What works? That is what we'll you here.show
Before we begin, here are some useful definitions that will help you understand this discussion and your internet experience better:
Search Engine A site that indexes World Wide Web pages based on content. Each engine works differently. They may base the results of their searches on Meta Tags, page content, page title, or a combination of these. The search engines get their content from spider (see below) programs. Some popular search engines are Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos. (SearchHound is the newest and coolest of all. It allows you to search 8 engines at once- including its own superb index). Contrast this with a "Directory". Directory A site that categorizes the World Wide Web based on input submitted by someone. A good example of this is Yahoo. In this case, the actual web content is never accessed. When someone searches for a keyword, this is referenced against a database of sites that contain a title and description for a particular site. Once again, this site is categorized by topic and the title and description are submitted by someone. Spider A program used by a search engine to index the World Wide Web content. Spiders are all set differently, but they all capture specific information about a page. Some capture the title and the first 1,000 characters of content. Some capture the title and "description" Meta Tag. Some look only for the "keyword" meta tag. Some use a combination of all of these methods. Hit Any time a document is accessed from a web site. If someone tells you they get 1,000 hits a day at their site, this may not be a big deal. For instance, if they have 15 images on their page each time their page is accessed it generates 16 hits (once for each image and once for the HTML document). Ask them how they got this information and you'll get a better idea about what they mean by the statement. This information is generally useless for our purposes. It usually doesn't matter how many times a particular graphic is used. User Session Any time a single user logs on to a site. He can look at all the pages of the site, but it still equals only one user session. Page View Any time a viewer looks at a particular page. This is more meaningful than a hit. Access Logs (Server Logs) Most web servers maintain access logs. This log will contain information about which pages have been viewed how many times, what page referred the web surfer to your page, what time they came in, any errors encountered if any. Ask your ISP to set this up on your site. Most good web hosting services will offer some form of statistical analysis. Keyword Selection
The first and most important step in manipulating the search engines is keyword selection. Keywords must be both relevant and frequently used.
What do I mean by relevance? If you own a website about "marketing" and your website comes up first in an Alta Vista search for "alternative medicine", you will get some visits from this. You'll get them, but they won't do you any good.
The term "alternative medicine" is indeed frequently used. But its relevancy to marketing is questionable.
Chances are, you are trying to sell a product or attract certain interest groups with your site. The visits you get based on the "alternative medicine" searches will be irrelevant. If you are selling marketing products or services, I sincerely doubt any of these visitors will be interested in your products.
Now, if you simply want visits for the sake of visits (for instance, if you are selling ad views on your site), then it doesn't matter where these hits come from. See "What Keywords Work."
If you are looking for relevant visits (if you're selling a product or trying to attract a particular interest group), then you need to be more careful in your selection. Relevant visits equal more chances for sales and more chances for return visits.
In this section we'll show you how to select relevant keywords. In the following sections we'll show you how to apply them. This may not make sense now, but it will pay off later.
Let's take the case of a site featuring water faucets. The initial list of keywords the owner devised consisted of repeating the term "water faucet" 100 times. Makes sense, right? Well he's making several mistakes here and not taking full advantage of keyword power. Here are some rules he's ignoring and how he can be applying them:
Use Plurals If you pluralize your words, those who search for the singular and plural will both find your site. In this case he should have written "water faucets".
Diversify One word alone will get a few people, but not everyone thinks like you do. Try to get into the mind of someone who would find your site/product useful. In this case, he could have used words like "plumbing", "home improvement", "sinks", "kitchens", "bathrooms", "plumbers", etc.
Don't Repeat Excessively Some search engines are beginning to filter out sites that repeat words too much. I repeat about 2-5 times and leave it at that. Most sites will recognize this. Keep an eye out for word on policy changes.
Use Varying Forms Not everyone is going to write "water faucet" as you see here. Right or wrong, there are many people out there that will search for "water-faucet" or "waterfaucet." It probably seems silly to you, but it will make perfect sense to someone else. In this case it probably won't be so important, but what if you are offering an IQ test? You would be wise to use both "I.Q. tests" and "IQ tests".
Use Power Combinations This refers to economy of space. Some sites will only look at the first 250 characters or so of a keyword list (in meta tags). To use the space more effectively you can combine two combinations. For example, if the site here also offers bottled spring water, they need to include that in their list. Instead of writing "bottled spring water" and "water faucets" they can combine the two and simply say "bottled spring water faucets". This way people searching for both keyword combinations will pull up the page with less space used. This frees up some more space for more keywords.
Use Phrases In a recent study conducted by one of the major search engines, it was revealed that over 65% of all searches made use phrases rather than single words.
Target No More Than Four Keywords or Phrases Per Page If you try to target more, your page will lose relevancy for all words concerned. Each search engines looks at only a certain portion of your page. Don't waste that space! The more pages your site has, the more keywords you will be able to target....
Now, take a moment to write down the keywords related to your site. Once you have generated a list. Ask yourself: "What would someone who would benefit from my site be looking for"? Then add the results.
Show your list to your friends and colleagues. See if they have anything to add.
An interesting test may involve asking people the above question without showing them your list. Ask as many people as you can. Compare the lists. The phrases or words that show up the most are likely to coincide with the most "frequently used" words on the search engines.
Are you excited? You should be. You are on the road to phenomenal traffic!
The Title
Another great asset is your page title. I don't mean a title like you see directly above. I mean the "title" tag in HTML. It usually shows up at the very top of your web browser next to the browser logo.
This tag is in the page head (between <head> and </head>), and looks like this:
<title>Your Page Title Here</title>
Once again, you want to use as many keywords here as possible. Just be sure not to make it look tacky. If it looks unprofessional, people won't think that much of your page.
When most search engines display your page data as the result of a search, the <title> tag is the first thing they display. This makes it double important to ensure the tag looks professional. If the tag says something like "tools tools tools plumbing plumbing plumbing", the type of person you are looking for probably won't even click on the link even if it does show up first in the search engine.
It's up to you to creatively include your keywords in a professional looking title. The title can be long (not too long, though), but it had better not be just a keyword list. Have a friend look it over to see what they think.
Remember: don't target more than four keyword phrases per page and don't repeat excessively.
Title Repetition
For example, rather than simply having the following title tag:
<head> <title>Online IQ Tests. Test your intelligence with these I.Q. Tests online. See if your brain measures up.</title> </head>
You can make the tag look like this:
<head> <title>Online IQ Tests. Test your intelligence with these I.Q. Tests online. See if your brain measures up.</title> <title>Online IQ Tests. Test your intelligence with these I.Q. Tests online. See if your brain measures up.</title> <title>Online IQ Tests. Test your intelligence with these I.Q. Tests online. See if your brain measures up.</title> <title>Online IQ Tests. Test your intelligence with these I.Q. Tests online. See if your brain measures up.</title> <title>Online IQ Tests. Test your intelligence with these I.Q. Tests online. See if your brain measures up.</title> </head>
For some search engines, the second example will be weighted five times more than the first. Someone searching for "IQ test" will be more likely to find the document using the second tag example in a search.
Warning: Title repetition is (like hidden input and keyword stuffing) considered bad netiquette. Some search engines may penalize for it. However, some people have found this technique to be quite effective... Use prudence and caution.
Know the Different Search Engines
We could spend some time here and spout off some of the standard wisdom about what search engines uses what rules to index documents.
But in my experience, this information is generally unreliable. Most search engines are very secretive about the indexing rules they use. Some will publish one rule and use another. Some change their rules all the time.
The only reliable way to figure out how each search engine works at any particular time is to compare search results.
(The easiest way to do this is revealed in Tracking Your Progress.)
What do they have in common? Do the first documents all have extensive keyword meta tags? Do they have long descriptive titles with lots of keywords?
Using this method, you can figure out what a search engine is looking for at this particular time. Modify your pages to accommodate this and then submit. Once your pages are spidered, it will probably be a while before they are automatically reindexed. So, it's OK to change your page once you are sure it has been spidered by that particular engine. Why change it? To submit to the other search engines of course.
Changing your page is not the only solution here... More to come.
What Keywords Work?
Hmmm. Good question. What keywords will bring in the most people? Well, as I mentioned before, this depends on what your goals are.
Chances are you are not just looking for visits, but relevant visits. By this we mean, you want to attract visitors who will be interested in what you are offering.
Lists have been circulated showing the "most searched for keywords". The generally consist of words like:
sex, naked, women, gay, adult, erotica etc....
The theory goes like this: If I fill up my page with words like that, I'll get more visitors. Since these are the most searched for keywords, my page will be the most viewed.
Well, this is erroneous thinking for two reasons:
The number of people trying to use this strategy is so high that it is highly unlikely that your page will come up first or even 100th.
If someone is looking for pornography, do you think they will spend more than a second on your plumbing page? It's probably a teenage boy that doesn't have enough money to buy your products anyway.
This is not to say that no one has used this strategy effectively in the past. They are the exception, though. Rather than water down your list with words that are unrelated to your content, use words that are relevant.
So what keywords work?
The ones that someone who may be interested in your product may use in a search.
That's worth saying again: The ones that someone who may be interested in your product may use in a search.
It used to be up to you to find these words, but that has all changed.
Since our first publication of this manual, a service that will change this whole field forever has been released by the up and coming search engine SearchHound.
It is called Strategic Information Network (SIN - their motto is: "the advantage we give you is just SINful!").
What they are doing is surveying the keywords searched for by people of various demographic groups and selling the info in a subscription format.
So, you ask yourself, "what keywords are people searching for financial topics using in the search engines?" And SIN has the answer. You buy a three month subscription and they feed you the top 100 words and phrases of your desired topic each week.
Not only will this drastically improve your search engine strategy, but it will keep you abreast of trends.
It's like having your finger on the pulse of the world.
Are your wheels spinning yet?
Do the exercise at the end of "Keyword Selection" again, using what you've learned here.
Multiple Pages
I mentioned before that there was another solution to the problem of satisfying the various search engine criteria. You can't satisfy all the people all the time... So what do you do?
If you have the web space to do it, create a separate web page that satisfies the requirements of each of the major search engines. An idea here is to take your "main" or "index" page and create several copies of it: maina.htm, mainb.htm, mainc.htm etc... With each copy change the invisible components to satisfy particular search engines.
Here it is step by step:
Go to the search engine you are targeting. Do a search for a few of your keywords. Compare the top five documents and see what they have in common. Apply this to one of your extra pages and submit it. Repeat this process for all the major search engines.
(There's a great program out on the market that will do this for you as well as submit your pages to many sites. It's called Global PromoBot.)
Remember that some of the pages may have changed since they were indexed by the spider. In this case, the information here will be erroneous. That's why it's important to compare the first five or so documents at least. If you look at just the first, the information may be erroneous. Compare what they all have in common. Apply this to your page and you will have a higher ranking with this search engine.
Another way to multiply yourself even further is to create separate pages for different keyword groups. For instance, if there are several different groups of people that may be interested in your product (MLMers, entrepreneurs, HTML beginners, etc.), you may want to create a separate group of pages to address each of these interest groups.
To clarify, if you are trying to attract 3 distinct groups of people and you want to target 6 different search engines, you will create 18 distinct pages. This will improve your relevant visits considerably.
How to Submit
In the old days of the Internet (in Internet terms, this is say, two years ago), people would submit their sites one by one to the various search engines, directories, and link sites.
Later, some smart entrepreneurs developed services for registering sites for webmasters. Let's face it, how many of us have the time to submit our sites one by one. "Someone will do it for me? Great!"
The problem here is that the services are too expensive for what they offer. Who has $200 to $1000 dollars to blow on promotion that you're not even sure will work?
Then along came the submission programs. These promised to make the whole process much simpler and economical for the webmaster. The problem was that most of the programs were ineffective or did not submit to many different search engines.
Well times have changed much and there are now two excellent automated search programs on the market: Global PromoBot and Submit Wolf. There are many programs like this on the market, but these are the only two that I have found to be effective.
Now, don't get me wrong, any submit program is going to have flaws. Your chances of getting listed in such sites as Yahoo are pretty slim if you use these programs, but they are great for about all the rest.
Global PromoBot doesn't submit to as many different places as Submit Wolf, but it has a few other interesting features that make it worth owning: deep submit and mirror page generation.
The deep submit feature (in the pro version) will look for all of the pages in your site and submit each of them to the search engines. A pretty handy tool if you're trying to take advantage of every page in your site. The mirror page generation feature will create five different versions of any specified page and tweak each one for different search engine types. Very cool.
Submit Wolf does not have all of the sexy deep submit and mirror page generation features, but it makes up for it in volume. The only problem is that you have to pay for expansion packs if you want more sites.
Global PromoBot, on the other hand has free unlimited lifetime updates that increase the number of sites and improve the submission algorithms. This deals the knock-out blow, in our opinion.
If you're really serious about promotion, owning one of these is essential (although we prefer Global PromoBot). They are reasonably priced and very reliable. Both offer free trial versions that have some sites disabled, but enough to take the program for a good spin around the block.
Tracking Your Progress
We mentioned before that the best way to find out how each search engine works is to look at the results of searches conducted on each engine. Compare the results and apply your findings to your pages.
The problem here is that it can get quite difficult to manage what changes you've made and what effects the changes have had on each of your pages.
One way to track this is to set up a spread sheet with each of your pages and keep notes on what changes you've made, what engines you've submitted them to, and what effects you've noticed with each change.
Sound like a pain? Well, it is. First of all you'd have to go to each engine, conduct a search, and go through all of the results to find out where your page stands. Then you would have to make adjustments on your spread sheet and then change your game plan.
Imagine doing this for each of your pages and for all of the major search engines? You would spend all day trying to keep up.
Well, don't worry. There's a program called WebPosition that will do all of this work for you.
Not only will this program find the exact position of each of your pages in each of the major engines, but it will give you advice on how to improve your positioning as well. Then it will generate reports and let you compare your position with that of the last report. It even gives a warning if your position drops!
What really sets this program apart is the "Mission Creation" feature. It asks you to specify what your specific goals are and helps you achieve them.
For instance, let's say you want to rank in the top ten of Excite search results when someone searches for the phrase "mutual funds". This program will take you step by step through the process making this a reality.
This helps you get not only hits, but relevant hits.
You can even download a free trial of this awesome program at the WebPosition download site.
If you use this program in combination with the two submission programs recommended, you should have no problem getting thousands of relevant hits a day.
Further Study
Congratulations! If you have read the entire contents of this e-book, you are one of the proud few who really know the bottom line about winning the search engine game.
If you apply everything you've learned here to heart, you will surely improve the traffic at your site drastically.
Remember, though, that the rules are changing all the time. For the latest version of this e-book and for great articles on marketing, sales, success, and the net, check out the Internet Marketing Library. You will also find other great e-books on killer marketing techniques, sales, and more.
And for great deals on only the best marketing and success tools, visit the Internet Marketing ProShop.
Also, you may want to ask for a free copy of the Self Employment Services newsletter. Every month you'll find the latest information on marketing, sales, self employment, self-improvement and much more. It wouldn't hurt to get a free copy. The contents of a single issue will drastically improve your bottom line.
Here's to your success!
