A Down and Dirty Guide to
Search Engine Positioning
I've been asked here to sum up what
everyone should know about search engine positioning. First, two caveats:
1) Search Engine Positioning is only a tiny part of the big Internet Marketing
picture. It takes time and there are other things that will pay off
far more in the long run. 2) This is a gross simplification of the
whole process.
With that said, let's dive
in.
1. This discussion will focus
on spider engines. That is, an engine that goes to your site and indexes
you based on what it finds. Directories are a whole 'nother ball game
(which we will address in another article). Good examples of spiders
are: Infoseek, Excite, and AltaVista.
2. Every search engine
is different. You need to learn the "algorithm" (set of rules)
used by each engine to rank pages. An algorithm is a set of
rules
3. These algorithms
change constantly. This is why tips like "put 3 % of your
target keyword in your title tag" are probably worthless by the time you
hear them.
4. The only
reliable way to learn a sites algorithm is to analyze actual results of a
search on that engine. This must be done using a reliable
keyword
density analyzer. This tool will show you the weight of
particular keywords in high ranking documents. You then simply reproduce
this weight in your document to attempt to reproduce the results. Any
advice you find that did not come from an actual analysis is probably smoke
and mirrors. This method is very reliable. There are a few other factors
that will affect rank that can not be measured this way (link popularity,
spam filtering etc.), but keyword density is the easiest to measure and most
reliable factor.
5. You should not only
be concerned with the rank of your listing, but with the way it appears in
the engine as well. If your listing is #1, but looks like
a bunch of junk (try a search right now and you'll see what I mean), it will
be a waste of your time. The appearance of your listing depends on
two of three things:
a) your title tag
e.g. <title>title here</title>
b) your description
tag <meta name="description" content="description here like this">
(applies to some engines - all others use the following)
c) the first 250
words (or so) of visible text on your site on your site
"A" above is what the engine links
to your page. B or C are used as descriptive text for your link.
You must balance your work on these tags. That is, sometimes what gets
you a high rank will not make for an enticing listing. Remember that
your title is most important. Think of it as a headline for an
ad.
6. No software in itself is
going to get you a high position on a search engine. Period.
There are many software products claiming to get you a higher position on
the web. For the most part, save your money. There are
really only two programs you need (and you may not even need them):
a) A keyword density
analyzer. You don't really need this if you have some other tool that
will allow you to analyze the relative mathematical composition of any text.
If what I just said flew over your head, a keyword density analyzer
is for you. Here
is the only one I use.
b) A site
submitter. You don't really need one of these, either, if you are strictly
focusing on a high position in the spider engines. You can probably
submit these pages one by one just as easily since the process of gaining
a high rank is a surgical one. However, if you need to submit many
pages at once (if you do it will save time), or you want to submit to other
types of sites (most submitters submit to over 900 sites and spider engines
account for about 12 of those), then it is a good idea to get some software
that will automate this task for you. We've developed a powerful
multi-use
tool that will spider all of your pages and submit each of them to all
known spider engines (it has about 20 other functions as well - all of them
key).
There is, of course, much more
to it than I have listed here, but this information will get you started
on the right track.
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Article by
Mark Joyner, of
1001 Killer Internet Marketing
Tactics. Mark is also the CEO of Aesop Marketing
Corporation. 1001 KIMT is an absolute *must have* for anyone serious
about Internet marketing. No other course out there even comes close.
It will dramatically boost the results
of any campaign in a very real and measurable way. They are offering a special
right now where it comes with a bonus database of over 6,000 media contacts
(including email and FAX numbers). |
