All About Search Engines, cont. |
1 2 3
4 |
 |
Keywords |
|
It is important to take the time to first decide on what your
keywords should be. Keywords may not necessarily be what YOU think
describes your site. You must accurately predict what other
people will type into the search field to find a site like
yours. The keywords that THEY type in are all that matters. Several
questions to ask yourself are:
- Who are you trying to attract to your site?
- What does your site have to offer them?
- What keyword might they type in to find what you have to offer?
Oftentimes, keywords must be used in short phrases to narrow
the results sufficiently. What 2-word phrases might users type
in to find your site?
- What other words are related to that word?
1. Build Your Keyword List
To test a keyword or keyword phrase, go to Google
and run a search with those words. What comes back? Sites that
are closely related to yours? Or are the results varied? Unless
the results list of sites is closely related to your site, you'll
need to find a more accurate keyword.
Another reason it is important to find keywords that provide
a narrow focus of results is it will be easier for you to obtain
higher rankings. Simply put, it's easier to rank among the top
ten of one thousand sites than it is a million.
And finally, getting high rankings among a very broad category
doesn't do users any good either. It's frustrating for them to
sift through unrelated sites to find what they are looking for.
Ultimately, to get high rankings you need sites to link to you.
How many sites? That depends upon your keyword phrase. Here is
a simple way to research this.
- Go to Google, type in your proposed keyword phrase, and search.
- When the results appear, click on the first listing.
- When that page loads, copy the URL.
- Now go back to Google and type in the following in the search
field:
link:www.domain.com (substituting the actual URL after the colon.)
Click the Search button.
- This is amazing. What you get is the number of sites that
link to that URL! How many sites is that? To rank higher
than this site in Google, you must have one more link than they
do. Simple, but not easy.
- If the number of links you will have to beat is more than
a few hundred, you may possibly be using too broad of a keyword
phrase. Try to find one that is more specific of exactly what
your site offers. (However, some categories of sites are naturally
going to have incredible competition, so this rule is not set
in stone)
(I'm currently going through this daunting task myself for the
Web Design Program
website. For the keywords I've selected, I need to have around
300 - 500 sites link to me! If you feel so inclined to link to
the Web Design Program site on your personal web site, I would
SO appreciate it!!!!)
After selecting your ideal keyword phrase, you may want help
thinking of related keyword phrases. Overture has a Search
Term Suggestion Tool that will tell you how many times in
the previous month that term was searched, as well as related
terms that were searched. Granted, these numbers related only
to the Overture search engine, but it will give an idea of the
relative effectiveness between several keyword phrases. "To
roughly determine how many searches are conducted across the internet,
in a given month, multiply the Overture numbers by 10." (This
formula was generated by a leading search engine placement company.)
How does this all relate to traffic on your site? Statistic show
that if you have strong ranking (among the top 10) among all the
major search engines, you can expect 5% of that traffic per month.
For instance, Overture tells me that the keyword phrase "web
design training" was searched for 4,897 times last month.
That means there were 48,970 searches for that phrase across the
internet. If I can obtain dominant ranking for my site, I could
expect to get 2,449 hits per month.
2. Refine Your Keyword List
After you have done your research on keywords and keyword phrases
that users typically enter to find sites like yours, you will
need to narrow your list to only the most effective ones. Drop
keywords that have low hits as shown in the Overture Search
Term Suggestion Tool. Also, drop keywords for which the #10
ranking in Google is unrealistic for you. In other words, when
you use the link:www.domain.com feature for the 10th ranked item
in Google for a given keyword, and if the number of links you'll
need to beat is unrealistic for you, drop that keyword.
3. Write a Site Description
Next, you'll need a concise, non-hype description of your site
for Search Directory submissions. It will need to be between 25-30
words. Use your keywords in this description, but the sentences
need to be well-structured. These descriptions will be evaluated
by real people, not spiders, so spend some time writing an effective
description.
The description is what is displayed just below the page title
in the search engine results list. A good description will persuade
people to click on your link and visit your site. A high click-through
count positively impacts your future ranking in many search engines.
A poorly written or exaggerated and boastful description will
be ignored by users.
4. Add Keywords to your Titles
Keywords are placed within the <title> tag of your page.
Search engines have different standards of how many characters
they will read in the title tag. Generally, there is about a 40-60
character limit, which is about 3-5 keywords per page. If your
list of perfect keywords and keyword phrases contains 20 words,
you'll have to divide them up into groups and place each group
of 3-5 words on different pages.
Make sure that every keyword you've selected is placed in the
title of at least one of your pages. Place the most important
keywords at the start of the title.
It is recommended by some search engine experts that keywords
not be capitalized because people generally don't capitalize when
they type words into the search field. However, I don't see any
difference in search results if I capitalize words and then run
a search again without capitalization.
5. Add Keywords to Your Page Content
Search engine spiders also read the text on your page, so you
need to make sure your keywords are effectively integrated into
your content. These should be the same keywords that are in that
particular page's title.
Search engines look for keywords in context, which means they
need to be in sentences starting with a capital and ending with
a period.
Keywords should be used as close to the top of the page as reasonably
possible -- don't save them for the footer! It's recommended that
they appear within the first 150 words in the BODY tag of your
HTML code. (This means that if you have a 3 column table, the
search engine will read everything in the first column before
the second. Often navigation is placed in the first column with
content in the second. Just be aware of the order in which the
page is read by the search engine spider.)
Don't stuff your page with repetitions of keywords. Search engines
can spot this as non-legimate content and will severely penalize
your rankings. For instance, people used to place hundreds of
instances of keywords at the bottom of the page. They would change
the font color to match the background, so visitors couldn't see
it. But the spiders would see it and then boost rankings. This
trick used to work, but NOT ANY MORE!
Search engines are more savvy now and can spot this as spam. Don't
do it!
6. Wait for the Spiders to Find You
No need for arachnophobia! This is a good thing. With your keywords
placed in the title and in the top portion of the page, and with
your awesome, interesting, relevant content, you are now ready
to be "found" and cataloged by search engine spiders.
This can take awhile, though -- months maybe.
You can help this process along by registering with the human
edited search directories like DMOZ, LookSmart, and Yahoo. Spiders
frequently crawl the directories, so your site will be found faster
than otherwise.
Google uses 2 types of spiders: a freshbot
and a deep crawler. When a freshbot
finds new pages, it temporarily will boost your page's ranking
for that month. Then the ranking will drop some until the deep
crawler finds you again and positions your site in more of a permanent
ranking.
|
