Search engine positioning guide

Why use the Internet for ones business?...

• Marketing : to attract people to one's web page and position one's goods and services.
• Support : to provide resources to one's client base to create more efficient and cost effective customer care.
• Transactions : to provide more efficient and cost effective customer transactions (ecommerce, forms, returns, shipping)
• Training and education: To teach them something.
• Entertainment: Create an entertaining page or resources within a page to attract and create repeat "browsers". - like the play area in shopping mall.
• Systems Management: many companies pay another company to host and manage their entire computer system. All Internet and Intranet traffic flows through the one facility. This strategy can become a cost effective one as the percentage of an organization begins to become more Internet centric.

There a a number of Internet marketing strategies being used today for the sole purpose of attracting people to ones web page.

• Luck Model: Build, host and hope - with the options: real and simulated domain names, free or fee based hosting. The only real chance if getting found here is through luck, business card URLs, and unique keywords.
• Pretty Obscure Model: Search engine spiders don't like pretty web sites. Only 1 out of 20 web sites submitted to the search engines gets listed. (E.g. www.SandyLevel.org and www.hgwt.net ) The realization of this generates a great deal of frustration, giving rise to the following practices:
• SEP Model: Design, analyze, competitive best practice study, optimize, promote, host, monitor, adapt - targeting prominent keyword placement with search engines. The goal here is top 30 placement on the top 20 search engines on your primary keywords.
• Reciprocal links Campaign - Search engine placement and traffic can be enhanced by encouraging a reciprocal links exchange with ones market affiliate and associations.
• Banner Ad Campaign - placing click though links with web portals. (E.g. www.BlythewoodNET.net), search engines.
• Information Page Campaign - create Information pages designed for prominent search engine placement with click throughs to ones services. (e.g. www.SouthernBaptistSermons.com)
• Retention Campaign - once we have them on our site, how to we keep them there and have them come back

A good rule of thumb for service organizations is that 80% of the support calls you take are common in nature. This type of frequently asked question (FAQs) should be places on one's web page for one's client base. The world is becoming accustomed to being able to find answers utilizing search engine and keywords. You want to be on the list of places that the search engines look.

For personal web pages, many individuals build, promote and host small pages about themselves, and about their business. The bulk of the web consist of these small obscure pages. The reason for this: They are cheap and easy to build. The ways that someone will find one of these pages is through:

• A URL on a business card
• In an advertisement elsewhere
• By keyword search on something unique to that site
• By referrer link

If you are interest in this model, a copy of Microsoft Frontpage and the following resources, and you are in the game:

thefreesite.com - they list the top 20 or so free web hosting services.

ftpvoyager - excellent FTP utility - shareware

SiteSolutions.com - excellent - free web based - web site analysis tool

Build your site in front page, plug in meta tags, upload using ftpvoyager, optimize using SiteSolutions.com then submit manually. Depending on your abilities, the whole process would take 4 to 8 hours to get a few pages built, moderately optimized and submitted to the search engines.

It is tempting to build elaborate FLASH home pages, with bells and whistles galore. FRAMES are also excellent for maintain nice navigation and tight control on how the data is displayed; but the catch is: When the search engine sends a spider to crawl though your HTML code to try to determine how to index you, it cant read the text inside the FLASH graphics, and doesn't know how to handle the FRAMES pages. Therefore your site joined the 19 out of 20 sites submitted that don't even get indexed.

These are two categories of obscurity here. Poor rankings and no rankings. Pretty sites frequently get no rankings.

Search engines look for certain things, and give priority (ranking) to those pages that do it well. So if we design to the search engines expectations to begin with we can avoid the disappointment of obscurity.

The design process begins with

Client identification - who are they and what are they looking for. This step should generate: 3 primary keywords and/or phrases and 7 or so secondary keywords and/or phrases.

Search on your 3 keywords and see what comes up. Use Google, MSN, Lycos and Yahoo here as they are the benchmarks and represent the bulk of web searches. Record the urls of those who's position you would like. Realize that much of their success may be their design PLUS the nature of their reciprocal links PLUS the existing volume of traffic to them and their reciprocal link partners.

Check Your Competition : Using a search engine by search engine tool, analyze the HTML code of each of your competitor's URLs. If they are well optimized, well structured you may be in for more that you planned for, but in my experience, there is always room for optimization beyond the competitors.

Plan the Domain Names, Title, Description, Page Structure, Keywords, Graphics, Directory Structure, Hyperlinks around generating a superior test results than the competing pages.

Build the primary pages used so get the people to you, post, host and test. Optimize. Test. And continue until you are sure you are ready to submit. Double check your competitors again. Thoroughly scan the page for SPAM and other know flags that may get your site rejected. Also check for broken links.

Submit your site manually to the main engines. (See table) Some will crawl your site and pick up all of the pages - but some will want each page submitted. Use our URL Checker to keep tabs on when your pages are indexed. 3 weeks is great - 8 weeks is normal.

DMOZ - Now create a title and Description for the DMOZ and submit to it.

YAHOO -

Now begin to look at the other web marketing campaigns

Once someone visits, why would they come back? - Either you have to entertain them, or let them know you have great information that solves a need they have.

• Fast information. (E.g. www.Google.com)
• Optimized graphics, multimedia enhancement, interactivity.
• Avoidance of slow performance e.g. Lots of little pages.
• Customized customer feel - e.g. Cookies.
• Lots of good information. (www.ricehope.com)
• Free stuff / Great prices

You can only market one web page so much. One page and a few keywords can only take you so far. Now you are ready to begin thinking outside the box.

How do weekend shrimp fishermen fill their 48 quart coolers?

Random casting ? no, That may get a few shrimp, but mostly mullett and oyster shells.

Baiting? - well bating seems like a good idea, most use dog food, fish meal and mud balls.

One big pile of bait? - no, the shrimp aren't that bright to find one big bait.

Lots of little piles of bait? - Yup. I think they even license the number of poles to keep it fair. This same method can be deployed on the web. They are called informational pages. You target keywords, and provide a page that is full of good information that would attract your type of customer. At the bottom of the information page, you try to drive "those needing more information or additional help" to your home page.