Do people find you on Google?

The vast majority of websites get very few visitors through search engines. Why? Because they might be on page 20 (or worse) for the keyword phrases being targeted. Most searchers never get past page one or two of the results.

Just look at a basic example. As of this writing, a search for the keyword phrase “internet marketing” brings up over 165 million results, but Google’s first page only has ten listings. Assuming the searcher looks through two pages of results, 164,999,980 listings never even get seen.

Getting ranked high on search engines like Google has become a science. It’s referred to as Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) and the next four chapters introduce some powerful tricks you can use to optimize your website for the search engines.

Let’s start at the beginning. As we mentioned in Chapter 27, search engines like Google look for three primary factors when determining website rankings.

1. The quantity of unique relevant content.
2. The newness or freshness of that content.
3. The link structure surrounding the website.

This chapter elaborates on the first factor. Chapter 30 elaborates on the third factor and Chapter 31 introduces a great SEO trick. The second factor speaks for itself. Don’t let your website get stale. Continue to add more content and make adjustments to existing content. Keep it fresh. Google loves new content!

Let’s jump into the first factor. Clearly, the basic message is that more is better. A 400-page website generally ranks higher than a four-page website. But there are a number of things you can do within the content to make it more search engine friendly.

First, Google loves sentences and paragraphs. Avoid bulleted lists and hidden text. Whenever possible, put your content into standard sentences and paragraphs.

Keywords, keywords, keywords. We talked about keyword research in Chapter 12 and 13 and here’s where they belong! Pick about a dozen primary keyword phrases and use them naturally but consistently in the following places:

□ The primary domain name, if possible.
□ The page title and, ideally, the page URL.
□ Any other H1 tags throughout your site.
□ The title tag and page description.
□ The alt tags of all images on your site.
□ The first paragraph of your page content.
□ Throughout the rest of your page content.

Let’s drill down on a few of these. The first point is an often-missed opportunity. If you haven’t already registered a domain name for your website, try to find one that incorporates your most important keyword. It helps.

The second point is also overlooked frequently. A lot of websites are structured such that the individual page URLs end in things like “.com/content/pageid?=63956/.” Nothing could be less helpful from an SEO perspective.

The page URL is valuable real estate. Whenever possible, incorporate your page title into the page URL. Using your primary keywords in the page title and also in the page URL dramatically improves the odds of having that page rank high for the keywords used.

The third point is important as well. If you have any headings on your page, always use H1 tags and incorporate keywords into the heading. H1 is an HTML tag that refers to Heading #1. HTML also includes H2, H3 and H4 tags.

Google considers H1 tags to be important and considers the words in H1 tags much more than normal content. Take advantage of that by using H1 tags on every page and incorporating your keywords in those headings.

The fourth point is missed entirely on most websites. Title tags and page descriptions cater directly to search engines but most websites don’t even use them (see Chapter 14). That’s a major missed opportunity. Not only will they have an immediate impact on your website’s ranking but they also determine what shows up on the search engine results page.

The fifth point is an opportunity. Every image you put on your website can have an ALT tag (also part of the HTML coding language). ALT tags determine the words that show up when someone uses their cursor to scroll over the top of the image. Google looks at ALT tags as an indication of what the image (and hence, the page) is about so make sure you load them with keywords.

The sixth point seems trivial but it makes a difference. Google likes to see the primary keywords in the first paragraph. Also, make sure the keywords in your page title match the keywords being used in the page description and throughout the page content.

Once you’ve made adjustments to your website, you’ll have to wait for Google to re-index your site before you’ll see the results. That can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks depending on how often your site gets indexed.

You can resubmit your sitemap to accelerate the process. The Google Webmaster Tools is the easiest place to do that and we’ll be introducing that platform in Chapter 32. You can also submit individual URLs manually at the following location.

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Done properly, the suggestions laid out in this chapter can dramatically improve your search engine ranking.

Author Bio: Patrick is the author of \”Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed\” (2011, Wiley) and a regular speaker for Bloomberg TV. Watch his video about SEO keyword saturation on YouTube.

Category: Business
Keywords: patrick,schwerdtfeger,seo,keyword,saturation