Super Search Engine Marketing

In this part I am going to give you information about how to really market your web site.  There as many way to drive traffic to your web site some are encouraged, some are discouraged, some can get you banned from the search engines.  Relying on the Search Engines to bring you traffic is not always the best way to get traffic. Actually if you wait for the Search Engines to bring your site up in the top searches, you might be waiting a long time before you show up if you do show up.

In this section I am going to explain the various different ways to market your site from direct email marketing to links with other sites.  With each method I will attempt to tell you the advantages, and the disadvantages to using the marketing technique.

This is something you will need to look at in detail once you have your idea, domain name, and web site developed and ready to deploy or is already deployed. You do not start any marketing technique until you already have your site up and running.  No sense in telling people about a website that is GONNA exist but doesn’t yet.  So before you go on with this section make sure that everything else is in place.  This is going to be some of the best, or worst, ways to get traffic going to your site regardles of what it is that you are offering your customers.

So read on carefully and hopefully you will soon find yourself with one of the more popular sites on the internet.

Sparky

Advertising on the net is an art form unto it’s own. There are so many choices to make.  In this section I am going to explain the Pay Per Click ads that are available to you.

First lets talk about Pay Per Click. You have been to google, yahoo, MSN, and done a search.  What do you see at the top and along the side when you search? Ads. These are Pay Per Click ads that are generated because the advertiser thinks that what you put in to search for is related in some manner to them.  Essentially the advertisers are bidding against each other for the placement of the ad, and also it’s position.  In some industries or markets, this can be very cheap for key words or phrases that people are likely to search for.  However if your trying to reach the most generic single term search your going to pay more to get a good position in the search results.  As I said the amount you bid determines where you show up. In some markets the generic key words are so expensive that unless you have a very big ad budget it’s best to stay away from Pay Per Click ads.

There is also an ongoing issue of are the people doing the clicking actually customers or are they bots or competitors trying to click you out for the day. Think about do you click on ads or do you look through what is called the generic search results?  Is there an advantage for a competitor to keep you out of a search term or run up your costs for ads?

Testing Pay Per Click ads, or at least looking at what it costs to get a good position is worthy of checking out for your site, however if you follow some of the other methods available most of which are free and generate real customers, your probably better off.

Sparky

Pay Per Show advertising can be effective and is usually much cheaper than Pay Per Click ads.  These are ads that you purchase for a specified period of time on websites.

In order to determine if it is worth your advertising on a site in this manner is a matter of dermining the value. Getting an ad on the local High School Hockey team is great for your local shop or other online business but for another it may not be.  Where ever you place your ads you need to know who is visiting the site and all sites can provide some information on how many unique visitors they have per day, how many repeat visitors and where they usually track in a site.

Everything is logged on the net in some manner or another. Servers track everything from computer address, to a bot scanning your site, what kind of browser, the operating system, time of day, types of files, everything is tracked which leaves a perfect trail that you can use to spread your ad money where it works best.

PPS ads are probably not going to generate lots of traffic to your site and unles you find that there is going to be a value above the number of people who click to your site the better off you are.  There is also an ongoing debate on paying for ads on sites as it may look like your paying to have a link to your site by the SE’s however if they offer up ads from google and the like at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be a big SEO, SEM, or SERP problem.

Sparky

One of the cheapest form of advertising is to do direct email campaigns, though you have to be careful not to be labeled an email spammer.

So you can always start with your own address book and email friends and relatives and let them know about your site and ask them to pass the messaage on.  That is generally the safest way to start an email campaign and not be labeled a spammer.

There are companies out there who will spread your message far and wide. The keys to using them is to check them out thoroughly.  You can search for known email spammers, you can also ask to see how it is they collect email addresses.  Nothing irritates potential customers more than to get junk email.  However many companies get people who sign up to get their email notices and for a fee you can get your site spread far and wide.

Email, like direct mail, marketing is a matter of numbers. As with standard direct mail marketing you need to hit many to get a few responses.  The beauty of email marketing is that you can hit so many more than in a few seconds for a fraction of the costs associated with direct mail.

You also get a instant response. Many people check their emails on a regular basis, some check as often as every hour or few minutes.  Within a short period of time from the launching of your email message you will know if you have success.

As with all forms of advertisement content and how it is presented is king. If you are not able to write a good ad, have someone else do it.  If your thinking of running an email ad run it past several other people before you run the ad.  Your looking for the biggest bang for your ad dollar and direct email if done right, can be a valuable tool.

Sparky

One of the hot new things is the Social Networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. These are also excellent ways to advertise your site, you just have to be creative in how you go about it.

First is to create graphics and things that people can use as comments or layouts on their page.  In the graphic and other elements you use to make it easy for people to use your site to get comments, you put in things that bring people to your site.

Creating comment Graphics is much easier and it can also show off your product or services.  I run a site called You Sexy Thang which sells sexy clothing for men and women.  Part of the site is obviously pictures of the various products, so I have taken some of the pictures added some text and then saved them in a different location on my site so that they are seperate from the product pictures.  Then create a page with the code that people need and Bingo ready made comments with links to my site.

This creates several things that will benefit your site. First it brings people into your site when people click on the image to look for reply comments and while there maybe buy something.  Second, It also creates inbound links with proper tags that eventually the SE’s will find and thus it adds one-way links to your site which should increase your PR and SERP.

This is a fun and interesting way to promote your site and your products.

Sparky

Comments and Testimonials about the site. I love to hear feed back on the information I am presenting here on this site.  If you have a specific question about something in an article please register with the site and leave it there. I am sure others will wonder the same and I can answer your question and keep it in the topic.

This area is for general comments. Things that you would like to have added, or just general comments about how great you think it is to find such a resource available to you on the net.

It is my desire to provide you a resource of information that will help you achieve sucess on the internet like so many others have.

The world is moving to the internet, bricks and mortar stores are going to be a thing of the past.  Centralized shipping from distribution points is the future, welcome to the future.  Do not get me wrong there will always be a need for some stores, but for the most part Walmart and the likes have met their match with the internet.  Why have a store every 50 miles or closer if you can centralize and utilize shipping to move your products to customers?  We are in a transition phase right now we are moving further and further from going into a store to find something and more to looking for it on the net.  Partly due to convenience it is easy to find hundreds of prices on the net in a few minutes vs driving for hours looking for the best deal at a store.

By getting into the net now you are going to be on the cutting edge of where the future lies. The time to act is now, the longer you delay the more competition is striking their claim to a piece of the internet pie.

Sparky

In this section I will deal with various different techniques used to make money and also how you can get paid.

There are a number of ways to make money off your website.  Direct sales of your product, sales of your content, registration fees, subscription fees, advertisments.  In here I will try to describe various ways of making money off your website and maximizing your profits vs your investment.

Then there is how do you get paid? There are a number of solutions from setting up a merchant account with a bank to using pay pal or having people mailing you a check.  I will try to give you various ideas on how to best get paid for the service your providing with your website.

The whole idea is making money off the net. Well if your gonna try to make money you need to have a way to generate income and get paid.  In here I am going to go through various different ways you can get paid depending on where your generating your revenue.  Google, Yahoo, MSN ads on your site mean you get paid one way, sales of product or other means of selling your content means getting paid another.  What is the best way? Depends on what your selling and how your customers feel about paying for what your offering.

So read on as I try to explain the various advantages and disadvantages of using various different methods, the costs vs the benefits.  As always feel free to register here and leave a comment if you have a question.

Sparky

So, you have your website idea, you know what your going to offer, now lets think about how your going to generate revenue from your site.

Hard Goods: Obviously if your selling a product you want someone to make the purchase.  If you have followed along with the various general concepts, website concepts your site is full of CONTENT that makes visitors feel that your offering the best thing since sliced bread.  Selling things will be easy if you get traffic to your site.  Getting Traffic to your site will be discussed in the SEO, SEM, SERP, and General Internet marketing techniques.  But if you have hard goods that your selling on your site, the sales pitch on your site should sell the product.

Soft Goods: If your offering soft goods on your site generating revenue can be done in a couple of different ways and or both ways.  One is to use like I do here and have ads from Google, Yahoo, or other ad service put ads on your site that when people click on it you get a commission on the click.  These are Pay Per Click ads and they will be discussed further here in this section.  Then there is pay per inclusion types of ads these are advertisers that are paying you directly for either links or for graphics with links to their sites.  These are usually more profitable, but both are valuable to generating revenue.  The amount of clicks you get depends again on how many people visit your site.  Another way, that is used less is the pay per view, much like Pay Per View TV people have to subscribe and pay a fee to view the site.  This works if you have the right kind of site, generally an adult site is something people are willing to pay to view.  The more visitors, the more clicks, the more you can charge for direct ads on your site.

Attracting Visitors is the key and that is what this site is really all about.  Getting you set up so that you start to get visitors and customers as quickly as you can.

Sparky.

Your selling a product that is a physical thing.  How do you get paid? There are a number of ways to get paid for product before you ship it.

One way is to get a bank account with a Merchant Account so that you can take and process credit card orders.  Generally with most banks they have interfaces that allow customers through a secure server to make a purchase.  There are some drawbacks to this method. One is that the banks charge fees for this service and with internet based businesses they tend to charge more due to the credit card fraud that occurs on a regular basis.  Some of these fees include monthly account fees, fees on the purchase, fees on deposits, it can zap a start up business with lots of expenses while your waiting for your first sale.

The other is to use one of the many others out there that are offering this kind of service.  You will notice a link of interest which takes you to one of the most used and trusted payment collection methods Pay Pal.  Originally developed so that they could harvest money from E-bay sales they have expanded to cover almost any form of payment and credit card on the face of the earth.  They do charge a fee, but only when money is transferred into your account, and transfers out to your bank account are free and secure.  Pay Pal for all intensive purposes is a bank and needs to use the types of encryption that banks use to process transactions.  This makes payments secure without the need for a secure server or interface. Pay Pal also offers a variety of other services including dispute resolution between a buyer and a seller.  Keeping accurate shipping records is key to dispute resolution with Pay Pal.  The other thing that is nice about Pay Pal is that they are well known and well trusted by people so convincing them that their information is secure is simple to do.

You can also take checks, money orders and direct payments.  These methods for the net are not generally used except for those that fear putting their credit card info on the net.  The net functions for the most part on IMPULSE sales.  People are interested and they buy, instant payment with a credit card is the norm.  Just be sure that the checks clear before you ship the product that is ordered.  If the check is drawn on a US bank that is generally 3-5 days so a simple page that explains payment options and that checks are held till cleared is a simple task.

Those are the basic ways of getting paid for your hard goods.

Sparky

When your selling soft goods you can use the same techniques used for hard goods.  The only thing is that you should push is an instant purchase (subscription) type of method.  This would be like a credit card or my favorite Pay Pal.

When your selling a soft good, you have your customer already locked in. They are ready to view your content or get your information NOW.  People by general nature are very impulse orientated. Even in standard stores impulse sales make up for a greater sale and EVERYONE falls for it.  Just ask yourself how many times you went into a store after a particular item and walked out with other things.  The other things you bought on an impulse.

Soft goods are by nature very much impulse sales. People have found your site and now they want to buy, not tomorrow, not in an hour, they want to Buy NOW and you have to be able to take advantage of that.  The only real way to accomplish the sale is to have some sort of method that they can pay and get access right now.  This means using and instant payment method be involved, along with instant access to the product.

Pay Pal is one of the best ways to do this. People can click the link fill in their info and instantly have access to the content through what Pay Pal uses as a re-direct after the purchase back to your site.  This way you get the sale right away and they get what their impulse at the moment says they want.

Selling soft goods and getting paid for them is just as easy as selling hard goods.

Sparky

One of the eaisest ways to make money off any site is through the use of advertisments on your site. I am sure many of you have profiles on Myspace, Tagged, or visit other sites and you see, like this one, ads from google or other types of ads.  This is how these places are able to let you do what you do for free. They count on you clicking an ad which they charge a fee to the advertiser for the click.

You can take advantage of this in several ways. Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines and even an ever growing market of companies that sell advertising for sites you can get a commission for each of those clicks.

Even if you have a hard goods website the use of ads from the ad companies on your site can increase your revenue. Most of the big ad companies have various different ways that they display ads.   In the example of Google you can use a content form (where google reads your site, sees words in the pages and then puts ads up that are similar to your content), and then refine it so that you get the kinds of ads on your site that you think your visitors will be interested in.

Most all of these companies require that you register with them and then they give you a bit of code or allow you to generate code that is included in your site which calls up the ads from their server.  In the registration process will be a way for them to send you a payment. The key is using a known company to put your ads up for you or if your site is really popular you hitting the net and finding companies that might advertise on your site.  Obviously it is easier to use something like Google to display your ads as you can be pretty sure they are gonna be around for a while and they also allow you to look at what your clicks are, and how much money your making off of them.

Many wonder why would you put ads for other companies that are selling similar products to what you offer on your site?  Simple, most people who run ads are either very big companies with lots of money to spend on ads, or they are new to the net and looking to get people to their sites.  These are people with money to give you for forwarding someone to their site, not that they will buy from them, but you get paid for the click to their site.

Sparky

Check Stub from Google for Ad-Clicks on my sites

First of course is what are you gonna sell people?  Are you gonna sell your words, or do you have a product?

For obvious reasons having a product is more profitable, but many people make money just off the words they write.  Some have become down right famous for their blogs and make tons of cash.  What you want to do is entirely up to you.

Once you have a “product” you want to sell the next step is of course getting a website set up to offer your product.  Again depending on your product(s) depends alot on the form your website is going to take.  For example I have as a client Harmony Cedar who sells Hand Made Amish Furniture.  Their site is extensive as they have literally thousands of products for sale and extensive.  The other extreme is this site right here, it is small compact and once it is set up pretty much operates itself based on the software that allows you to see what it is that I have put up here.

So you need to determine what it is that your going to sell, be it services, your words, products or just Google and MSN or Yahoo links to other sites.

If your good at writing and are knowledgeable about a particular subject then making a site that sells your words and attracting an audience is the way you may want to go.  I will go into this further in another posting

If you happen to have access to products that you have knowledge about then maybe you want to go with a commercial site selling products.  I will discuss this further in another posting.

The key to the whole thing is find something you know something about and build your business around what it is that you know.  It makes it much easier to sell a product, or yourself if you know what your talking about.

SO think about it what would you like to do?  The door is wide open.

Sparky

OK, so you have decided on a “product” your going to offer people.  The next step is market research.  Luckily with the internet and internet based businesses the vast majority of your competition is already on the net.  So search for what your going to offer.

Now there are good ways to get search results and there are bad ways.  In most the search engines if you search for a term without quote marks you get results that are different than those with quote marks.  Suggest you try searching both ways and see what kind of results you get from the various search Engines that are out there.  Your looking for the number of similar businesses or competition to your products.  In the case of my Gourmet Coffee site there are MILLIONS of sites that I am competing against.   1.95 MILLION at last check for the search term Gourmet Coffee.  However my main product line is Flavored Coffee so when a search for that is done it comes up with only Half a Million or 25% of the Gourmet Coffee search.  Thus I have focused my Coffee site to really push the flavored coffees, adding new ones and making sure that part of my site is always updating with new things.

Now that you have an idea of the numbers of competitors you are facing it’s time to look at what they are offering.  Check some of the sites that come up in the results, not just the first one (though for reasons to be discussed later and in other areas look carefully and bookmark the top 5 so you can go back to them later).  You now need to decide is your product going to be able to compete against the competition?  Can you offer a better price?  Can you offer more information? In the case of Blog sites, can you be more entertaining, informative, or a better writer?

DECISION TIME..  Do you go forward? That is a question only you can answer, but you should not be diswaded by the number or quality of the other competitors, mearly have the confidence that you will take some part of the market share that is out there, or create more market share by virtue of your surpassing them in your marketing of your “product”.

Even with Millions of competitors out there, and more growing everyday, doesn’t mean you can not make money off a “product”.  The key to any successful company is how well they are able to market their products vs the competition and the costs of doing business.  Obviously the fewer the number of competitors there are, the better your chances of becoming tops in search results for search terms, but that should not be the only factor going into your decision.

More to come keep watching.

Sparky

If your looking to sell hard good types of products on the internet, then you need to find merchandise.

There are a number of ways you can find products to sell on the internet.  You can find wholesalers and purchase stock, you can make them yourself, you can find others in your area that make them, you can find others in your area that will let you work off their inventory, you can find companies that will drop ship for you to your customers.

The ability to make your site profitable and at the same time keep overhead down is if you can avoid the purchase stock.  If you do not have to stock a product you can run your online store for next to nothing in terms of overhead.

If you can make the items yourself, you do not have to produce anything until orders come in.  If you can find others in your area who already make or stock merchandise you can probably work out something with them so that you can sell them online and get a commission, if your able to find a company that will give you a wholesale or reseller account and drop ship for you again you do not have to invest in stocking merchandise.

The biggest plus in online selling is unlike a bricks and mortar store you do not have to stock anything to sell something.  You only have to be able to get it within a certain period of time, as defined in your website.

So now that you know what you want to sell you need to find the cheapest way to obtain stock.   As I stated earlier the cheapest way to get into business is to start out with something you can make or get from somone quickly when an order is placed or the drop ship method, which I personally like and use frequently.  This allows you to start your business without the overhead of a Bricks and Motar type of retail operation.

Sparky

You do not need to have hard goods to sell or make money off the internet. There are what I like to call soft goods, which are not physical objects.  What your looking at now is what I call a soft good.  Blogs, Podcasts, Pictures, anything that can be transmitted in an electronic format is a soft good.

So what do you have that would be of interest to people that they might be willing to pay for in one form or another? There are so many directions you can go here it boggels the mind.  From something like an advice site about what ever you can offer advice, an online community of people, a blog about your thoughts about the day, you would be surprised the kinds of soft goods that are making people lots of money off the internet.  Actually there was a person who had a site that sold PIXELS… (pixels are the little tiny dots that make up the stuff you see on your computer screen).  For a Buck a pixel you could buy pixels on his page. Now you have to realize that on the average computer there are 1024 pixels wide and 760 pixels tall.  That comes out to 778,000 + pixels at $1 each. 3/4’s of a million dollars were available on his page.  Most pictures are better than 200 pixels wide by around 200 tall, that is 4o,000 pixels or $40,000.  Company’s were paying to place their logo on the site as an advertising expense.  The person made lots of money as they got exposure on the network news and became rich.

Nothing is TOO STUPID, STRANGE, OR IDIOTIC that you will not find an audience. Many blogs thrive on doing the insane.  Take a look at the Onion.  They make money making up stuff, same for the Inquirer and other Rag Mags as I call them.  YOU CAN DO THE SAME if that is what you want to do.

If your going to go with soft goods then you need to be knowledgable in a particular subject or not. Look at the popularity of Poltical Blogs.  Do any of these people have any special training in politics?  Some yea, most no but they all have readers that come there day after day to read what it is the person has to say.  They either are their because they agree with you, or they want to see what kind of crazy nonsense you might be spouting today. People on the net find it entertaining and also for information, if you can do one or the other you can have a soft goods site, like this one.

As with all sites soft goods sites need to have CONTENT (have I mentioned how Content is KING? yea I think so), and if your lucky you might find through the market research you do that you might have few competitors out there or millions in any case there is always room for one more.

The way you turn that into money is through the use of google, yahoo, msn, or other types of pay per click or pay per show ads. Some sites like this one, use ads generated by the content on the page.  You may notice that ads are different on different pages, that is how those kinds of ads work and we will discuss that in more advanced parts of this site.  The other kinds of ads are ones that people or companies pay to have on your site.  These can be just a simple link to graphic images and much more.  If you go to a site where you see ads at the top, that is why the site is free.  Someone somewhere is paying the bills.
Sparky

In this section we will focus on the many kinds of things you can do to enhance your site to the top level.

Before you try to understand the posts in this section you will need to understand the concepts and terms used in the other posts in the other categories. So please take time to refresh yourself with the information provided in the General Concepts, SEM, SERP before advancing to the advanced tips on how to market your site on the internet.

In this section I will be using terms like SERP, SEM, Links Marketing, SEO and other shortcut words that you will learn in the other areas of this site.  It is important that if your going to advance to this section that you first fully understand these terms and how they are used. So that you will not wonder what it is that I am talking about when I mention something like “through links marketing you will not only increase your SERP, SEM, and SEO of your site and have a higher PR than your competition.” Unless you understand what the shortcut words I use mean, you will have no clue how to understand what it is that I am going to provide you here in this section.

So again I urge you not to start reading this section unless you already have read the rest of the information I have provided, or already understand what most of these sorts of terms mean go back and start with the begining.  We are getting into the technical sides of how to make your site rank at the top of the search engines for the terms and words that relate to your site and also how to use other sites to increase your sites presence on the internet.

Sparky

Once you have completed the various other tasks the next thing to do is to get yourself into the search engines.  First ones are the big ones.

Google, manditory and easy to do.  If you go to google and look around you will find a link that allows you to submit a site to them.  Once that is done eventually google will get around to indexing your site… sooner or later if you search for your domain name you will find it.

Yahoo, manditory and easy to do.  There are two types of submissions you can make to Yahoo.  One is a regular free submission which like google once they get around to you they will index your site.  The other is a annual fee you can pay for inclusion into their directory.  Some swear by paying for inclusion in the directory part of Yahoo as key to getting high ranks with Yahoo.  As I look at it unless your making lots of money off of your website there are other ways to get into yahoo that are more effective than their directory submission.

MSN, manditory and again easy to do.  MSN like google offers a way to present a new website to them which eventually they will get around to indexing and offering up in searches.

You must wait until your site is up and operating before you register with a search engine. No pages that are under construction or empty of content.  You can have blank pages or incomplete pages, just do not link them to the live part of the site until they are ready to go.

There are other directory’s / search engines out there and if you run across one your not in, you should register yourself. In another article I will explain how you can get yourself into almost a thousand directories which will help to increase your Page Rank on the major search egines.

Sparky

Directory Submissions Information click

Links are what takes a person from one page to another. When you clicked to view this page you clicked a link.  The internet is built on links, one page linking to another, one site linking to another, this is why its called the World Wide Web.

Without links there would be no web. Links are what make the web the web.  They are what take you from one site to another searching for what ever it is your finding.  Links are one of the most important parts of the internet and your site.

There are a number of types of links you can get. Some are good, some are not.  Good links are links that are coming into your site.  You only have limited control over who links to you.  There are no laws on the internet that forbid people from linking to you. While some incoming links are better than others and certainly better than none, the right kind of link will bring you a better result.

The Best links: The best kind of link you can get is one from a website that ends in .EDU or .GOV these are, it is believed, to be links that are the best to have.  Part of the reason is that they are next to impossible to obtain due to the nature of the sites.  EDU sites are educational, and usually only have links to sites or pages that they know are of value.  The same is true for a GOV or government sites.  If your able to get a link from any of these kinds of domains take it, it is worth gold to the search engines.

Great Links: If your able to get a link from a news organization you can expect that you will not only see traffic increase but also a boost to your sites ranking.  News sites are generally ever changing and checked very often by the SE’s the more times you show up in links in News sites, especially the big ones, the better your going to rank and the more traffic your going to get.

The Next Best links: The next level of links are links that are one way to your site. The more people linking to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The SE’s keep track of how many links come into your site, the more links coming in the more important they believe your site to be. To a certain degree you can not control what sites link to your site so there is no real disadvantage to having an incoming link from any site.

Links in Directories: I will explain further in another article the value of registering your site with as many directories as you can find out there.  Suffice to to say that it falls into the category above where the more links coming in the better.

Link Exchange: This is where you seek out sites that will trade a link on your site for a link on their site.  This is also a subject I will discuss in another article in greater detail as it is an art form all to itself.

Sparky

Links exchange is a great way to get two things coming to your site. One is customers, the other is the SE’s.  The key to successful link exchange marketing is to keep it tight to the overall theme of your web site.

The main key to links is to trade links with sites that fit the theme of your site. Take a look at my coffee site.  Down near the bottom you will find a links of interest link which takes you to an index of my link categories.  You will notice that the links are with sites that are related to coffee.  These would be things like Kitchen stuff, Dinning Room things, Coffee sites, Gourmet Foods, and other sites that are related in some manner to coffee, the theme of my site.

The other thing is to not link with what we call link farms. Link farms are sites that link with just about anything.  They are easy to spot because before you ask for a link from a site you want to look at their links.  If they are links that are relevant to their site and your link is relevant then you have a fit, pop them a message asking for a mutual link.  See links that do not fit their theme, stay away and look at another site.

The second thing you want to do is have different kinds of links out there. You do not want to have the same link everywhere on the net.  The SE’s notice this and it is partly how they end up ranking your site and what it has to do with.  So using a variety of sample links that sites can put on their site is important.  Even minor word changing is fine.  Move a sentence around, change the alt text for the link, get as many variations as you can.

Next is how do you find links? Well you can do it the old fashioned way and go to a site similar to yours and start looking at the sites that they have in their links of interest area or use a SE.  Follow the rules of are they relevant, are they a link farm, and if they like your site, they will probably link with you.  Many sites have forms you can fill in or an email address specifically for links.  I like to always tell them that I have added them and if they reply with where my link is located at I will make it permanent link.  The formation of a good links letter can mean the difference between getting links and not getting them.

There are other alternatives to hunting up sites yourself. There are companies, such as mine that for a fee will find you links and keep finding them.  One of the important things about links is it is an always going activity. The more links you get coming to your site the more the SE’s will come to your site.  The more links on other sites the more important your site is to the WEB.

Customers going to one website DO look at links and follow them. While no endorsement is implied and even expressly denied, it means something to a browser that if they are good enough to be on this site they must be ok factor is in the mind of the consumers mind when they come to yours.  My coffee site lives off of links with other sites. I track where clicks are coming from and most of them are through links with other sites.

The other way to get links is get a program that will search the web for you. A number of them are out there one that I happen to like is called Zeus .  It can be programed with keywords that are relevant to your site, and even negative or exclusion words to look for.  Basically you tell it what to look for, what to avoid, where to start and it goes out and follows links and ranks sites.  If a site ranks well enough it puts it in a look at file.  The speed it scours the net depends on your connection and a variety of factors but in no time at all you can have lots of incominge and out going links.  Then you just need to look at the sites it finds and if they fit, it will send them your prepared email and even upload the links.  Some will even do a pretty good job of tracking to make sure your links are still out there.

Sparky

One of the best things that can happen to your site is incoming links to your site. I have previously discussed the value of links, well there are incoming links and outgoing links.

Outgoing links take people away from your site. Which is not a bad thing but you do want people and the SE’s to come to your site.

Incoming links are links that are coming into your site from another site. These serve several purposes.  The first is that it brings in customers to your site.  Second is it brings the SE’s to your site.

SE’s have what are called spiders. You know World Wide Web, has World Wide Spiders.  These are programs that follow links around the internet. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… are always looking for new content on the net.  One way they find it is when you submit your site to them.  The other is they find your site through a link on another site.  The more they come to your site the better as each time they come they look for changes from the last time they indexed your site and may add your information to their data center.

There are a number of ways to get incoming links to your site. One is to use the directories that are out there.  Known to lots of people there are other places to find directories of websites that are used like the major SE’s.  Lots of people use these directories to look for things of interest.  They are usually smaller than the Big Three out there, but have a loyal fan base that is growing.  Many of these directories will allow you to suggest your site for free.  This is a perfect way to get more incoming links to your site.

The other method to get inbound links is to do article submission. If you happen to be good at writing and have some information that will be valuable to others you can submit articles to websites in hopes that they publish them and along with the article you have a link to your site.  These are not as easy to obtain as other types of links as you have to be able to write good content for it to be included in a website and you have to submit it to websites that may or may not include it.  I will discuss article writing in another part of this section as it deserves more attention than I can give it here.

There are a number of reasons to get incoming links to your site. First of course is the potential for new customers finding you.  Second is that as the SE’s spider the net they come across these directories and index them and follow their links, which means you have the SE’s coming and spidering your site more often.  It is also counted by the SE’s as another link to your site.  If your up against another site and all things being equal, the one with more inbound links vs outbound links is going to be one that is more likely to be listed above the other.

You will notice a link on the right that says Free Dirctories. That is a listing of nearly 1000 directories that will take your site.  Here again like link trading you want to have a variety of Title’s, and descriptions so that your site is indexed in different ways by the SE spiders.  This can be a long and tedious process, and again a service that I offer is to submit your site to as many of the directories as I can.  I use a piece of software that allows me to put in your information and then use it to submit a variety of worded links to your site from these directories.  The sooner you get yourself listed in these directories the better.  Many of them have a long waiting list so get yourself included as soon as you can.

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Google itself offers up vast amounts of information on how it works, what it looks for and what it dislikes.  While they do not give away all their secrets, they have a patent on how they provide searches, they do lead you in the right directions.

According to Google they consider themselves as “an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (“served”) to you.”

But how do they do this? Google says that this is accomplished with three things.  Crawling, Indexing and Serving.

Crawling is what their spider does. It “is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.“  They use large banks of computers around the world to constantly monitor the web.  If the stats from some of the sites I monitor are any indication, google bots are very active little creatures.  I have sites that google visits on average of 40-50 times per day with peaks of 300 visits per day.

As the google bot goes from one site to another it indexes changes, dead links, and new links, the links it follows around and sees where it takes them. It looks at information submitted for google to search by webmasters, like myself, such as sitemaps and other files placed in websites to direct its bot around to better index the site.

Google says that they do not use the influence of it’s ad generating side of the business to affect search results. There is no evidence of that this is true or not so we kind of have to take them for their word for it.  However search results on Google if you haven’t noticed are surrounded by ads so you can pay to get on the first page, if you have enough money.  I will talk about paying for advertising on the net in another article.

Next is the indexing of the pages. Google bots read the pages and catalogs the words it reads on pages and where they are located at in the page.  Quoting from Google 101 “In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”

Next is serving up the information when someone does a search. According to Google they look at what the “querry” is and through the use of over 200 things they determine what it is that they are looking for and offer up search results.  One of the things they do note right away is they look at links coming into your site. “PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.”  adding “each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank“.  Thus the importance of links from other sites.

Sparky

If you’ve read this site or studied SEO, SERP, you’ve come across the term “Link Exchange” or “Backlaink” at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become such an important part of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks indicates the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a particular keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When there is a banklink to your site come from other sites, and those sites have information that is related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The relevant the inbound link, the greater their quality.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher. Thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques such as automatically generated pages whose purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In a link exchange, one website places a link on their website that points to another website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted.  This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. You could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We should begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being as careful as we can with which websites we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t have tons of outbound links on a page, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won’t be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are relevant to others, sometimes they are not.  Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way. Too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your link exchange or backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks. There are tools to help you keep track of your backlinks and make links with other sites.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link’s anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like “click here” which probably won’t relate in any way to your website, using the words “Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten” is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink.  This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to SEO, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.

Sparky

This is probably one of the more advanced areas of measuring of your sites performance.

Google allows webmasters and owners to track information that google itself is storing about websites it crawls. The information is vast and can be used to help further target your market and make your site perform better in the SE’s for SERP.

Google allows you to submit directly to google sitemaps of your site for their bots to crawl and index. This is probably one of the most useful tools as it assures you that your site is submitted and all the pages that google should crawl get crawled and hopefully indexed.  That is the other very interesting thing is that when it does crawl the sitemap it tells you how many pages are indexed by google.  Hopefully the two are the same but if they are not, then you know there are pages to do some work on.

Google also tells you other things about your site. Like do you have duplicate page titles, content, various other sorts of things that it finds as negative about your site. This is usually why some pages are not properly indexed.  As an example my Coffee-n-Caffeine.com website had some short meta tags.  Not something that was too big a deal on a site with almost 2o0 pages to not have 10 of them properly indexed.  However since I found that and I fixed that now all the pages are indexed by google.

Google also provides information about what people are searching for which they have clicked on your link to go to your site from google. This information is invaluable, it shows what people are looking for that leads them to you, and also what they are not finding you for.  The details that google provides to the webmasters and owners of sites can be of tremendous value in futhering your SERP and also your market share.
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This section is for me to produce a dictionary of a sorts of the various terms I use in this site.

As I use new terms, or make them up, I will make an addition here, so that you will be able to follow along and understand what the terms mean.  With this information you will be able to further enhance your site by being able to use the information I am presenting to you to market your site to its fullest.

There are going to be many terms that will be explained here.  It is very important that you fully understand how they are used and the context in which they are used so that you will be able to take advantage of the information presented here.

I hope that I will be able to fully explain the terms here so that you will understand them.  Once you have the terms understood, you will be one step ahead of the majority of your competition and able to further market your website and achieve success in your venture into the internet.

If you have any questions please feel free to comment on the particular item you wish clarification on and I will be sure to make a followup to help further explain the term or concept.  I will try my best to put these terms into as plain language as I can so that it will be easy for you to understand the definition of the term, how it is used.

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HTML is a computer language that allows you to put information into a document on the internet that when it is called upon by a web browser (or other software) is viewed by the viewer.

HTML code is comprised from standards set by the W3C or World Wide Web Consortium.  The W3C meet from time to time and make changes to the standards, add new standards so that websites and browsers are able all view the site the same way.  BUT DON’T LET THAT FOOL YOU.  Just because your site is W3C Compliant doesn’t mean it is going to show up how you want it to look across all browsers and all computers.

An example is if you look at most any Static Page website like Coffee -n- Caffeine you will see it looks one way with Internet Explorer and slightly different with Netscape or Firefox or Google Chrome.  This is expected.  Each browser handles the code that it is given by the web page a little differently.  Mostly cause they are not following the W3C.  The biggest thing to remember is that your site should be built so that it is viewable the way you want by the most popular browsers.

Currently the most popular browser is Internet Explorer though traffic from Apple’s Safari and also Firefox are gaining ground.  So if your gonna write website code then you need to have a few browsers ready to look at the pages you create so you can see what it looks like before you post it to the internet.

PR is page rank.  Page Rank is how important search engines determine your site to be. The higher the page rank the more important your site is to that search engine.

There are a number of ways to determine what your page rank is. One is a plugin offered for many webbrowsers.  The others are software like Traffic Travis which allows you to track PR for a search terms and other things your using to market your site, and products.

Page Rank is generally not given to new sites, and it usually takes time to achive a page rank for the various search engines.  Getting a high Page Rank is a never ending quest and if you follow the advice given in this blog you will find good advice on how to get the best Page Rank you can.

A high Page Rank across all search engines for the terms people use to find your site is the desire of every webmaster and site owner out there.  Welcome to the battle field.

The most interesting thing is how each of the various search engines determine your page rank.  Each has it’s own mathamatical calculation that it uses to determine search results based on what people are searching for.  To achieve the highest rank you need to get the best numbers you can into the calculation.

SERP = Search Engine Rank / Position.  This is where you actually show up in the search results for various words or terms used to search for and find your site.   This is something no one has real control over as each SE has its own way of ranking sites when someone searchs.  Search Results are also very fluid.  You can be top position one second and the next be #10 as the fluidity of the net alters your search results.

Sometimes your SERP is due to an error in your site or a change in that of your competitor.  SERP errors can be discovered and fixed if they are within your own site.  If they happen to be because of significant changes in the other sites all competing for the same search there is not much you can do other than make significant changes or additions to your site.

SERP can be affected by all kinds of things.  The first and foremost is the code used to make your site.  If your W3C complaint in the code of your site then your good to go there.  You can look at how the SE’s see your site.  There are a number of ways to do this.  One of the simpelest is to click within your page and do a select all and copy.  Then past that text into a NOTEPAD document and it will show you how the SE’s see your site.  The text and content is read just like what you see there.  If it makes sense to you then it makes sense to the SE’s.  If you site is coded so that your content shows at the top part of the page and reads properly then its time to look at the content and how often it changes.  The SE’s notice how often your site changes.  Everytime something changes, the SE’s take notice.  The addition of materials to your site on a regular basis shows the SE’s that your site is growing and thus becoming more important as a search result which increases your SERP.

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SEO = Search Engine Optimization.  This is a process of making a website more visible to search engines.  This process can include a variety of things from Site Code, Site Lay Out, Site Maps, Robots Files, and other things that make it easier for the SE’s to crawl and index your site.

The process of SEO is something that is continually changing as SE’s continue to change and update the formula they use to produce results when people search for something.  A site that is SEO’ed properly and uses as many of the techniques as can will rank higher in the Search Results than other sites.

Most SEO is done at the begining development and construction of the website.  A good webmaster will know all the code that is necessary and that which is obsolete so that your site is seen well by the Search Engines.  Parts of SEO also include CONTENT, which as I have stated is KING to a website.  Well worded copy along with proper coding to meet the W3C standards for the web help with your sites SEO.

Other factors include the number of inbound links, the ability of site crawlers to index your pages, the use of various files and tools through the SE’s to help get your site indexed and reads properly to a SE Spider.

In this section I will present information to you about the basics of design and other elements needed for a website on the internet.

In this section I will explain the need for various types of things in order for your Site to get a high SERP, be Properly SEO’ed.

There are many things that go into the design and operation of a website that can get you higher in the search engines quicker.  There are many dangers to also avoid that can get you banned from the search engines, which unfortunately is very difficult to overcome.  You can plead with the computers at Google all you want, your not likely to get to a real person unless you know someone who works there.

There are many different elements which need to be considered when designing your website.  What your products are, what kinds of customers your looking for, eye candy as I like to call it (curb/store front appeal in bricks and mortar stores), and many other things that you can do that will attract customers to your site, and the search engines as well.

The design of your site not only the look for your customers but the elements it contains for the search engines.  Your marketing to two groups, one your customers are more stable, the other the search engines are not.

It is things like this that I will further discuss in this section of this site.  If you have any questions about the terms I use be sure to check the terms dictionary as I try to explain the various things.  Many times I will take a term and make a link to it in the Terms Dictionary as I did earlier for SEO and SERP.

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Search Engine Marketing, SEM for short.  This section of this site will give you various hints and tips on how to use the search engines to your advantage.

Being on the net consists of a number of areas in which you can market and expand your business.  One of the most focused on is the Search Engines, show up on the first, second or third page and your popular and visted often and probably selling lots of product.  Think about it. If you search for something and you don’t find what your looking for in the first couple of pages what do you do?  Try a new search? At the same time how do those websites get into those highly coveted positions? That is called SEM (and sometimes SERP Search Engine Rank and Placement).  Developing within your site stuff that the search engines figure people will want to see when they do a search is how you get there the fastest.

SEM covers many different things from website design, marketing techniques that are all designed to increase how the search engines find your site and decide that your site is important enough to be place higher than other sites.  Some things you have control over others you don’t.  No one knows for certain what the Search Engines like.  No one knows what Google looks at in a site, or MSN, or Yahoo for that matter.  Lots of people have ideas of what they look for and different things that can be done to increase your sites ranking but each Search Engine (SE) has it’s own method of determining who is important.

In this section I will direct you to things that not only help in your quest to reach the top of the searches for what it is that your offering the internet public.

Sparky

The biggest thing to remember is that CONTENT IS KING.  While your customers will love the eye candy you put on your site, to the search engines (for the most part at present) pictures, video, audio, flash intro’s, etc… are meaningles to them.  Actually it is generally understood that Flash Media, especially on the home page, while very attractive makes it next to impossible for the search engines spiders to get through it and properly index and rank your site.

In the words of my friend and mentor Jere’ CONTENT IS KING, the more words the better, at least 250 per page, search engines read text they can not see pictures no matter how nice they are.  Now that being said, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jazz your site up with graphics and other things, but you have to do it so that the search engines recognize them as CONTENT elements to the page.

The better your content the more likely you are to be recognized as an important site. As amazing as it may seem, search engines are a sort of artificial intellegnce.  They can read, they can tell when you repeat yourself, they can tell when your words make no sense, they can even spell.  Case in point: Coffee-n-Caffeine, my coffee website.  For a period of time I was curious why I was getting so many hits for the word Caffiene (a mispelling of Caffeine).  Eventually I tracked it down in MSN’s search engine and an accidential misspelling I had made myself in the Home Page.  A single misspelled word, put my site in the Number 1 Position on all the search engines when you searched with a misspelled Caffiene.  Obviously many people misspell things, however now you notice that if you search and misspell a word the search engine offers you alternatives with the correct spelling.  So it is not as successful a technique as it was before.  However, if your site is selling something that people could misspell putting the common misspelling in your site could put you in a number 1 position that others missed.

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The most basic functionality of a domain name is to provide symbolic representations, i.e., recognizable names, to mostly numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource (e.g., website) to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet, in effect changing the IP address. This translation from domain names to IP addresses (and vice versa) is accomplished with the global facilities of Domain Name System (DNS).

The Domain Name System makes it possible to assign domain names to groups of Internet users in a meaningful way, independent of each user’s physical location. Because of this, World-Wide Web (WWW) hyperlinks and Internet contact information can remain consistent and constant even if the current Internet routing arrangements change or the participant uses a mobile device. Also Internet domain names are easier to remember than IP addresses such as 208.77.188.166(IPv4) or 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8 (IPv6). People take advantage of this when they recite meaningful URLs and e-mail addresses without having to know how the machine will actually locate them.

In general, the Domain Name System also stores other types of information, such as the list of mail servers that accept email for a given Internet domain. By providing a world-wide, distributed keyword-based redirection service, the Domain Name System is an essential component of the functionality of the Internet.

In plainer english, the domain name is the part you see after the WWW part of a website address.  It is not necessary for you to even put the WWW in front of a website.  You will get to most any website mearly by typing in the name and the extention such as .com .

There is also alot more than just the .com you normally see on a website.  Now there are

Generic – .biz · .com · .info · .name · .net · .org · .pro

Sponsored – .aero · .asia · .cat · .coop · .edu · .gov · .int · .jobs · .mil · .mobi · .museum · .tel · .travel

Infrastructure – .arpa

For the most part the Generic are the most commonly used.  The others are used for special needs like the military, educational institutions, government, etc…

Sparky

One of the most important things in Search Engine Marketing is the domain name.  Unless your a huge company like HP, Apple, GM, Toyota, Walmart, etc. your domain name is one of the keys to being a player in the internet game.

At one time it didn’t really matter what you selected as a domain name as it was all about content and other factors.  Recently however domain names that produce better search results are those that have the product in the name.  Again, the way the name is produced is another key.  In the past it was significant enough to have a domain name with one of your search terms in it.  Now with the way search engines are operating and changing the ways in which they rank sites it is even more important that your domain name be as Unique as the Search term that is used to find it.  This site is a prime example.  There is a reason why I took the name that I did. Super-Search-Engine-Marketing.com is read by the search engines as Super Search Engine Marketing, where supersearchenginemarketing.com would not be as well read by the Search Engines.  So the selection of a domain name, and or names, is one of the many keys to successful online marketing.

There are many factors that produce results that are great for your site, and the selection of a domain name that will stand out and be recognized in searches is one of the first important things that are needed for a site to rank well with the search engines and make your marketing more successful.

More to come, keep watching.

Sparky

In the world of SEO, SEM, and SERP Content is KING.  I think I have mentioned that before.  But how the content is presented is also important.  The SE’s have become more and more intelligent over the years when they used to just catalog the content of your site.  Now they have become almost intelligent and can find many things that they used to pass by before.

It used to be a common tactic to stuff in words that are the same color as the page at the bottom of the page.  These were words the user couldn’t see cause they were the same color as the background, but the search engines could, and the more times your search words showed up the better your results.  The SE’s became wise to this and now will ban sites that use the techinique.

What is the best thing to do now is to make sure your pages make sense to the average reader. If they make sense to them the will make sense to the SE’s and if you write your information about your product (hard or soft) with the SE in mind you can work in your keywords into the content and get the results your looking for.

Let me give you an example of what I mean from my coffee site. You look at each of the various coffee pages you find information about the flavor of the coffee and the like.  In the body of the content I use the key words Gourmet and Coffee and Flavor or Flavored as much as I can while at the same time keeping the content readable and understandable to the reader.  This has a dual effect of making the content unique with my key words in it and also perfectly fine for the average reader.

Unique content is also extremely important, copying and pasting from another site or source on the net will be discovered.  The SE’s are able to compare your content to the content of other sites.  If the other site used the content first your copying them, if you used it first they are copying you.  In either case the SE will read it and according to its archive determine who to punish.  So make your content unique.

The other thing is that you want to try to use as much text as you can.  Many SEO, SERP, SEM experts believe that you need at least 250 words per page.  This makes sense as it gives enough information for the SE’s to understand your page and also deem it important to the net because it contains a lot of content.  If you have more content than a competitor your more likely to rank above them.

Sparky

The way in which you present your content is also important. Who ever said a picture is worth a thousand words never built a website.  While for a viewer a picture is great, to a SE it means nothing (other than the alt text attached to it).

Do not get me wrong the use of good graphics is important to a website, in the case of hard goods it is imparitive that you show a picture of the product if available.  Customers want to see what they are buying. Unfortunately to a SE a picture only means what the alt text or the name of the file is.  So where you gain with customers you do not with the SE’s.

Words are what count as content, at least now.  In the future content of Video, Audio, and Pictures will be readable in one form or another by the SE’s.  Right now we have not yet achieved that state.  Where it nice if we were it would make building a site with pictures and some text, like a catalog, so much easier.  If the SE could see that it is a Red Dress with shoulder straps sites would be more equally ranked.  Unfortunately they can’t, yet.

One thing the SE’s do understand is that BOLD text is more important. You will notice that I use Bold and Italics on text on various pages.  It accomplishes two things.  First it drags your eye to the content. Second it does the same to the SE.  The SE sees the difference in the code of the site and realizes your trying to point something out.  Using Bold and other format of text tells the reader and the SE things you think they want to know.

So you need to use a combination of text and pictures to make your site look attractive to your customer and also to the SE. Look around the net at various websites.  Find what attracts you about their site and what doesn’t.  Make notes about how things are laid out and you will be able to design your site to the optimum.

Sparky

Of course with website design you need to keep your customer in mind.  Attractive sites bring people back.  Eye candy is important. If you look at my coffee site you will see that it is attractive to the eye.  It is also attractive to the search engines.

Offering lots of content is important.  Did I mention CONTENT IS KING?  Yea I think I did but you will hear me harp on it again and again as it is one of the MOST important things to search engine marketing. The more content in the form of text, alt tags and other html coding, the more important your page will rank (PR).  For information about PR I like to use other software that is available to track PR, not only across Google, but other SE’s as well.  We will get into this later.

So your design elements must incorporate not only Eye Candy for your customers but also a means for the SE’s to read your site.  Many sites use a data base program to make the pages from information they put into the data base.  A sample of this would be Harmony Cedar , their site runs on software on a computer server that offers up ever changing information.  This site also runs on a Data base where my text and what I have highlighted or made a link to is stored and when your looking at a page it is what the data base is offering.  Data base run sites can be cheap like this one, or very expensive like Harmony Cedar.

Most sites that I manage or create are made up of what we call static pages.  These are pages of HTML code that once placed on the internet shows what you see when you click to a site and view it in your web browser.  They are inexpensive to create, and maintain or make changes too.

Most people do not need to learn HTML code in order to open up a site.  Depending on your site, your host etc.. you may get software that will help you create your site.  You can use some Word Processing software to creat HTML pages from what you create in a word document.  However the best form is to create the pages from scratch or using some sort of template which content the very basic elements needed.

The Basic elements of a webpage needed in a site is: CONTENT, A Menu, A Header, and a Footer.  Almost every website page you look at contain thise 4 elements.  Obviously the Header is at the top, the Footer is at the bottom, where the content is viewable and the menu’s are located is entirely up to you and your particular tastes, or better yet the tastes of your customers.  Essentially you have 3 places where you can put your Menu, at the top of the page, along the left or along the right.  No one puts their menu at the bottom, though in the footer we do put links to other pages that are important to have on every page.

There are other types of files which we will get into later that are also very helpful to a website, like a sitemap, robots file, and other things.

So now you know the basic design elements that are needed.

A Check list so far.  You have your product/service/sage advice , you have a domain name selected, you have checked to see what the market is like, you have an idea of what you want your site to look like and contain in the form of content.

Before you go to much further you need to look at the top 10 sites on each of the big search engines.  In most cases you will find many of the same sites, but you should see at least 20 different sites between Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  Time to really look at these sites.  What makes those pages show up first?  Are they content rich or eye candy rich? Are they the big boys of the industry?  All of the sites should have common elements.  Those common element are what makes them a top site.  Go through the sites.  If you need to look at the source code for the page. The all have elements that make them top, what they have done is what needs to be done to make you a top site.

In most cases you will easily see the common elements.  Usually it’s because they are the Big Boys of the industry who get mentioned in news papers, or other media out lets.  We will get into the value of getting links from important sites as a method of gaining popularity and importance for the search engines.

If you have the money there are companies like mine that can for a fee examine the top sites track information about them and report back to you the common elements we think are making them a top search site.

Within every website there are elements that create the page. These elements are what we call HTML code.  HTML code can be made up of many things from Java Script, to cookies, to the tags that are used to make the words appear the way they do, links to pages, pictures or graphics, and other elements some of which are great to use others are better used in certain ways or not at all.

The barest and most basic of all websites is a file that ends in .html (there are other types of file endings but for simplicity we will consider them all the be html files) .  What is contained within these files  is what a serving website sends to your browser when you click a link to a page.  All the information that is presented, links to other pages, graphics that show up and where are all controlled by the Code that is put into these pages. How the code is put into the page determines how the information is shown to the viewer and also crawled by the SE’s.

All web pages contain a variety of things, For details on HTML code you can check with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortiom) for the current standards they set forth. For me to go into all the various tags here would take a whole section.  I will focus on the most necessary elements, and the ones to avoid or use in other ways.

Meta Description is a tag that describes your page to the search engine.  It needs to be unique among the many pages of the site. This can be in a minor form for example my Flavored Coffee pages on my Coffee-n-Caffeine site each have the name of the flavored coffee contained within the description of the Meta Description tag.  This tells the SE’s that this page contains….  Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee as an example.   Description tags should contain at least 100 characters in the form of words that make sense.  Example “Coffee-n-Caffeine offering Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, 100% Gourmet Flavored Coffee, Fuzzy Navel, Blends, Fair Trade Organic, Caffeine, Retail, wholesale“

Meta Keywords – This is where you put in key words not only for your site but also for the page as well.  Most of the SE’s like to see differences in these tags as well. So using the same tag line throughout the site is not a good thing.  It will not hurt you but it is better to have each of them being slightly different.  Key words or phrases are important as combined with the other meta tags it helps the SE’s properly index your site for what you think is important on the site.  Example “Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, Coffee-n-Caffeine, Coffeecaffeine.com, Gourmet Food, Gourmet Coffee, Coffee, Coffee Beans, Coffee Gift, Caffeine, Coffee Information, Organic coffee, Fair Trade coffee, Earth Friendly, Free Coffee, Online Ordering, Kosher Coffee“.  Again long enough and with the changing of the name of the coffee and some other changes throughout the various pages, you can gain an advantage.

The other tags that are good but not as important are the following

doc-class content=“Living Document” this tells the SE’s that this page changes.

meta name=“author” content=“author name” Tells the SE’s who wrote the page… not very important.

meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow” this tells the SE’s that they should follow the links on the page and read the page. Not important if it’s missing, but better to have it there.

meta name=“revisit-after” content=“1 Week” this tells the SE’s how often they should return. Rest assured that even with a 1 week return if you follow the other things I point out in this section you will be indexed more than several times per day.

meta name=“language” content=“EN” This tells the SE’s what your language is so that it knows how to read your site. Believe it or not the SE’s can read most all languages.

meta name=“copyright” content=“Copyright holder” this is basically a tag that says the content is yours and you have the copyright.  Not important but you should use it.

meta name=“rating” content=“kids” -  this one shoud be adjusted depending on what rating the site is.  If it is an adult site then it should be changed it helps the SE’s and also the Parental Filters that are being used.

These tags will help your site get better results from the SE’s.

Sparky

There are a number of things that will limit your sites presence in the search engines. First and foremost is conent that the SE’s can read.  Many can now read PDF Files and some multi media files, others can’t.  Here are a few of the things that they can not read, yet.

Graphics – Graphcs are meaningless except for the file name, and any alt tags that are added to the html code that puts the graphic on the page.  File names are important. A graphic labeled icon1.jpg is not going to be indexed by the SE’s very well.  Now a graphic with a name of Band-Schedule.jpg is going to be read by the SE’s.  Add to that an alt tag in the code that says Click here to see the Bands Current Schedule of upcoming shows, and you have added readable content by the SE’s that help your site.

Java Script – Java script is meaningless and in many cases can halt SE’s dead in their tracks.  If you need to use Java it is best to have it in a separate file and use an include or some other means of bringing the script into the code of the page.

Style Information – many people, and software, put style information in the page.  This is code that tells the browser how to show various things on a page.  This information again is better used in an external file that is called upon by the page in it’s code so that it doesn’t confuse the SE’s

Outdated Code – there are updates made to the code that is used to create websites.  It is important to try to remain as close to W3C Complaint in your code as you can.  No site is perfect, but the better you are the better you show up.  This is dual effective.  First is that the customers will all generally see the page the same way regardless of the kind of browser or computer they are using.  Second is that it shows the SE’s that your using proper code in your site.

Frames - frames are an old way of trying to control where things show up on a page.  While the code is still valid, it isn’t easy for SE’s to see your site properly. It is far superior to use tables and nest them together to get control over the content, and the look will be the same, but the SE’s will read it better.

Those are just a few of the Don’ts that you should avoid in your website design.

Sparky