by 9 people |
SEO - Stay On Top of The Competition
After you hit that submit or search button on the search engine like Google or Yahoo, most likely you will get millions of results. Most often, if users cannot find what they're looking for on the first or second page of the results, they do another search using another keyword. If your page is not listed on the first or second page, nobody will find your page. Worst is if trying to sell something. You cannot get any conversion. No visitor = no profit.
On this lens, I will show you how to get your site listed on search engines, at least on the top 10. I have experimented on this to the point that I make my own website from scratch, bought a domain, applied the basics of SEO that I will show you and then watch my site go from the second page to top. Although my site is not existing now, but my point was I was successful in getting my site a top rank in Google without spending a penny in advertising(see the picture below for my page rank).
My Google Ranking
The Basic Guide
The very first thing that we need is to look for a product that we want to sell online. This is what we call a Niche. You might have some product already or an idea on what to sell online. If so, you can skip this part and browse down to the next topic. If not, we can start looking online on what the people are trying to look for at Google Trends. You can also try to look at ClickBank, an online outlet for over 10,000 digital products. Most of the publishers in ClickBank offers up to 75% commision thru their affiliate program. If you have some digital products to sell like ebooks, you may want to use their services.
2. Keyword
keywords are simply words or phrases that people type in a search engine to find for some information. These words are being indexed by search engine and where they can be found. If your site has those words, then most likely your page will be found by search engines. But how appealing those words are, will depend your page ranking. Choosing the right keyword and optimizing it makes our page visible not only to search engines but also to searchers.
There's a lot in the web that we can use to optimize a keyword for free. One of those is the Google Keyword Tools. Let's put in mind that the more result we get, the more we have a competition for that keyword and that's not what we are after. What we want is to stand out in a lesser crowd. Another tool that we can use is the Word Tracker and Good Keyword.
When I tried to optimize the word bikes in Google Keyword Tools, it gives me over 6 million results. The good thing about keyword optimizer is that they also give you suggestion on what other keywords people are searching in relation to our keyword. We can look on the results, get some ideas and try to be creative. With our example, bike, a good keyword for could be mountain bikes, bike accessories and bike components.
After we have identified our keyword/s we then need to put it in our page title, meta name description, meta name keyword and also in the body of our page. If you don't have a domain name yet, it would be nice to put also our targeted keyword in our domain name. We can check on iwebtool on the availability of a domain. It will also give you a suggestion on what domain name is still available.
3. Meta Tags
Meta tags are HTML elements that are inserted in the head section of the web page. Other than the title tag, those elements are not directly seen by the user unless you look on the source codes (on IE, you can go to view menu and click on the source). These tags purpose is to provide useful information to search engines and the server. Theres a lot of meta tags being used such as author, copyright, refresh, language, description, keywords, robots, etc.
For our SEO purpose, we will only touch the title, meta description and meta keyword.
Example:
3.a Title
The title is a very important piece of information in order for search engines to determine the topic and ranking of your page. This is also the information that is displayed on the search results and on the top border of your browser. when I started learning on making webpages, I put "Welcome To My Page" as my title which doesn't really give much information to the readers about my page. Since search engines used this information, it might be wise to place some of our keywords on it.
As for the maximun length of the title, we should limit it to 60-90 characters. Google will display your title up to 66 characters while Yahoo up to 120.
3.b Meta Keyword
Meta keyword tags used to play a major role in page ranking. However, webmaster abused the used of this tag so, search engines don't emphasized the use of this anymore. Nevertheless, they should not be left out in SEO. When writing your meta keyword, put your most important keyword first. As to the max. length, some suggest 8-14 words while others 250 characters. Whether using a comma in between doesn't matter anymore. If search engines limits it to a number of characters, then i suggest dropping the comma so we can place more keywords since comma and spaces still count as characters. Just remember
3.c Meta Description
Meta Description should give a brief and concise information about your page. But, like meta keyword, meta description doesn't play much of a role in page ranking. However, this bit of information is displayed in the search results. If people don't find anything they want in your page then, most likely your page will not get a click and one thing for sure that will make your page get a higher ranking is the number of visitors to your page. More visitors means the more will search engines give your page a higher ranking.
When writing your description , keep it to about 150-170 characters. Remember that this is your invitation to the market to visit your site and it is very short so, make a good use of it. Don't forget to put your keywords also in here.
If search engines include your page in the results, this is the one that will be displayed together with the page title and the link to your site.
3.d Meta Robot
Meta Robots purpose is to provide user a chance to keep their content out of search engine index and services. The default value for this is index and follow which means that if your page has no meta robot tag, the robot or web crawler will index your page and follow all the links. Unless you don't want the robot to find your page, then don't use it. For more information about meta robot, visit robotstxt.org.
Search Result:
4. Sitemap
Sitemap contains a list of the pages on your site. Creating and submitting a sitemap makes it easier for search engine to know about all the pages in your site including URL that are not discoverable like pages featuring Flash. You don't need to learn much about how to make a sitemap since Google has a sitemap generator for this. All you need to do is download the software from Google and install it. If you don't want to download however, there is another site called xml-sitemap.com that will also make it for you online. Just copy the text, open your notepad and paste the text and name the file with sitemap.xml and then upload it to your server at the "public_html/" folder.
5. Web Hosting
After making our web page, applied our keywords and meta tags, now we are ready to upload our page to a server. There's a lot of web hosting providers out there and all of them claims to be the best and inexpensive. What I suggest is to do some research on this and select what you like most based on the providers offer and pricing. Most of them however offer a free domain name. Some may even offer two. Another thing that you want to consider is how much disk space they can provide, bandwidths, scripts they can support and how much control you can have on your site.
I used www.ixwebhosting.com as my provider. They have a lot of great offers including Google and Yahoo advertising.
Site Submission
I use Instant Position to check my site for errors. After checking it for errors and correcting them, We are now ready to submit our site to Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines.
Google: Google Add URL
Yahoo: Yahoo Directory Submit - You will need a yahoo account to do this.
Other Search Engines: Free Web Submission
Also, submit your site to directories like Dmoz and Jayde.
Dmoz: http://dmoz.org
Jayde: http://jayde.com.
Reader Feedback
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- jeffandlia jeffandlia Dec 4, 2009 @ 2:36 pm
- c-l-i-c-k-b-a-n-k
?Wow? you are a genius for sure what great ways to get ranked high and obtain good traffic flow from your article. Thank you for sharing your information it was very good reading for sure. I am looking forward to any more of your articles you produce in the near future. I am now working on my integrating c-l-i-c-k-b-a-n-k social networking and affiliate marketing , to provide good traffic just as you have within this article also the affiliate marketing c-l-i-c-k-b-a-n-k blog & Get-Ranked-Post-Here & Post Here.
Jeffrey Allan Sousa. is an avid writer on various internet marketing topics and is the founder of the ClickBank Team.He creates innovative marketing tools for novice and aspiring networkers worldwide from his office in Suburban Massachusetts, c-l-i-c-k-b-a-n-k Blog. Learn more about his business and how his team is seeing success by integrating c-l-i-c-k-b-a-n-k social networking and affiliate marketing. Want More Traffic to your website, blog, forum or video then Get-Ranked-Post-Here & Get-Ranked & Post Here.
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- Pukeko Pukeko Nov 3, 2009 @ 11:52 pm
- Lots of really great information here. Blessed by a Squidoo Angel (you can add your link at Angel Blessings from Pukeko)
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- TShirtFrank TShirtFrank Aug 5, 2009 @ 5:32 pm
- Great lens, I have been wondering what exactly Meta tags were!
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- Pain_Man Pain_Man Aug 2, 2009 @ 10:19 am
- Enjoyed reading the information on your lens--very helpful, as I am just learning about Internet Marketing, SEO, etc.
Thanks and keep up the great work!
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- Brainchild_Associates Brainchild_Associates Apr 20, 2009 @ 8:44 am
- Thanks for the helpful information.
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