SEO – the 3 Most Important Tasks

SEO EXPERTS

First, I am not an expert – far from it. I know a lot more that I did last month, last month I made some significant gains, as I did the month before that. I believe that it will continue this way for many more years. Luckily I have really good mentors, and I spend lots of time testing, Then retesting, and testing again. What I can offer is some first hand experience that, if applied, will get you on the right track.

I find that there an internet full of experts, and a few of them have parted me and my dollars under the promise of teaching me how to play the Google game – I can be number one on the search engines. I think everyone has been tempted by them – “$69 or $259 or what-ever will get you to the number one spot on Google”, or some similar pitch.

There are two pionts I would like to point out before I continue. First, I find two kinds of SEO experts on the Internet; the ones that really are experts and don’t need to hype their expertise, and the scam artists. The real experts have a solid knowledge of what it takes to help you get recognized among nine billion other sites, they are not the ones emailing you everyday or making huge claims when you do a search for SEO. The ones that I have dubbed scam artists usually have never actually practiced what they are preaching, or they feed you a good story while protecting the “Big Secret”. Caution: They are everywhere.

My second point, and when you grasp this point you will understand why so much of the sales pitches are just hype, is that nobody, except the few geeks locked away in the basement of Google and fed Mickey-D’s through the bars, really knows how Google’s (or any other major search engine’s) algorithms work. Suffice it to say that over the years these algorithms have become very sophisticated; complicated enough that the easy fixes that we are teased with won’t work. Couple that with the fact there are lots of sites who have been doing this for a very long time and have either earned or bought the right to be at the top of any searches you do, and you can see that it’s not some magic formula for instant success. However, if you work hard, and follow a few simple rules, you can begin climbing to better and better positions with the search engines.

So, you could reasonably ask the question “if this is so, how is it that there are some experts that can play the Google game so well?”. It is this question that I hope to shed some light on. First, I’m going to dispel some myths mostly created by the Hype Artists. MYTHS

1. You need a thousand link-backs to raise your Page Rank . I will never discount page ranking, but there is some reliable evidence, including some conversations on the Google blogs that included Google employees that suggests that the Page Rank you see listed on your Google bar is not the one Google uses for determining who gets placed in what position on any search. Second, there seems to be a lot more that goes into page ranking then just link-backs. My advice here is to gather link-backs when ever a good opportunity presents it’s self, but make sure the site is relevant to yours and that they are in good standing with the search engines. Irrelevant or shady sites are worse that no links-backs at all. Just as in the real world, you will get punished if you hang around with the wrong crowd. The only link-backs I have at this time are from Ezine articles, and my Ecommerce site is climbing steady in the rankings.

2. You need tons of traffic, traffic of any kind to get you listed near the top. Well, yes, Google’s crawler does pay attention to how much traffic your site gets, but they also pay attention the quality of that traffic. It is not hard for a crawler to determine e if the traffic is coming from a few servers, and if it is being referred because of so shady advertising. Paying a shyster to artificially deliver traffic works for the short term, but when the crawlers get all of the facts you, they drop you like a hot rock – so how was your moment of glory? My advice – make sure your traffic is coming to your site for the right reason. It takes longer, but it is also long lasting and can become repeat business, which then increases you traffic again. My latest Ecommerce site is getting only about 50 hits a day, but those hits are converting reasonably, and I am up to page 2 on a lot of my keywords and phrases. For me, the most important this is the conversion rate in the beginning, If I can get the conversion rate to be in the double digits, then as I increase my traffic, it will mean more dollars stick to me. Keep in mind as you judge those figures that I’ve only been active for two months at this writing. I know those numbers are far from impressive, but I have done it all without paid help, and I test every change. That’s how I learn what makes the beasts happy. I’ll talk about how to do that later.

3. Load up with key words. Keywords are important. The use of keywords and their placement are a major factor a search engine uses to decide your sites worth in regards to positioning. However, smart things that they are, they are also concerned about two things. Are they part of content that is serving a useful purpose to the visitor, and are you stacking them just for the search engines sake. Much of the hype will have you believe that you need to get your keyword scattered around the page as much as you can for tha search engines sake. It should come as no surprise that the search engines are continually being refined to determine how the keywords tie in with interesting and useful content on each page that it indexes. Keywords need to be used in content in ways that make sense to the visitor and provides information of interest them. WHAT TO DO

I was driven to experiment by two factors; first, I could not afford the real experts in SEO. Second, I have a desire to not only accomplish my goal, but to learn the why and how, and understand it thoroughly. To succeed, you are going to have to understand and think like a search engine – even if we will never know the algorithms. Google has an exact agenda. Forget about its algorithms and figure out its goal.

GOOGLE’S GOAL IS TO MAKE SURE THAT EACH TIME A SEARCH IS PERFORMED THEY DELIVER THE BEST CONTENT AVAILABLE

Search Engines lose clients when they deliver sites whose content is not what the searcher was looking for. Five years ago, all of the things the hucksters are still pitching really did work, but as scammers tried to trick the system and bastardize the search, Google and other search engines created complicated algorithms detect these scams. Thinking like a search engine is a little easier than you might think. Just ask yourself – when I search for this keyword or phrase, what do I want the SE to show me? Once you thin like that, the rest is just following a few simple rules and having patience and tenacity of purpose.

Please read all before initiating any of them so you have a whole picture:

1. TEST ALL CHANGES- Test every change, then test again, and then test. Testing and then allowing time for the search engines re-visit your site will show you which changes helped, which were detrimental, and which did nothing. Search Engines usually cawl once every 30 days if you haven’t done anything to give it a reason to crawl more often. If it doesn’t see any changes, it make wait longer between each search. There are some easy methods to get the search engines to crawl you on a more timely basis. You will discover them as you read on.

2. Link Backs – Google doesn’t like link farms, sites who advertise they will get you tons of links. Scrutinize directories before joining. Check their page ranking among other things. There are two good methods to get link-backs. First,the tedious job of finding other websites that have relevance to yours (a site on how fabric is made to link to your clothing store), then approaching them on the possibility of linking to yours. These are hard to persuade, but as time goes on, they will come. If you must pay for a back link, make sure they are worth it in relevance and page rank, and do not tell anyone you paid for it – that’s a no-no with Google.

Second, and the most effective, is to write a 500 to 700 word article about your industry and start placing it in Ezines (which is exactly why I placed this article here!). Never write it as a sales pitch. Write some interesting aspect of your industry that will be strictly informative. You can do a search of your industry and pick out lots of good stuff from several articles, then write it in your own words. Never plagerize. Not only is it unethical, the search engines will punish you for duplicate content. Notice at the bottom of this article there is a link to my site. With this link, I get a little business from people who read my article, but I get a lot of link credit, especially when I broadcast the article to 40 or 50 other sites. There are sites who will, for a small fe, do the broadcasting for you (more about that in my next article). Search engines generally crawl the good Ezines several times a week, and they crawl every link listed on the Ezine site, so they crawl your site again and again. Write well, write often.

3. Tons of Traffic – Traffic is good. Google like to see traffic, but they can tell the difference between real traffic and manufactured traffic. There are lots of scams out there that advertise that they will deliver instant traffic, but it is all trick traffic. This traffic isn’t shopping your site, and most aren’t staying long enough to impress a search engine, like zero seconds! There are a lot of good ways to build good traffic, too many to go into here, and first you have to get your site SE optimized.

4. Load up on Keywords – We mean Content – The content on your site is the single most important thing to the major search engines. Even if what you need to display is pages and pages of items for sale, you have to pay attention to content. First, make sure your “title” in the header of your code is different for each page and contains key words for that page. Don’t try to use your title to load up on keywords. Determine the main theme of each page and use your top teir keword for that theme in 2 or three different ways (clothing | men’s slacks | work pants), You will get demerits for having the title the same on every page or not relevant to your page content. Using the clothing example, on the page that displays T-shirts, your title should have “T-shirt” separated by a “|” and then “tee shirt” (without the quotes), another separation and any other descriptive word for T-shirt. When you go to the sweatshirt page, put two or three keywords in the title of that page that are something that someone would use to search for sweatshirts, and make sure those keywords are used in the content of that page (3-7% of total word count). There site available that will do the work count for you and tell you the percent of each word..

If your site is an Ecommerce site, as much as it doesn’t seem like a good idea, put a large paragraph somewhere on the page that describes the products. I usually put it at the bottom so it does not interfere with visitors finding my product upon entry. Your main keyword should appear in the content only 3-7% of the total word count for the entire page – no more, no less. Do a total word count on the page before you start, which will include text-links and item descriptions, and make sure the new paragraph has at leas as many words at the rest of the page. This is where the search engines judge whether you are delivering what the visitor wants. Regardless whether it is an Ecommerce site, or a service or information hub, keep the content on subject, no duplications and always good information.

WARNING: DO NOT COPY content, not from other pages on your site, and without fail, never, ever from another site. You could get punished severely for duplicate content, not to mention it is plagiarism. Google has a Duplicate Content Island which you could be banned to. Be creative or hire a creative writer.

This is by far not all there is to good SEO work, but it’s a real good start. If you do this correctly, you will see results and can then move on to more sophisticated tools.

I hope this has been some help. Feel free to email me with any input or questions. Stay tuned for my next article where I talk about some specific tools you will need to help you navigate this jungle.