broken links. This is easily accomplished with a number of software tools. I use Xenus Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/XENU.ZIP). This is a freeware program that will identify broken links on your site for you. Use it once a month to keep your site in shape. Your second mission is to keep track of those sites which link to you. The major search engines all have advanced search functions that will help you see which sites they have indexed with incoming links to your site. At Altavista, for example, you type in: +link:www.domain.com www.domain.com to see the external links to your site. Many websites will do this for you automatically. Go to any search engine and search for link popularity youll find plenty of sites that offer this as a free service. There are also free CGI scripts you can install, if you have the technical expertise, that will do the same thing. One of my favorite sites is at http://www.linkpopularity.com, which keeps score and shows you how your site ranks relative to many others. Another good one is the MarketLeap link popularity checker at http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop. The Google Toolbar One nifty toy you can get is the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com), which lets you instantly search on Google, as well as providing all kinds of helpful information about any site that you visit. Enabling the "advanced" features also creates a graphical "PageRank" display showing you how well linked the site is, as well as an option to search for backward links. I don't surf without it.
76
Dirty Tricks & Gotchas

Warning About Taking Shortcuts If you think youve discovered a great trick to fool the search engines, you may be right. If someone tells you theyve got a secret weapon in the search engine wars, they could be telling you the truth. If you actually use such a shortcut, and get caught, dont be surprised if your domain is permanently banned from one or more search engines. Ask yourself whether you would want the search engine operators to know what you were doing. If the answer isnt a resounding yes, then dont do it. Links Programs Links programs have been discussed already you sign up, you put a bunch of pages on your site that link to the other members sites. They do the same, and everyone has great link popularity. Unfortunately, none of the links is likely to be relevant, and everyone participating has a good chance of getting their domain banned by multiple search engines. How do I know this can happen? One of my sites was ranked in the top ten at Google.com for most of my top keywords, until I decided to try out a links program. My intention was not to fool the search engines (which already liked my site), but to find out whether these programs even worked. One day, my site disappeared from Googles index permanently banned. Google figured out that links programs were skewing their rankings, and decided to do something about it. Dont let it happen to you. Top SEO Expert Caught Cheating Direct Hit Direct Hit is now defunct as a search engine, although their data is still in use by MSN. When they were operating, they kept track of how many times surfers clicked on a particular site when using a particular search phrase. The more clicks you got, the more relevant your site was. They also used click-through tracking from other search engines (they may still be doing this), as well as from the Direct Hit engine itself. Each click is a vote for that sites relevance. If the surfer stays on the site for a long time, or never clicks back to Direct Hit, the vote counts a little more, because this indicates that they found what they were looking for. One day, while visiting my favorite search engine optimization (SEO) experts web site, I was about to click on the homepage link at the bottom of a page, when something caught my eye. The URL for that link wasnt direct to his homepage, but rather to the URL that you'd find if you were clicking to his site from Direct Hit. In effect, every time a visitor clicked on that link, to return to his homepage, they were casting a vote on Direct Hit. I checked my Top 20 printouts from Direct Hit for the prior year, and I was amazed. His trickery had vaulted his site from #19 to #3 in less than a year, and had probably been responsible for getting him into the top 20 in the first place. Since other search engines incorporated Direct Hit results in their rankings, the impact goes well beyond
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies Direct Hit alone. I sent him an email congratulating him on his great trick, but never got a response, although I havent noticed the Direct Hit link on his site since then
77
What do you think would happen if Direct Hit had found out about this? Banishment from their listings, possibly even from their partners listings. In this case, the guy obviously came out ahead, but it could have easily gone another way, and damaged his website's standing permanently. Are you willing to take a risk like that with your site? Not me Website Promotion Central made it all the way to #2 on Direct Hit without any special tricks, and although my "friend" was ahead of me at #1 when Direct Hit went offline, I won't complain. Page Cloaking (a.k.a. Stealth, IP Delivery, etc.) One of the more popular cheats is the use of stealth or page cloaking software. What this means is that your web server delivers a different web page to spiders than it delivers to a normal visitor. This is a complicated issue, with opponents and proponents of cloaking all over the map, and far too technical for this book. You should know, however, that search engine operators dont like the practice at all. I don't recommend cloaking trying to fool the search engines is very risky, and I haven't been convinced that it provides any real benefit.
Revising Your Strategy

At the core of our theme-based positioning strategy are the keywords themselves. Its unlikely that anyone will come up with the perfect keyword strategy on their first attempt. By carefully monitoring the search engine referrals that your site receives, youll be able to update your keywords and content to continually improve your results. One of the best ways to do this is adding keywords that appear in your referral logs. If, for instance, you get a lot of referrals to your landscaping site for the phrase organic pest control, but you dont have any content on that, you may want to add a few pages, or even a whole new hallway. You can get referrals for terms that dont even appear on your pages, because of term vectoring, the use of related terms on your site, and the context of external links. When you do get such related terms referrals, this indicates that there is another category of keywords that could be generating referrals, and that there isnt much relevant content on the web in general to compete with you. One of the significant differences between theme-based search engine positioning and the old way of positioning by keywords is that you see a lot more different search phrases in your referral logs. The other side of the coin is irrelevant referrals search phrases that have nothing to do with your site. If you can identify a particular keyword in these referrals, and it actually appears on your site, consider editing that word out of your content. For example, if you had a site on search engines, and one of your page has the word Ferrari on it, you might get referrals for Ferrari engines. We tried to avoid this when
78
we were selecting keywords and developing content, but the search engines will tell you if youve missed something. Finally, because some search engines like fresh content, and others like old content, its a good idea to add or change at least a few pages every month. That way, the search engines have a reason to keep visiting, and you can satisfy both types, with a mix of old and new content. Dont forget that the entire purpose of search engine positioning is to increase your sites visibility to those whom you want to visit your site. Its not just about a top-ten ranking for your favorite keyword, which you may never achieve, its about obtaining long term results. If you follow the four-step process youve learned in this book, Im confident that your results will improve. When they do, let me know how you did it, and how well its working for you.
Change Never Stops - Don't Panic!

By the time you finish reading this book, there may have been some changes in the search engine industry. I will send out updates by email when major changes take place, which may dictate a change in strategy. However, the whole point of using the "fast start" method is that what we do applies to every search engine. If one of them goes bankrupt, or a new one gets started, that should not make a big difference to your strategy. If there is a stronger move toward themes, or the new search engines begin to gain market share, a major portal switches their search results to Google, or Yahoo decides to stop using Google, that really won't change the way we optimize our sites. What we're doing works today, and will probably continue to work as long as people search the web with words. I'll keep you posted.
79
Chapter 10. Advanced Topics & Updates

One of the most difficult things about publishing an e-book is keeping it up to date, without forcing every customer to reprint the whole book every time something useful needs to be added. While I continue to release new editions once or twice a year, important information sometimes comes up in the meantime. This chapter was originally added with the 3rd edition to provide a home for this information. Some of the information in this chapter has been published online, and some of the new additions will eventually be distributed as free samples. As I distribute updates from time to time, they'll be added to the end of this chapter. When you receive an update, you can print it out if you wish, and add it to the end. That way, your copy can be kept up to date without using too much paper. This is not a perfect solution, but it's the best idea we've been able to come up with, to satisfy both our new and old readers. If you have any feedback or suggestions, or there's a topic you'd like me to cover, feel free to email me at support@cannedbooks.com. If you didn't buy SEO Fast Start from me (www.cannedbooks.com), you should still receive updates from the reseller. If you are concerned that you aren't receiving updates, you can check by sending an email to updates@cannedbooks.com. When you do this, please let me know where you bought your copy. I can send you any missing updates, but I'd also like to contact the reseller and see what's going on. Thanks! Dan Thies Author & Publisher
80
The New Teoma 2.0: Best Search Ever?

(Originally published January 2003) The "Teoma" search engine (www.teoma.com) is a part of the Ask.com / Ask Jeeves search portal. It delivers search results on a large number of portals and websites that use Jeeves search boxes, as well as delivering a substantial and growing number of searches through Teoma.com itself. In fact, it is now the #3 search engine database, in terms of the audience it reaches, behind Google and Inktomi. Teoma search also incorporates the formerly independent "Direct Hit" technology, purchased last year by Ask.com, which allows them to improve their search results based on the links that surfers actually click following each search. If a particular listing gets a lot of clicks, it is assumed to be more relevant, and those that get fewer clicks are assumed to be less relevant to that particular search term. Teoma's rapid growth has been fueled in part by the dramatic improvements the technology has made in the quality of search results on the Ask Jeeves portal. According to a press release in January 2003, the number of searches where the visitor actually clicks on a result has risen by a whopping 42 percent since Teoma search was integrated into AskJeeves.com. One of the most innovative features of the Teoma search interface is a listing of related terms that allow the searcher to refine their search. For example, if you search for "chevy parts" it will offer such helpful refinements as "chevy truck parts," "restoration parts," or "classic auto parts." When you click on one of these, they are added to your query, thereby reducing the total number of results and making your search results more relevant. Prior to the release of version 2.0, Teoma's ability to suggest refinements was in need of a little refinement itself. In my experience, the suggestions rarely had very much to do with the search. In contrast, Altavista's "Prisma" system has been delivering useful suggestions for almost 2 years. That weakness has been addressed with Teoma version 2.0 search, and the overall quality of their search results has improved at the same time. In the "Search Engine Watch Perfect Page Test," Teoma now scores an "A" along with Google, Yahoo and MSN search. In my opinion, at least on a limited number of test searches, the quality of Teoma's results was superior to any of these. I am not ready to declare this "the best search on the web," but if they aren't #1 yet, they are certainly on their way there. Teoma, like Google, offers a "search toolbar" that plugs into the Windows (Win98 or newer) version of Internet Explorer (version 5.0 or newer). This toolbar, in addition to conducting searches for you, is also capable of instantly highlighting the search terms that appear on the page that you are viewing.
81
Getting Your Site Listed By Teoma Teoma is a crawling search engine like Altavista, FAST/AllTheWeb, Inktomi, Google, and Wisenut. This means that they crawl the web, following links, and build up an ever larger database of indexed web pages. Like Inktomi, Teoma does not offer free web page submissions. If you want your website to be included in their index, you can either pay them ($30 per year for the first page, $18 per year for additional URLs) or wait for them to find you. Given the rapid growth of Teoma, it is likely that more and more website owners will choose to pay them. If you don't want to pay, the same advice I have been giving for two years applies here work on getting more sites to link to yours. Since they crawl the web, it's a simple formula - the more incoming links you have, the sooner they will find you. Don't assume that 20-30 links is a lot, because it's just not. Teoma is in a rapid growth phase right now, so you can expect them to be a couple months behind on crawling the web, at least for a while. If you absolutely have to be in Teoma today, pay them the $30 and get your home page included you can sign up for this service at http://ask.ineedhits.com/ What Makes Teoma Different: Did Anyone Say "Themes?" If there could ever be a search engine designed specifically to reward the readers of SEO Fast Start, Teoma is it. Teoma likes content-rich websites (like the ones we build) with lots of links from related sites (you work on this every day, right?), that follow a consistent theme (there's that word again!). The reason for this is that Teoma introduces a new concept to search engine technology, called "subject specific popularity." While other search engines look at "link popularity" (how many links), "link relevance" (what words are in or around the link), and/or "link weight" (how popular is the site the link is on), Teoma wants to know much more about your site. To give you an idea of what this is about, let me start by quoting directly from their press release, with a little highlighting and bold text added to emphasize the key points: "Like real-life social networks, the Web is organized into clusters of local communities. Communities are groups of Web pages that are about or related to the same subject. Teoma is the only search technology that can view these communities as they naturally occur on the Web (displayed under the heading "Refine" on Teoma.com). This unique method allows Teoma to generate more finely tuned search results, exposing dimensions of the Web that have previously gone unseen by other
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies engines. In other words, Teoma's community-based approach reveals a 3-D image of the Web, providing it with more information about a particular Web page than other engines, which only have a one-dimensional view of the Web. This wealth of information allows Teoma to add a new level of relevance to search results, known as authority. Authority represents a level of expertise or knowledge to a Web page as validated by the other Web pages about the same subject." Now a quick quote from Teoma's website: "To determine the authorityand thus the overall quality and relevanceof a site's content, Teoma uses Subject-Specific PopularitySM. Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of samesubject pages that reference it, not just general popularity."
82
First, this tells us that Teoma ranks sites based on what's on the page (of course), but that the "off the page factors" include how well linked they are from other pages about the same subject. Links from related sites count for more than links from unrelated sites. Presumably, links from related sites that have greater "authority" will count even more. Further, Teoma is not simply looking at a single word to define the subject of a page. Related subjects are clearly visible on Teoma's website, as the suggested "refinements" to a particular search. Presumably, the list of refinements displayed first is the listing of subjects considered most closely related. There is a link to "show all refinements" which displays all of the related terms. In other words, Teoma is the first fully theme-based search engine to reach a substantial audience. This technology has allowed them to develop a system that delivers relevant results on a level comparable to the other major players. In my opinion, it is better than the rest today, and only their smaller database keeps them from being the very best search engine. One of the interesting "side effects" of Teoma's algorithm is that it will encourage the "search engine optimization" community to put a greater focus on relevance. Both within their clients' websites, and in the linking campaigns that inevitably follow the initial stages of positioning and optimizing a website.
83
Teoma Ranking Tips

(Originally published January 2003) First of all, I will say that the same "optimization" techniques we use already apply to Teoma, too. Optimizing each web page for the specific search terms involved is a simple exercise. Beyond that, Teoma presents some interesting challenges and opportunities. Keyword Research For Teoma: Teoma's definition of "related subjects" will have an impact on how you handle keyword research and positioning your site. Here are a few key points to keep in mind: Because searchers will be able to "refine" their search, every page that targets a single search term must also include several of the related terms in prominent positions. That was important, so read it again! Why that was important: If your site shows up on a search, but disappears when the search is refined, you lose. If your site is not highly ranked for the first search, but jumps up to the top when the search is "refined," you win. If your site uses a consistent, theme-based linking structure, it is reasonable to assume that each page will contribute more to how the other related pages are ranked. Teoma doesn't say "a community of sites," they say "pages." If you already have content that is optimized for each of your primary search terms, it makes sense to include Teoma's related terms on those pages. As you add content, it makes sense to optimize the new content for terms that are related to your primary search terms.
Teoma's "refinements" offer great suggestions for the next step in a search. They also offer excellent suggestions for related subjects that you may want to consider as you add more content to your site. If searchers find these subjects related, your visitors will too, and everybody wins. Unlike any other search engine, Teoma will encourage websites to become better organized and more useful, by providing a "surfer approved" measurement of what subjects are the most important to searchers. The breadth of a subject or theme will be defined by the refinements that searchers choose to click on. Off The Page Factors, Or "Establishing Authority" You might be able to fake link popularity. If you are unscrupulous enough, you can even do a lot of things that will give you an undeserved boost in PageRank on Google. You will have a very hard time if you try to fake "authority." This is because authority is established by a community of related web pages the more authoritative pages will tend to link to each other, and those pages most frequently cited (linked) by the established subject-specific authorities will rank better for searches on a given subject.
84
So, how do you establish authority? I will assume, for the moment, that your website actually merits consideration as an authority, at least a minor authority, on some subject. This means that you have either content that is of sufficient quality, or products and services of sufficient quality, that other quality sites will feel like linking to you. On the positive side, it will be a relatively simple matter to determine which sites are Teoma's top "authorities" for a given subject. Just search Teoma for your primary search terms, and look at the top ranking sites. The higher their ranking, the greater their authority, more or less. Once you've established links from the top-ranking sites for your primary search terms, you can move on to the top authorities for related subjects, as shown by Teoma's suggested search "refinements." It should not surprise you that many of the same sites will turn up on related searches as well. So, what can you do if your site doesn't quite rate as a giant authority? The same advice I have already given you on positioning still applies. Find the biggest small pond that you can be a big fish in, then dive into it. Get the other fish in your pond to link to you, or at least the healthy fish. Then grow your content and other offerings organically, following a consistent theme. Eventually, the fish in the bigger ponds will learn to respect you. At Teoma, It's About Community The more broadly you develop your site's offerings, and the more you get "linked into" the community of related websites, the better your site will perform on Teoma search. If you sell products, this means that you should seek out the independent voices in that community and get your stuff reviewed. If you have content, find others with content and link up. If you have industry news, make a headline feed and get it syndicated as widely as possible.
Managing Multiple Domain Names

(Originally published March 2003) I've answered several questions this year about the use of multiple domain names, and what the search engines think of this. There are four different scenarios that I have encountered, and I'll discuss each of them here. As an added bonus, we'll learn a little bit about using "redirection" scripts. Scenario One: Multiple Versions When you register a .com name, most registrars will try to sell you the .net, .org, .info, .biz, versions of the same name, to protect your business name. This is a sensible strategy for some businesses, and it's not all that expensive. I have to admit that I don't bother with this, but I can understand why it's done.
85
Search engines understand this, but it's important that you not run multiple copies of the same website. In other words, if the .com version is your primary website, the other domain names should be directed to the .com URL, either through a DNS entry (forwarding) or a 301 Moved Permanently code returned by your web server. Scenario Two: Merger & Acquisition If you buy a competitor's website, you have a choice you could continue to operate two completely different websites, or you can combine them into one. Obviously, it's cheaper in the long run to have a single site, not to mention that it's probably better for your customers as well. What you don't want to do, though, is completely shut down the old domain, right? After all, there are links to that URL, ads printed with that URL, people have it bookmarked, etc. This should be handled the same way as Scenario One with either a DNS entry or a 301 redirect. The other benefit of this approach is that some search engines will begin to count links to the old competitor's site as links to your primary site. When you do this, I would encourage you to notify any directories that have listings for both websites, and only keep the one that points to your active domain. As tempting as it may be to try to keep two listings, just do the right thing it's for your benefit as well. If the directory finds a duplicate listing on their own, they may permanently remove both. Scenario Three: Multiple Websites Some folks, myself included, have more than one domain name, because we have more than one website. I have CannedBooks.com, where I sell SEO Fast Start. I have InsideOutMarketing.com, which carries my article archive and some other information. SEOResearchLabs.com offers keyword research and link targeting reports. These are all very different businesses, and need their own domains. There are several others that I won't mention here. Each of these websites is unique, and it would not make sense to smash them all together under a single URL. Some of these sites link to some of the others, but they don't all link to each other. Each of them is promoted more or less separately, and nobody could look at what I've done and call it spam. If you have multiple websites, that's fine, as long as they are all unique. Just keep in mind that excessive cross-linking (like linking from every page) between them may raise a red flag at some search engines. The more "external" links there are the less chance that there will be a problem with cross-linking. If a link would make sense for a visitor, then it's probably okay. Don't use hidden links, or any of that nonsense, and put links in an appropriate context.
86
Scenario Four: Spam, Spam, Spam Actually, there are a lot of "spam scenarios," but I'll try to generalize. When the search engines consider what you're doing to be "spam," you can expect to get penalized for it. Any time you have created multiple domains for any of the following reasons, you are running a big risk, and you'll get no help from me: Multiple Directory Listings if you're just trying to get multiple directory listings for the same site, you're spamming, and I hope you get caught. Sorry, but I don't have any sympathy for cheats. Link Popularity / Cross Linking if you're just trying to get more link popularity by linking a bunch of domains together, you're spamming. Spamming With Impunity if you're using multiple domains to test out new spam techniques, I hope you get caught. I know you'll probably just buy some more domains and keep going, but I hope that the search engines make it as expensive as possible for you. Trying to get multiple search listings if you think "I'll put up 100 websites, and at least one of them is bound to show up in the top 10," you're spamming. What's Your Scenario? If I didn't cover all of the possible scenarios here, let me know, and I'll be happy to advise you on your individual situation. If you would feel comfortable explaining exactly what you are doing to every employee of Google, you're probably okay. A lot of the time, it's more a matter of simply doing things the right way. To your visitors, having two URLs with identical content might not matter, but to a search engine, it can create problems. Hopefully we all understand how to keep our sites out of trouble. Added Bonus: If you use "redirection" scripts for your internal links, the proper way to send the browser to the destination is to generate a 302 Found code, or use the HTTP "Location:" header. All of the PHP scripts I have seen use this header, and create links that (most) search engines can follow. For an interesting online discussion that includes scripts for ASP, Perl, and PHP, see: http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10724 For a quick note on how to set up a 301 redirect on the Apache web server, see: http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11760
87
Using Adwords For Keyword Research

(Originally published July 2003) Keyword Research Challenges
Choosing the most targeted keywords and search terms has long been a guessing game. While considerable skill is still required to find good search terms, a great deal of the "guesswork" can now be eliminated. Search engines are very reluctant to share information about the relative popularity of search terms. Google's "Adwords" pay-per-click advertising program provides the means to extract a great deal of useful information that was previously unavailable. Web designers and search engine optimization (SEO) consultants should enjoy this article, as will many "do it yourself" webmasters. While I can't make you a master of keyword research in one lesson, I can teach you how to make the most of what you have.
What Adwords Can Tell You About Keywords

For a small investment (which is very likely to pay off on its own), Google's Adwords program can tell you: How many times people searched for each keyword or search term on the Google.com search engine. Which search terms are the most targeted, and therefore the most likely to result in higher traffic and sales. It's important to understand the difference between the popularity of search terms, and their value in targeting your desired audience. While popular search terms might bring in more traffic, the real payoff comes from getting visitors who want what your site (or your client's) has to offer.
Why Adwords Provides The Most Accurate Data

Other services, such as Wordtracker and Overture, can provide a hint of the relative popularity of search terms. However, these services provide data from a very small number of searches, compared to the hundreds of millions of searches that happen on Google. The simple fact is that Google controls more than half of the web searches on any given day. Further, the information provided by these services can be skewed by automated software that performs "rank checking" and "bid management," since these programs generate additional searches that can skew the data considerably. The same software may also be used on Google, but the sheer volume of searches there reduces its impact to mere background noise. This doesn't mean that Wordtracker and Overture have become useless, far from it. We use them on a regular basis to help us locate keywords for our clients. They are very useful in obtaining estimates of search volumes. The main weaknesses are the small sample size and the number of "false positives" they generate. Examining search terms through the microscope of Adwords eliminates these weaknesses.
Setting Up Your Adwords Account

Get out your credit card... In order to take advantage of this opportunity, you're going to have to plunk down $5 to activate your Adwords account. Thereafter, Google will charge you for clicks
88
as you reach your credit limit, which starts at $50. You can expect to spend $25 or more before you have enough information to go by. The full pricing and payment details are available from the Adwords site (https://adwords.google.com/select/pricing.html). I'm going to assume that you have a list of search terms you want to investigate. If you don't, you may want to read through the rest of this article anyway. Adwords has a search term suggestion tool that will help you create a list. We're going to use Adwords to turn this list of "candidate" search terms into a list of targeted search terms.
Bringing Keyword Strategy Into Focus With Adwords

The first thing we're going to do is determine how targeted your search terms are, and how popular they are on the Google.com search engine. Point your browser to http://adwords.google.com and follow the instructions to create an account. Begin by creating your first ad campaign, following the instructions. For this exercise, you want to create an ad that accurately describes what your site has to offer. Avoid hype-laden copy, which violates Google's editorial guidelines and has a tendency to skew the results. You want to know how targeted your search terms are, not how well people are responding to a special offer. For the most precise targeting information, add all of your search terms to the campaign, enclosing each search term in brackets, like this: [search terms]. The brackets tell Adwords that you only want your ad shown when there is an exact match with your search terms. If you'd prefer to widen your investigation a bit, you can use "exact phrase" matching by enclosing your search terms in quotes, like this: "search terms". In this example, the ad would be displayed for "finding good search terms," but not "search for good loan terms." I wouldn't advise anyone to advertise on Google without using at least one of these keyword matching options. Don't look for this feature on any other pay-per-click search engine, because they don't give you this much control.
Setting Your Bids, Budget, and Distribution Options

At first, set your maximum bid to 5 cents, and your daily budget to whatever Google recommends (assuming it won't break the bank, of course!). You can monitor your campaigns as closely as you like, but it's pretty unusual for Google to ever reach your full daily spending limit. If you set the limit lower than they recommend, your ads may not be displayed on all searches, and you won't get accurate search counts. Once you've set your bid amount, Google will show you the expected average position of your ads. You want to bid high enough to put your ads into the top 7 positions. They will float up and down depending on the click-through rate, but you need to keep them in the top 9 positions to get accurate search counts. Google displays 9 ads per page on their normal search results. If your ad is always displayed on the first page of results, you'll know the total number of searches by looking at the number of times your ad is displayed for each search term. If any of your search terms won't make the first
89
page with your initial bid, you can create a separate ad campaign with a higher minimum bid to track them. To get accurate data, set your campaign options to limit distribution to Google.com only. You do this by making sure the boxes that say "search sites in Google's network" and "content sites in Google's network" are unchecked in the "campaign settings" screen. This keeps your ad from being displayed on AOL, among other places. If you want to investigate the search volumes in a particular country, you can also limit the distribution of your ad to specific countries. I work with a few designers and SEO consultants from Australia, England, and New Zealand. The data these folks can acquire from Adwords is absolutely invaluable in planning their clients' SEO strategy.
Interpreting The Results

Unlike Wordtracker, which gives you instant results, Adwords will take a while to provide useful data. I like to let my initial advertising campaigns run for a full week, monitoring daily. If you use tracking URLs, and monitor your sales, you may discover that you've already turned a profit on your campaign. After a week, Google will probably have "turned off" some of your search terms because their click-through rate was too low. They did you a favor, because those are not the most targeted search terms. If you monitored the results daily, you know how many times each of your search terms was used on Google. Any search terms that show a click-through rate at 0.5% or higher are excellent, and you'll probably find that some of them have much higher percentages. These are your most targeted search terms, and would probably make an excellent focus for your optimization efforts. Those that get the most total clicks and best click-through rates on Adwords are probably your best choices, assuming that you can effectively compete for good rankings. You can now delete or pause all of the ad campaigns you've set up, to stop the click charges. Before you delete them, though, take a good look at whether or not you can make a profit with Adwords. Web designers and SEO consultants who use Adwords to conduct keyword research may learn that their client would like them to manage an ongoing campaign.
Is A Yahoo! Listing Worth The Cost?

(Originally published November 2002) In October 2002, the Yahoo! portal changed the way it delivers search results. In the past, the most prominent results were exclusively culled from websites listed in the Yahoo directory itself. Since then, sites listed in the Yahoo! directory no longer enjoy this privileged status. The Google search engine now drives the primary search results on Yahoo!. While this is certainly an improvement for users of Yahoo! search, it's a disaster for many businesses that counted on their Yahoo! listing to deliver substantial traffic.
90
This change has also led many site owners to question the value of a listing in the Yahoo! directory. In this article, I will outline the pros and cons of maintaining, or paying for, a Yahoo! listing. In the process, I will delve into more details of the recent changes. Argument #1: Yahoo! Listings Mean Link Popularity Pro: Even if the Yahoo! listing itself delivers little or no traffic, other search engines will rank your website higher if it's listed in Yahoo!. Because Yahoo! is so important, a link from Yahoo! counts more than a regular link. Thanks to its higher "PageRank," Yahoo! means even more to Google. Con: Yahoo! listings do not deliver nearly as significant a contribution in this area as you might think. You can verify this by doing a "backward links" search on Google for any Yahoo!-listed website. The most important links are listed first, and the Yahoo! listing is rarely even on the first page of links for top ranked sites on Google in many cases, it doesn't show up at all. Argument #2: Listed Sites Look Better In The Search Results Pro: Websites with a Yahoo listing show up in the combined Yahoo!/Google results with their title, description, and category from the Yahoo directory. This may boost the response when the site appears in the search results. This applies when the URL listed in the results is the same as the URL in the Yahoo listing. Con: Results listed with Yahoo information include a link to the site's category, which may prompt surfers to pass over your listing and go to the category. Sites without Yahoo listings have the more inviting "search within this site" link, which leads to more results exclusively from your site. So, Is A Yahoo! Listing Worth It? If you have a non-commercial site and can get listed for free, of course! If you're not one of the lucky few, though, you have to evaluate whether it's worth $299 a year for what amounts to a better than average incoming link. Everyone must make their own decision. If $299 is small compared to your total marketing budget, it may be easier to just continue paying. My own listing expires in March, and I don't intend to renew it. How Can You Profit From The Changes At Yahoo!? The obvious answer is that you must take steps to improve your own position in Google's search results. Google's rankings are made up of many factors, but the dominant factor is "PageRank," which is based on the number and quality of incoming links from other websites.
91
Therefore, the first step in improving your position on the Google search engine (and now Yahoo!) is to improve your site's link popularity. This takes time, and trying to take shortcuts can get you into real trouble Google doesn't like "link farms," or any program designed to artificially boost your link popularity. Finding Quality Link Partners Through Google Since only links from quality sites will count for much with Google, let's take a quick look at how you can find these sites. Start by targeting the sites that link to existing topranked sites. You can do a backward links search for any site by typing "link:http://www.domain.com" in the Google search engine. An even faster method is to use the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com), which requires Internet Explorer 5 or greater, running on Windows. With the toolbar's advanced features enabled, you can conduct a "backward links" search from the "Page Info" menu for any site you visit. Don't Complain, Act! By some estimates, Google controls 2/3rds of the searches conducted on the Internet in a given day. Not only is Google.com extremely popular in its own right, but Google also controls the search results on popular portals like America Online (AOL) not to mention Yahoo itself. A lot of website owners are complaining bitterly about this change. All the more reason for you to take action now, while so many of your competitors are busy licking their wounds. With a little planning and effort, you could be in a dominant position on Google before they even get started.
Useful Online Resources

I get a lot of my information online, of course. Here are some of my favorite online places for search engine information. The forums I participate in are fantastic places to ask questions and get instant answers. Discussion Forums & Newsletters Best Practices Search Engine Optimization Forums: http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums High Rankings Forums & High Rankings Advisor Newsletter: http://www.highrankings.com Cre8asite Forums: http://www.cre8asiteforums.com WebProWorld Forums: http://www.webproworld.com
Search Engine Optimization Fast Start 4th Edition January 2004. Copyright 2004 by Dan Thies Spider Food Forums: http://forums.spider-food.net Webmaster World: http://www.webmasterworld.com Technical Information PageRank Uncovered (White Paper on Google's PageRank Algorithm): http://www.supportforums.org/pagerank White Paper: The Classification of Search Engine Spam http://www.ebrandmanagement.com/whitepapers/spam-classification
92
Font inclusion section: AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+=`~{}[]|\:;"'<,>.?/ AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+=`~{}[]|\:;"'<,>.?/ AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+=`~{}[]|\:;"'<,>.?/ AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+=`~{}[]|\:;"'<,>.?/ AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+=`~{}[]|\:;"'<,>.?/ AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+=`~{}[]|\:;"'<,>.?/ AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+=`~{}[]|\:;"'<,>.?/ AbcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()_+=`~{}[]|\:;"'<,>.?/

Search Engine Fast Start!

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Search Engine Fast Start!

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Search Engine Fast Start!

Search Engine Fast Start:

A Step By Step Guide For Busy People

Search Engine Optimization Fast Start:

Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................ 6

Chapter 2: How Search Engines Work..................................... 13

Chapter 3: Keyword Strategy (Step 1)...................................... 26

Search Engine Optimization Fast Start:

Chapter 4: Organizing Your Website (Step 2) ......................... 34

Chapter 5: Optimizing Individual Web Pages (Step 3)........... 40

Search Engine Optimization Fast Start:

Chapter 6: Linking and Off-The-Page Factors (Step 4).......... 48

Search Engine Optimization Fast Start:

Chapter 7: Getting Listed........................................................... 60

Chapter 8: Controlling Search Engine Spiders....................... 68

Chapter 9: What Now?................................................................ 72

Chapter 10. Advanced Topics & Updates................................ 79

Search Engine Optimization Fast Start:

Advice For Really, REALLY Busy People

Setting The Stage

Following The Steps

Reiterating The Obvious

I Want You To Succeed!

Can You Believe Me?

Chapter 2: How Search Engines Work

Why It Matters To You

What A Spider Does

How They Find You

What Gets Indexed

How Pages Are Ranked

How People Use Search Engines & Portals

Takeaways what we've learned

Meet The Players: Where Traffic Comes From

Chapter 3: Keyword Strategy (Step 1)

The Keyword Hierarchy

SEO Research Labs: Outsourced Keyword Research Reports

Chapter 4: Organizing Your Website (Step 2)

How Search Engines See Your Site

The Theme Pyramid

Organizing Your Site Into Themes

Developing Themed Content

Chapter 5: Optimizing Individual Web Pages (Step 3)

How To Use This Chapter

Network Level (The Internet)

Tier 1: Domain Level (Your Home Page)

Tier 2: Roadmap Pages

Keyword Placement: Destinations & Deep Content

Rules For Search Engine Friendly Design

Chapter 6: Linking and Off-The-Page Factors (Step 4)

Whats Happening Off The Page?

Evaluating Outbound Links

Targeting Inbound Links

Recruiting Link Partners

Inbound Links: Other Sources

Outsourcing Your Links Campaign

Conclusion Don't Ever Stop Working On Links!

SEO Research Labs: Link Targeting Reports

Recommended Reading: The Free "Linking Matters" Report

Chapter 7: Getting Listed

Should You Submit?

Paid inclusion programs

Minor Directories Of Major Importance!

FFA Pages Don't Do It!