by
January, 12, 2004
This "fruit for thought" article is for all human beings, who somehow find themselves in the role of webmaster and struggling to obtain higher search engine rankings.
Search engines can be one of the best sources bringing visitors to your web site. If someone is looking for something, they go to search engines to get directions to web information. If you can be in the first twenty, you can attract a lot of potential customers. If you want a high listing in the major search engines for free, you must go through the procedure outlined in this article. You must first get a high listing in smaller engines for the big ones to pick up your listing automatically. All the services we recommend in this article are free.
1. Keywords
Do a keyword analysis on the supply and demand side for particular keywords you may want to use and then break away by doing some brainstorming.
1.1 Research the demand side:
Use keywords, which describe what your web site is about. It must be relevant to what you are offering on your web page. The result you get back will display the quantity of times those keywords were used over the past month for searches.
Enter a keyword to view most popular searches during a month that contained your keyword:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.7search.com/scripts/advertiser/sample_get.asp
The higher the number, the higher the popularity for using those keywords. It will give you an indication of which pairs of keywords to combine to make up a keyword phrase of more than one word.
Do multiple keyword searches simultaneously, but you have to sign up: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/
1.2 Research the supply side for those keywords:
Enter your keyword phrase in Google and they also display the total quantity of web sites that you will be competing with for those keywords. You must decide which keywords to use according to your confidence level of competing with the web sites for high ranking. Maybe you want to scale down the competition by selecting less popular keywords on the demand side, with less competition on the supply side. Get demand and supply statistics on Google from one place: http://www.nichebot.com
Find out how many sites are competing against you for the same keywords. With this one, you can compare two keywords simultaneously and see which one has the smaller competition: http://www.googlefight.com
1.3 Meta tags:
Here is an example of meta tags, which go in between the <head> and </head> of your cgi program language behind your "wysiwig" web page (This is normally what you see when you click on "View", "HTML" or "View", "Source" from inside your web page editor):
<head>
<TITLE>WEBMASTER RESOURCES</TITLE> (max 122 characters)
<meta
name="description" content="Global catalogue of webmaster
resources, information, tools and
products"> (max
250 characters)
<meta name="keywords" content="webmaster
resources, free web resources, web tools, webmaster
tools, webmaster utilities, software programs"> (max 1024 characters)
<meta name="rating" content="general">
<meta name="distribution"
content="global">
<meta name="audience" content="all">
<meta name="robots" content="index,
follow">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="14
days">
<meta name="author" content="John
Watkins">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
Try to work as many of your important keyword phrases into your meta tags for "description" and "TITLE".
In your meta tags for keywords, no one word should be repeated more than three times:
<meta name="Keywords" content="webmaster resources, free web resources, web tools, webmaster tools, webmaster utilities, software programs">
You will notice that in this example the word webmnaster appears three times only.
2. Site Structure
Use different headings between the <body> and </body> of your cgi program language behind your "wysiwig" web page.
2.1 Your heading for your web page must also include your most important keyword phrases:
<H1
align="center">Webmaster Resources</H1> (H1, not h1)
You can have more than one type of heading on a page:
<H3><font
size="2"><em><strong>Where
you get free webmaster resources, free internet
software, free software downloads for
life</strong></em></font></H3>
2.2 Use the title tag or most important keyword phrases in all your hyperlinks to your web pages between the <body> and </body> of your cgi program language behind your "wysiwig" web page.
Try to use your keywords when assigning names to your web page files.
References from other pages back to your home page or index page:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/">Webmaster Resources - Home
References from your home page or other pages to cross-linked pages:
If it is inside another forward directory folder: <a href="resources/articles.html">Articles
If it is inside another backward directory folder: <a href="../resources/web tools.html">Web Tools
If it is inside the same directory folder: <a href="web utilities.html">Web Utilities
2.3 Use your most important keyword phrases in the content of your web page.
The recommendation is that your keyword density must not exceed three percent. In other words, if your web page has 500 words, the keyword phrase must not be repeated more than 15 times. It is also recommended that your index page must have at least 500 words. It seems that with Google the keyword density can go as high as twelve percent.
2.4. Anchor text by using the "alt" command.
If you have a problem with reaching the required keyword density in your content, you can anchor your keyword phrases to the images on your web page, as in the example below:
<img src="commonfiles/ph02208u.gif" alt="webmaster resources, web tools"
3. Measuring Keyword Density
To measure keyword density and prominence go to: http://www.jimworld.com/tools/keyword-analyzer/ and http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php and http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi
4. Check How Robot Friendly Your Site Is
http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.search-engine-viewer.htm
http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go?
Check to see when Google' robot is indexing once a month. You normally see four windows with the exact same quantities. When you observe a difference, it means Google is busy indexing.
http://google-dance.miniunternehmen.de/google-dance-machine.html?quick=y
5. Check How Many of Your Pages are Indexed
Go to a search engine and type site:www.yourdomain.com. It will tell you how many of your pages it has indexed.
6. Monitor Your Position in Google
Find out what your ranking is at Google: http://www.googlerankings.com
Find out what your rankings are at various engines: http://www.rankwhere.com/index.php
http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm - download the setup file and install.
7. See How Important Sites Are
This Google Toolbar tells you the importance of sites, which you visit, according to the Google page ranking algorithm. http://toolbar.google.com.
Links with the more important sites will boost your own page ranking with Google.
8. Monitor What Sites are Linking to Yours
Google News Alerts and Google Web Alerts will tell you who's linking to your site. Simply set up an alert to be notified when Google finds www.yourdomain.com.
9. Getting Help
A collection of services, tools, resources, and collaborative efforts, each put together by and for the Internet's most diverse, knowledgable, and masterful community of Internet professionals: http://www.jimtools.com/keywords.html also Forum 3 - Webmaster World and Forum 28 at SearchEngineForums
10. Links
Outgoing links from your web page and incoming links to your web page from other web sites, play an important role in search engine rating of your web page at some of the search engines, but escpecially so at Google. The topic of incoming links is covered in another article.
You must go through the whole procedure for each and every page you want listed on search engines. Each page should have it's own title and keywords applicable to that particular page. http://www.digiproducts.net/
© This article may be re-published only in ezines, magazines, newspapers and web sites, as long as it remains unchanged, together with the accompanying signatures and this copyright notice.
Pierre du Plessis, owner of several businesses and author of the ebooks titled "Easy Manage", which empowers managers to put strategic goal achievement on auto-pilot, "Leadership Development", "Nettruth" and several others. Web site administrator and owner of Management Haven, Leadership Haven, Easy Manage, Training Tools, Digiproducts and Jungle Truth. Company: Leaders Circle, specialising in corporate consulting and the design of training manuals and lectures for the development of human resources. http://www.digiproducts.net/