URL’s

The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the name of the actual page itself. When you save a page of your website the name of file is the URL. For example http://www.webrankingconsultants.com/blue-widgets.htm would be a file name. The file name of a page of a website resides in the text box where you manually type in website addresses. The number of times your keyword phrase appears in other website’s URL’s is also important for search engine placement. At the time of this writing the phrase ‘blue widgets’ appears about 11 times of all pages indexed by Google. (again, very low competition)

Conclusion for search term ‘blue widgets’

Keyword Discovery says that ‘blue widgets’ is searched for less than one time per day and is not worth ranking for. The only other alternative was ‘buy blue widgets’. Wordtracker gives you a list of many other alternatives and says that ‘blue widgets’ are searched for zero times per day.

• # of times ‘blue widgets’ appears in <title> tags: 43
• # of times ‘blue widgets’ appears in anchor tags: 22,800
• # of times ‘blue widgets’ appears in body text: 55,000
• # of times ‘blue widgets’ appears in URL’s: 11
• # of times ‘blue widgets’ is searched for: less than 1

In the case of ‘blue widgets’ as the keyword phrase you would be better off picking an alternative on the list to try and gain high search engine placement for. In fact, from the results I wouldn’t be surprised to see this page rank well for this phrase in the near future.

Step Two: Competition Analysis

The second part of getting better search engine placement is doing a competition analysis of the websites that already rank high for the search term. What is done is examining the top ranking websites for when the keyword phrase is used in their title tags, anchor tags, header tags, and body text. (These terms were explained in step one)

With just these results alone you should be able to rank high in MSN. Use this information that was collected and just structure your website to be better than your competition. Unfortunately to rank better search engine placement in Yahoo or Google you’ll have to do a little more research by examining backlinks. (backlinks are links that point to a particular website)

In examining backlinks you should collect data on the following important areas:

• How many links point to your competitor’s site
• How valuable are the links pointing to your competitor’s website
• Where the links come from
• What anchor text is used in the links pointing to your competitor’s website

This can be done easier with the right software or by employing our services. Otherwise be prepared for a lot of research on the web.

Step Three: Structure your Website

Structuring of your website will have to be done by optimizing the code, navigation, and submition of a sitemap. This is done by creating the appropriate tags in the html code and being careful not to ‘over optimize’ your web site to set off spam alerts.

By optimizing with cleaner html code and better navigation you can be ensured that the search engine spiders can crawl and index your website easier.

By careful examination from the ‘competition analysis’ done from before you will learn how to structure your website better than your competitors so that your search engine placement will be higher than theirs.

It is very important that this be done by a professional, because if this is done incorrectly you can find your website getting penalized or worse yet BANNED from the search engines. This is where the phrases ‘white hat SEO’ and ‘black hat SEO’ come in that you may have heard of. Websites done correctly by professionals are done by ‘white hat SEOs’ while websites done by amateurs and so-called ‘professionals’ that try to ‘cheat’ the search engines using bad ‘tricks’ are called ‘black hat SEOs’.

Step Four: Building a Linking Campaign

Now that you are armed with the knowledge of what kind of links to build with your link building report you can start developing backlinks to your website for good search engine placement. After a certain number of qualified links are developed you will start getting the ranks you want. Development of ranks should be left to the professionals as well, because if you link to ‘bad neighborhoods’ (sites that already have been banned or penalized by the search engines) it will hurt you more than it will help you.

In our services we deliver high quality good links from trusted sources and avoid ‘bad neighborhoods’, ‘linking farms’, and ’spammers’.

After you achieve your high search engine placement and have sufficient links built up, you have to continue building links slowly to stay ahead of the competition and maintain your high rankings. That is why it is highly suggested to continue a small monthly link building campaign.

Step Five: Monitoring your website traffic

You can monitor your website traffic through the use of stats providing by your hosting company, but I would highly recommend using quality software to track your visitors.

Now that you are getting the traffic you need it is important to monitor your website traffic to help determine what they are interested in. From examining what pages your visitors look at and how long they spend on each page will give you an idea of what areas of your website need improving and what areas seems to be a strong interest with them. By looking at these you can see how well your marketing is working on your website.

Another thing that you can learn by looking at your web stats is where your customers are coming from. What countries do they come from? What languages do they speak? Should you create a copy of your website in a different language? Etc. By examining what type of people is visiting your website you can change your site’s marketing accordingly.

After fine tweaking of your website through the help of web stats and creating better search engine placement through optimizing your website you can have a thriving growing website!

Until the next article, have a great day!

The owner of this registered company has over twenty years experience with DOS, windows business applications, numerous programming languages, artistic development, and web design. Other areas of interest include web marketing, web promoting, and business marketing and development. After the persuasion of those praising his work, he decided to go into business himself and highly suggests everyone else to do the same.

The Internet Presence was founded in 2003 from a desire to become independent. Less than 1 year later Internet Presence has had accounts in three different states ranging from a locally owned auto collision repair shop to a glass packaging industry that sells its product worldwide.

Michael Rock
Web Development Contractor

The Internet Presence
(Web Site Design Service)

Web Ranking Consultants
(Search Engine Optimization Firm)

Copyright © Michael Rock
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
(You have permission to copy this article as long as it remains intact with the author’s byline)

Search Engine Placement for Website Owners

By: Michael Rock

If you are a website owner then you already know the value that search engine placement can have on your website. This web page will explain the ins and outs for you in plain English.

Many website owners are looking to better their rankings for visitor traffic to their websites, but one thing to remember is to ‘hook’ the visitor once they visit your website. It is true that higher rankings will get you more traffic to your website, but you have to convert those visitors to customers once they visit your website. So with the combination of high rankings and good marketing you will get the results that you are looking for.

Below is a brief description of what is done. For a more in depth explanations click on the links or read below. For an exact definition on how to do this by yourself be looking for our e-book on sale at our website in the near future.

Let’s get started with the steps needed to obtain better search engine ranks.

Step One: Keyword Research

Keyword research determines how often your search term is searched for, how competitive it is, gives you alternate keyword phrases to consider, and determine which ones to try for and which ones to dismiss.

Step Two: Competition Analysis

Competition analysis gives you the details on the websites that already rank high for the terms you want search engine placement for. Some of the data collected is how there web site is structured, what kind of a linking campaign they use to get high ranks, and the details on how your keyword is used in their sites.

Step Three: Structuring your Website

Structuring your website is done based upon the information collected in steps one and two. With this information it can be determined how to optimize your website for search engine placement and how to structure your website so that the search engines can crawl and index it better.

Step Four: Building a Linking Campaign

After getting the backlink information on your competition and using the information obtained from the keyword research it is discovered how to approach your linking campaign to better your ranks in the search engines. Placement using links is very important with Google and Yahoo and it is recommended that you continue to do this on a monthly basis to stay ahead of competition.

Step Five: Monitoring your Website Traffic

After driving traffic to your website it is important to monitor their habits when they visit. By examining what they do when they visit your website, you can learn how to tweak your website to convert those visitors into customers.

Step One: Keyword Research

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important step and the first step to consider for increasing your search engine placement. Say you want to rank high with the phrase ‘blue widgets’. After doing the keyword research you will discover some very important things:

How Many People Actually Search for ‘blue widgets’?

You may discover that not to many people actually search for ‘blue widgets’ and may want to consider trying for a different keyword phrase.

Discovery of Search Terms Related to ‘blue widgets’

In addition to the search term phrase ‘blue widgets’ you may discover other search terms that are searched for more often and have lower competition. Such as ‘blue widgets in Wisconsin’ or ‘widgets for sale’.

Rough Approximation of Competition using the Search Term ‘blue widgets’

In the keyword research report you will discover a rough approximation of competition with a value called KEI. KEI stands for ‘keyword effectiveness indicator’. The KEI of a number is NOT to be trusted. It is a ROUGH approximation of how valuable a keyword is. To get a better estimation of how valuable a keyword is you will have to dig a little deeper and find out how many times the keyword is used in <title> tags, <h1> header tags, url’s, links, and body text. This brings us to the second part of the keyword research that we offer that does a little competition analysis.

How Keyword Phrases are used for Search Engine Placement

First a little definition of title tags, header tags, anchor text, body text, and url’s.

Title Tags

Title tags appear as <title>Your title here.</title> in the html code of a website and appears at the top of your browser when you view the page. The number of times that your keyword phrase appears in other web pages determines how hard it will be to rank for that particular keyword phrase. At the time of this writing the term ‘blue widgets’ appears about 43 times out of all of the web pages indexed by Google. (This is VERY low competition considering how many billions of web pages that have been indexed already.)

Header tags

Header tags appear as <h1>Your header here</h1> in the html code of a website and appear usually as text that is larger and stands out in a web page. Header tags are <h1> all the way through <h6> where <h1> is the largest and most striking text until <h6> which represents the text that stands out the least. By determining how many times your keyword phrase appears in other web page header tags will help you see how difficult it will be to rank for that particular keyword phrase. The number of header tags used with your keyword phrase has to be determined by looking at the search engine placement of the top ten sites that rank using the term ‘blue widgets’.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the hyperlinks on a site that use the term ‘blue widgets’ as the words that point to another site. In html code it looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.webrankingconsultants.com/search-engine-placement-for-website-owners.html”>blue widgets</a>

And appears on the web site looking like this:

blue widgets

Great value is placed on the use of anchor text with keyword phrases and should be used when you build links to your website. At the time of this writing Google showed that about 22,800 links out there contain the phrase ‘blue widgets’.

Body Text

This counts how many web pages indexed have the phrase ‘blue widgets’ in its web site content. This number also has to be considered to determine if ‘blue widgets’ would be an effective phrase to go after for achieving better search engine placement. At the time of this writing ‘blue widgets’ appears in about 55,000 web pages.

Dave Davies speaks of the importance of having the pages content near the top through use of CSS style sheets or manipulating tables the right way. Dave also emphasizes the importance of watching the ratio between the code and content on the page. Again this is done smartly with the use of CSS style sheets. The factors that Dave Davies considers when determining the rankings of web pages are age, content, backlinks, keyword density, and how the pages rank in the other search engines. I have never really took a look at how the pages rank in other search engines into consideration, but can see his point on the subject. With the latest stat results showing that Google took 60% of the search market Dave states that he would rather show up on page 3 of Google than page 1 of MSN. Another opinion of my own is that you should consider your target audience when developing your site for rankings. Which search engine are they likely to choose? Yahoo and Ask Jeeves is usually the shopper’s choice, the technical crowd prefers either Google or MSN, and the linux generation is more likely to choose Google over MSN, etc.

Aaron Wall, the author of the book entitled ‘SEO Book’, talked about the comparisons of the algorithms that the search engine used and explaining the side effects and what sometimes goes wrong with them. For example BigDaddy’s infostructure update that caused problems with Google. My opinion on this matter is that you shouldn’t be concerned with chasing algorithms, but concentrate on doing what it takes to make your web site more valuable by using backlinks, publicity in the right areas through the use of tags such as furl, DIGG, yahoo, etc. With the popularity of your site going up naturally it is likely that your ranks will be rising on its own. Just keep in the back of your mind the likes and dislikes of search engines to cement this in effect.

Quotes from Aaron Wall on specific search engines:

“Google has been very focused on search; they bias towards information resources. They are good at determining true link quality. Place more weight on domain level trust (old trusted domains do well). Google has aggressive duplicate content filters. Looks much more at linguistic patterns than the other engines and filters out some hyper focused pages.”

“MSN is new to the game, relative. Link graph was heavily spammed by the time they got in; they like new sites, bursty links. They focus a lot more on on-page factors, and the algorithm is very literal.”

“Yahoo has been focused on being pretty literal; meaning if you search for “dog fight cats” it would look for that phrase specifically. They have changed last week to be more like Google. He still sees link exchanges and some blog spam doing well in Yahoo. Yahoo may be slightly more commercial bias then others.”

Most of the speakers spoke of the importance of checking your web stats through the use of web site analytics to find out what is working and what is not so that you can improve your web site. I have previously written a search engine optimization article on the subject that you can read. This article will give you a good insight on what to look for so that you can improve your web site.

Michael Rock is a search engine optimization specialist that provides website positioning strategies, SEO consultation, keyword research, analyze competition, web site analytics, and website linking campaigns to help you achieve better search engine ranks!

Copyright © Web Ranking Consultants and The Internet Presence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.