You built a great looking website but where is the traffic you hoped to generate?Too often I find very expensive corporate and businesswebsites that have given little thought to how the site will play inthe search engines. The development emphasis is typically on design andmarketing content rather than positioning and search engine friendlycontent.
The scenario generally proceeds as follows:
The marketing or IT department contracts an expensive websitedevelopment firm (or uses in-house techies) to build a nice browserpresentation complete with rollovers and flash components. Once thesite is built, they throw a plethora of keywords and phrases into thehome page's META tags believing this to be search engine positioning.The keywords and phrases generally come from the marketing departmentand are based on how they think people might search for them. Then thepage titles and META tags are coded for the home page and often usedover and over in monotonous fashion on each page of the website.
Minimal thought is given to structuring the page or websiteto be search engine friendly. JavaScript and cascading style sheetscript is left on each page rather than stored off page. Keywords areutilized haphazardly or stuffed into the page in weak attempts atgaining ranking. In the end, the site lingers in cyberspace attractingonly those who know it is there.
Proper planning and the inclusion of a search enginespecialist on the development team prior to building the website willimprove the odds of gaining top organic search engine ranking, as wellas increase the ROI on your development dollar.
Planning for search engine positioning can be elaborate orfairly straightforward depending on the number of people involved,volume of content, dynamic page issues, and target market. At aminimum, the planning process should include the following steps:
1. Identify the target audience
2. Research and identify the keywords and phrases the target audience will use
3. Establish a focused theme for the website
4. Research and purchase keyword relevant domain names
5. Create a working site outline that utilizes relevant keywords and phrases
6. Develop website copy content from the outline
7. Build a navigation structure that utilizes the identified keywords and phrases
8. Create search engine friendly graphic content and page structure
9. Develop page and content structure
10. Test site for structural integrity on the host server
11. Review page titles, META Tags, page structure, keyword density, and content structure
12. Hand submit the website to the search engines
13. Incorporate miscellaneous Search Engine Positioning Strategies
The thirteen steps in more detail
1. Identify the target audience
The process of market identification runs the gamut of "I'vegot a gut feeling" to formalized surveys and studies. Your web audiencemay or may not be the same as your brick and mortar audience.Identifying the target audience for your website may provide somesurprises and reveal weaknesses in your current marketing paradigm. Ineither event thorough market identification will be a good exercise inmore formally identifying your audience. Simply having a product and putting it on the net isn'tenough. You will also need to know what problems your audience has thatis leading it to look for solutions like yours. The key to positioningisn't just identifying your audience. It is identifying your audience'sproblems and applying enough intuition to predict their searchbehavior.
2. Research and identify the keywords and phrases the target audience will use
Keyword identification and analysis is second only to marketidentification and is perhaps the key step in building a search engineoptimized website. Finding and identifying the right keywords usuallycombines a process of intuitive and formal discovery. Typically,keyword discovery begins intuitively using your knowledge of yourtarget market and industry insider keywords you believe your audiencemight search on.
After making your initial keyword selections you then need totake a more formal approach using some analysis tools, such as onlineor written surveys and other keyword identification tools that can befound online. There are two primary online services that you can use tosearch for keywords and key phrases, Overture term suggestion tools andWordTracker.
Overture provides a free term suggestion tool that allows youto enter a potential keyword or keyword phrase and see all of itsrelated search terms. Overture search term suggestion tool will alsotell you how many searches were performed on that word/phrase duringthe past month.
WordTracker is the primary keyword/key phrase discoveryservice used most by professional SEOs (search engine optimizationspecialists) and it is one of the most effective tools available forresearching the potential of your selected keywords/phrases. TheWordTracker service is comprehensive and allows the analysis to go intogreat detail on traffic and competition for a search term.
A concept central to WordTracker is the KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Indicator.
The KEI provides a measurement of how competitive a keyword isand what the odds are of getting ranking on it. The higher the KEI, thebetter chance you have of getting ranked for that keyword. Their statsalso reflect the last 400 million searches; the previous 24-hoursearches and how many websites are competing for a givenkeyword/phrase.
The Overture tool is more rudimentary in its approach but itwill assist you in initially sorting out potential keywords however,when you get into the serious work of positioning you need to useWordTracker.
3. Establish a focused theme for the website
The next important step in your planning is to be sure that thewebsite will have a theme and that the theme is highly focused. Themebased design, not just graphic theme but also content theme, is animportant factor in attaining top rankings for a website among many ofthe leading search engines.
A focused, theme based website will provide many expandedbenefits to your search engine positioning efforts. Theme-basedoptimization relies on developing the site's primary theme and thencompartmentalizing that general theme category into more specificsubcategories.
The home or index page is a gateway for your visitor, as wellas for search engine spiders to enter into the more specific/targetedcategories of the website. For example, if you built a website with abroad category about golf, it might have the subcategories of courses,swing techniques, rules, etc. and then again be divided intosub-subcategories of courses in Alabama, etc. It is key that you keepthe links within each category on-theme and, hopefully, utilizingkeywords. It is also important to minimize cross-linking betweendisparate categories such as courses in Alabama, and hitting a chipshot.
If the website and its links are not kept clean and on themeit will cause some search engine confusion because the search engine isattempting to make sense of the importance of what it is categorizing.For this reason, it is important to understand the basics of how asearch engine views a website.
How does a search engine view a website?
Initially, the search engine looks at the URL, then it looks atlinks/subdirectories of the URL, followed by page titles, maybe metatags, heading tags, external links, alt text (if it has a linkassociated with it), internal links, and content (copy).
It essentially takes a snapshot of the page and from thispicture the search engine has to categorize the information by deletingwords like and, a, the, etc. and it then attempts to identify recurringwords. Following this, the SE stems words by changing plural tosingular, etc. After it has completed those sorts it attempts toidentify word phrases that recur and determine the weight of therecurring "keywords" through indexing. Finally, the search engineattempts to identify a site theme based upon the dominance of recurringkeywords and keyword phrases.
4. Obtain relevant domain names
What is in a domain name anyway? Everything! First, there is the technical nomenclature of the domain name.The IP address is divided into a network and a host portion specifiedby four fields each separated by a period. Typically this is written indotted decimal notation such as 205.157.24.121, the network portionmight be the 205.157.24 and the host portion might be the .121.However, recognizing and remembering numeric IP addresses would be toodifficult for us humans so a system of attaching a domain name to theIP address solved that problem. It is important to note that the searchengine spiders still utilize the IP addresses; which brings up a keypoint, if you are seeking to get good search engine ranking it pays tohave your own IP address rather than host your website on a sharedserver with 100s or 1000s of other websites.
How do you use a domain name to increase your relevancy to the search engines?
Most individuals and companies select a domain name based uponthe name of their business, product, or trade name, which is an obviouschoice. However, the business, product, or trade name isn't necessarilythe best name to use from a search engine-positioning viewpoint. Inaddition to the obvious domain name choice, it pays dividends to reviewthe keyword combinations from step 2 and identify keywords or phrasesthat might make good domain names. A generic domain name will carrysome weight with the search engines. For example: www.xyzcorp.com willmean less to the search engine than www.fly-fishing.com orwww.flyfishing.com.
An alternative to purchasing a generic domain name is tocreate a generic named sub-domain within your primary domain. Forexample: www.xyzcorp.fly-fishing.com. Most domain hosting platformswill allow you to do this.
5. Create an outline utilizing relevant keywords and phrases
Now that you have used intuition, WordTracker and Overturetools to identify your best keywords and keyword phrases you areprobably anxious to begin writing copy. Still, before you begin writingcopy you need to create an outline for each page of the site. Theoutline is your next step and your best bet for staying on theme andkeeping your keywords in focus and out front.
For example: Lets say your topic is best places to fish inWyoming and you've identified the keyword phrases "Fishing in Wyoming","Fishing in Fremont County", and "lures for German Brown trout". Youroutline might begin something like the following:
1. Fishing in Wyoming
a. Fishing in Fremont County
 i. Fishing at Louis Lake
 b. Fishing in Park County
 i. Fishing at Buffalo Bill Reservoir
 c. Best lures for Wyoming game fish
 i. Lures for German Brown Trout.
The key is to create an organizational theme that makes senseand moves from the broad to the specific. In this site, the broad themeis fishing in Wyoming; the next is fishing in Fremont county, thenspecific lakes. Another theme within the site's main theme would belures.
6. Create website copy based on the outline
While completing your outline you might find additionalkeywords within each category that have potential. As an example,fishing in Fremont County might also include "The Sinks," a favoritetourist attraction and stream. If you use WordTracker you can check tosee if that term is searched on and to what extent.
A key to content optimization for the search engines is relevancy.
A website that provides little in the way of relevant contentwill not achieve high rankings. Relevancy is important in both thehuman driven directories and the spider driven search engines. Bothrely on an ever changing and evolving set of guidelines and/oralgorithms to determine a web page or a website's ranking within theirframework. Like the Colonel's secret spices search engines keep us allguessing as to what is important to them making search engine marketinga challenging and labor intensive job.
7. Create a navigation structure
![Navigation structure example [click to read how to make it]](/img_articles/3314/pic11.jpg)
Creating navigation structure is a component of outlinecreation and copy development as the navigation structure isessentially created from the site outline. Good site design includes an intuitive navigation structurethat results in the visitor being able to easily find informationwithin the site. To reach any point within the website, the website'svisitor (human or search engine) should not have to click on a menuitem more than three times. This keeps the design structure flatter,resulting in a better structure for search engine optimization becausesearch engine spiders tend to traverse only a couple levels deep intothe website structure.
The top level of the navigation structure can be buttons,navigation bars, text links, animated graphics, or drop-down selectionmenus. However, make sure that graphic links, buttons, etc. use the"alt" tag and are properly labeled because the search engine spiderswill use the "alt" label of a link to determine its weight andrelevance. Text links are best for the search engine positioningpurposes, especially text links that use keywords and keyword phrases.
Below the top layer of your website's navigation structure,links should typically be positioned within the body of your content.However, there can be secondary level navigation menus as well. Thesecondary level of your website's navigation should be text based.Navigation launched from content-based text links using keyword phrasestends to hold more weight with search engines.
Some guidelines for developing navigation structure include:
· Create an intuitive structure
· Maintain consistency throughout the site
· Give the user location feedback
· Keep it relevant and in context
· Offer alternative routes to important material
· Use clear visual messages
· Use labels that are clear and concise
· Maintain consistency with the site's theme
· Design your navigation and links for both human visitors and search engine spiders
8. Create search engine friendly graphic content and page structure
Simply keep in mind that a key to website optimization isdownload speed to the visitor's browser. Unless you are developing anart or graphic art website, keep graphics small and only use what isneeded to keep the site design interesting.
9. Page and content structure
Page design from a search engine optimization viewpointrequires several basic elements. Keep your page clean and simple!Search engine spiders can't read JavaScript rollovers or cascadingstyle sheets. They have a difficult time sorting through frames, andsometimes tables. If you must use JavaScript or CSS, move it off pageinto separate .css or .js files. Do not, repeat, and do not use frames.No need to go into why, just don't use them.
Build your pages so that your and its text copy sit highwithin the page structure and are not pushed down the page byJavaScript, CSS or tables. Most search engines place more weight oncontent that is close to the top of the page. Be sure each page istitled and that its title is relevant to the page and uses the page'sprimary keywords. Don't create a generic title for every page in yoursite. Each page's META tags should be specifically designed for thatpage and should reflect the same keywords on the page that appear inthe "keywords" and "descriptions" META tags.
10. Test site for structural integrity on the host server
This is an important step. Make sure your site works by testingall of the internal links and external links before going live. If yourlinks are not working, or pages are not showing you will be hurtingyou're chances for search engine ranking. Test, test, and retest beforetaking the next step of submitting your site to the search engines.Also, validate your pages html to make sure it is consistent and notbroken.
11. Review page titles, META Tags, structure, keyword density, and content
Each page should be checked for congruence of titles, METAtags, and keyword density within the body content and the internal andexternal links. Typically keyword density should be 3 to 4% of the pagecontent but this depends on competition and other factors. There areseveral good software applications and online services that allow youto test your pages for proper structure compared to the top results fora given search term. You may find that you will have to make severalrewrites and passes at each page to maximize its potential forobtaining top organic search engine listings.
12. Hand submit the website to the search engines
I bet you've seen them, or received their emails. "Get topranking by submitting your website to thousands of search engines!" Weguarantee top rankings and will submit your site for $39 a month! Thosesubmission shops typically use automated software that shotguns yourwebsite across the net in a very poorly targeted manner. In fact mostsearch engines and search directories frown on automated submission andhave adopted methods to prevent it. In the war for search enginepositioning site submission to only a few of the major search enginesand other targeted regional and national search directories is whatcounts. Additionally, submission to many of the minor search enginesand directories may help build some link popularity.There are only a few major search engines to focus oninitially and those include Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Fast/Lycos, Inktomi,Open Directory (DMOZ) to mention a few. Most other search engines anddirectories draw their results from one of these major players.
You might also find that there are some industry andregionally specific search engines and directories, but beware of theservices that claim to submit to thousands of search engines. Most ofthose operators are tied into link farms and groups that will harvestyour email for spammers. Some represent link farms, which will hurt youmore than they will help you, so stay away from them.
Also, be careful of the so-called classified ads. If yousubmit to any of these, be sure to use an email address you don't mindthrowing away because you will receive 100s if not thousands ofunwanted spam emails.
13. Miscellaneous Search Engine Positioning Strategies
A discussion on search engine positioning and websiteoptimization wouldn't be complete without a brief discussion about"cloaking".
The technique of cloaking is used to display a different pageto the search engine spiders from the one the visitor views. In theory,the idea behind cloaking is to create an optimized page for the searchengine spiders that is all text and stuffed with keywords. The searchengine spider sees the all text based page and the human visitor ispresented with a prettier more graphic page. Therefore, cloakingrequires that two sets of pages be created; one for the search enginespider and another for the human visitor.
This dual page concept allows the site to present a flashierlook and feel to the human visitor, while being able to present searchengine optimized pages to the spiders. Cloaking also serves the purposeof preventing competitors from seeing what kind of optimizationtechniques are being used. The concept is excellent in theory, but inpractice it is somewhat less than perfect and typically is notrecommended.
Cloaking requires the Website to identify whether the arrivingvisitor is a search engine spider or a human visitor. Checking thevisitors' IP address or their User-agent string is typically used tocorrectly identify whether or not it is a search engine spider. Thisrequires the cloaker to maintain a comprehensive up-to-date database ofknown spider IP's, which takes a lot of work to gather and maintain.
Cloaking may have some legitimate uses as a spoofingtechnique but it causes many search engines that dislike the practiceto punish sites that are cloaking their pages. Potential punishmentsinclude burying the site deep in the results far from the top, orcompletely banning it from the index.
The risk involved in cloaking depends on what it is actuallybeing used for. In an IP-based cloak where the title, META Descriptionand the first row of text are the same for the search engine optimizedand visitor optimized pages, and if the sizes of those pages (in KB's)are close in size, the site is fairly safe. However, there is stillrisk and like going to jail the "cloaker" has to weigh the risk ofgetting caught and punished with the benefits of the offense because itis never completely risk free. You should always be prepared for theworst when using cloaking - your site could get banned.
Link building strategies
Some search engines have been placing some emphasis on "linkanalysis" in addition to traditional algorithms and other informationretrieval techniques to help determine relevance. Traditional searchengine algorithms use factors like textual, semantic, and conceptualrelationships between pages and queries. Using link analysis, they tryto categorize the structure of the web and its "social networks" formedwhen people link web pages to one another.
Link popularity refers to the number and quality of theincoming links pointing to a site. The search engine places weight onthe fact that other sites consider your site important enough to linkto. So, in the engine's view, your site is raised in importance.
Building link popularity, in my opinion, is one of the mostdifficult areas of search engine optimization because the searchengines filter out "artificially created", non-relevant links. This ispartly due to the fact that in the early days, link farms and linkexchange programs worked were subject to extensive spamming techniques.Search engines want links from authoritative sites, or links from sitesthat share the same focus as your site.
Good luck in your positioning efforts I hope that one or twoideas within this article will give you the information you needed toachieve higher and more consistent search engine rankings. Remember,search engine optimization is an ongoing process not a one-time effortand even if you achieve higher rankings, today you may need to returnto the basics repeatedly to keep your rankings.
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