Professional expert
website optimization
guidance & techniques - free!
Professional search engine optimization begins with high quality, valuable content.
Give
your visitors what they are looking for. Combine that high quality
content with the website optimization tips and methods provided in this
tutorial
and you will see copious amounts of free organic search engine traffic
flood to your website.
For SEO content is king - provide
lots of it and use the heading tags.
For maximum impact, your content should be organized and presented in
the proper form to the search engines. This means using the
heading tags, which turns out to be great for human users as well. It's
vitally important to have the proper keyword phrases included in your
text body and headings. For expert search engine website optimization to
be effective you need to follow the tips here and you must have lots of
high quality content. Try for at least 100 pages with 400 to 800
words per page.
Content is king but useless with out good keyword research
Your content is the heart of your website, and needs to be of high
quality and something the website visitors want. Presumably you've
used
WordTracker or some other keyword tool and have determined that
people do search for the content that you have.
A real-life keyword research example of website
optimization
I once optimized a website about a hot water pump for the keyword
phrase "Hot Water". What I found out was that no one searched for
the words "hot water". Why would they? It wasn't until later and I
began using WordTracker to do keyword research that realized that "hot
water" wasn't something I should target. I re-optimized for the
phrase "hot water pump" and now I am #1 on Google results for the search
term "hot water pump", and have been for several years.
Still number one or two for "hot water".
Not bad for a tiny little 2 person company competing with huge
international corporations.
To further illustrate the power of WordTracker for expert website
optimization, I found that far more people search for the term "tankless
water heater" and it's variations than for "hot water pump". So I
also optimized the site for the keyword phrase "tankless water heater"
and variations of that.
Now being that our pump is not a tankless water heater, and we don't
sell them, its interesting that we are generally on the 1st page of
Google's results when searching for "tankless water heaters". It
varies with time, but as of this writing we are showing at # 3 on Google
for "tankless water heaters".
This is legitimate because we are an accessory for tankless water
heaters, as well as any kind of water heater. We are competing
again, with huge international companies and US companies for this
position, and winning.
Our traffic more than doubled after optimizing for the tankless
phrases.
Put lots of text on your pages. As far as the engines
go, content is text.
If you don't have text on your page, the search engines won't be able
to figure out what your page is about, and you won't get a decent
placement. You should have 300 to 1,000 words, or more of text on your page.
The more words on your site the more the search engines can learn about
your topic and your site. This helps immensely with those
long-tailed keyword phrases.
I like to use a minimum of 500 words if possible and I try to stay
under 1000. I do however, when appropriate, use fewer or more than my
these guidelines...as though a human were building a site for humans.
Size matters...
I recommend at least 100 pages of good high quality content. Yes...I
said 100 pages. If you were Google, and trying to be human-like)
and you were comparing two sites, one with 20 pages of seemingly good
content, and one site with 103 pages of seemingly good content, which
one would you consider more important? It's not really difficult
to come up with 100 pages of content.
I use the term "seemingly"
because Google is not a human and does not truly understand your content.
It can check for spelling etc., but it can't base value on the actual
text of your page.
It's logical that a site with a great deal of content would be of
more value than a site with very little content. Google can
compare all of the pages in your site to get a feel for the importance
of pages within the site as well as the importance of the site as a
whole.
It does this by counting keywords and weighing their value across
your entire site. The more pages of content you have the better your
chance of having multiple pages that relate to any one set of keywords
being used in a search.
If the engines are comparing the value of a page from your site with
a page from another site to see who to put on the 1st page of results,
then it would benefit you greatly if you had many more pages that
related than the competing site. It just makes sense.
Another benefit to a large number of pages with plenty of text on
them is that you have a greater chance of having an identical match to a
keyword phrase being searched for. And with long tailed keywords
an exact match is a very good thing...especially if it matches the
title. So keep making new pages whenever you can. And use
WordTracker or another keyword tool to make sure you are targeting
keyword phrases that are really searched for.
Spelling and grammar count too.
Google (and the other engines) can certainly check for nonsense words
or miss-spelled words, and most likely the search engines do. A
web page littered with miss-spelled words is unlikely to be a site with
high quality content. Good grammar and spelling are critical to
professional optimization techniques.
Even the grammar can be checked, and I'm
sure it is. Again, a site with high quality content won't be using
poor grammar. But even so, the engines don't truly understand your
content.
The engines can look for keywords, and when they find the keywords
they use any available information to determine the importance of the
keywords. One of the things that the engines use are the heading
tags. If you don't use the heading tags, you limit potential value
of the keywords your are using. Since headings imply importance,
use them appropriately.
Original content.
Be sure your content is original. Duplicate content taken from some
other site is a no-no. Using duplicate content gains you nothing
at best, and can get you banned from an engine at worst.
Do not use duplicate content within your site either. A snippet here
and there is ok but avoid duplicating large amounts of text on multiple
pages. It doesn't help you and could hurt.
Expert Optimization Methods tutorial continued...
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