We are nearing the end of my Internet Marketing article series and I am eager to hear your search engine success stories.  In last month’s Internet Marketing article, I explained how to select your keywords.  This month I show you where to place the keywords. 

This is part four of an article series on the Building Blocks of Search Engine Success.

To recap, the building blocks of search engine success are:

1. Build a website that is search engine friendly. That means search engines can find your website and capture the content on your site.

2. Identify what search terms people use to find your product or service and ultimately your website.

3. Identify reputable websites that can link to your website.

4. Analyze results and revisit the first three building blocks.

I should note that this article may contain some website building language that is unfamiliar to you.  If you are unfamiliar with these terms, contact a professional developer to add your keywords.

Keyword Placement

You will have search engine success if you follow all of the tips I shared in the previous three articles.

Focus

Focus on no more than three keywords for each page of your website.  If you have 15 keywords it is very difficult to place all of the keywords in the areas I list below.  For example, if you sell office supplies and copy machines, you want a page just for your copy machines. On that page you optimize your copy machine keywords only.

Title Tags

The most important location to place the keywords is within your title tag. The words in your title tag tell the search engines what your website is about.  I recommend placing your most important keywords in your title tag.  Avoid using a title tag such as “About Us”.  No one is going to type “About Us” into Google when searching for your product. 

Here is a sample title tag from my website.  I use “Website Design, Internet Marketing, Graphic Design - Putnam…”.   

Now let’s put it to the test. Go to http://www.google.com/ and search for “website design Putnam County”. I rank first on the first page.  Now try “Internet Marketing Putnam County”.  If you notice my page follows all of the elements of search engine friendly design as well.

 Header Tags

The header tags are the headlines on your website.  Use the h1 and h2 tags when adding headlines to your website.  You should try to have a header tag on each page of your website.

Let’s take a test drive by visiting my services page. In the services section of my website I use “Custom Web Design” as a header tag.  Now search for “custom web design Putnam county” in Google.  My website is on the first page.  Not only is the site on the first page but if you look at my results in Google the words “Custom Web Design” is in bold. 

Avoid the mistake made by many professional web developers and customers. To enhance the website, all of the headers are a beautiful graphic.  I have had, and continue to have, customers that order me to use graphic headers because they believe the look is the most important aspect of the website.  It is not…the most important aspect of a website is growing your business.

Body Text

The body text is the text people read on your website.  Use your keywords throughout your text; however, make sure it reads well.  Readers should enjoy your website and it should look natural.  I recommend hiring a professional copywriter if you have a lot of content on your website. 

There are more important factors to keyword placement than the areas listed in this article. I have listed the most important factors.

Share your success stories by commenting on my blog. Next month, I complete my Internet marketing series. 

 

As Creative Director, I have had the pleasure of being part of a team of people working on the design and development of most projects that MarkNet Group is contracted to work on. Lately, I have been working on the development of e-newsletter templates for a number of our clients. While doing so, unfortunately, I’ve come to realize that not all e-mail programs view e-newsletters the same way.

Here are just a few pointers to keep in mind:

Gmail removes anything before the body tags, so you will need to use “inline CSS” by adding a style inside an HTML element. All you have to do is specify the desired CSS properties with the style HTML attribute.

For example:

<p style=”background: blue; color: white;”>A new background and font color with inline CSS</p>

A new background and font color with inline CSS

Gmail doesn’t show the CSS style: font-family. You can use the HTML tag “font face” instead of, or in conjunction with your “font-family” CSS tag.

So you can specify font in two ways:

<p style=”font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”><font face=”Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>Specifying fonts</font></p>

<p><font face=”Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>Specifying fonts</font></p>

Outlook 2007 doesn’t support background urls, so it is better to embed images. If you had planned on using an image as background and add “live” text over it, you will need to add the text to the graphic itself. This can become an issue if you had planned on changing this text on each issue of your e-newsletter.

Outlook 2007 doesn’t support “alt” text for images. Try using “title” instead.

One thing to always keep in mind, is to create both html and plain text versions of your e-newsletters.

If you or your organization needs e-newsletter service, we can create a template for you that will work on all e-mail programs.

What do people type into the search engines when searching for your product or service?

The answer to that question is important to your online success. The words and phrases people use to search are called Keywords. This article will explain how to identify the keywords buyers use when searching for you.

This is part 3 of an article series on the Building Blocks of Search Engine Success. If you have not read the first two articles, you can read them on my blog at www.marknetgroup.com.

To recap, the building blocks of search engine success are:

1. Build a website that is search engine friendly. That means search engines can find your website and capture the content on your site.

2. Identify what search terms people will use to find your product or service and ultimately your website.

3. Identify reputable websites that can link to your website.

4. Analyze results and revisit the first three building blocks.

Keyword Selection

Keyword selection can be tedious, but done right can lead to buyers on your website. I want to stress the word buyer. Our goal is to grow your business; therefore, we want to focus on bringing you buyers. Some Internet Marketing companies will boast that they can increase your website traffic by 50%. My answer to them is “No Thanks”! I can easily increase any sites traffic by placing Angelina Jolie’s name throughout the website. I need to bring visitors that are looking for your product or service and are willing buyers.

Keeping the above in mind, let’s start finding your keywords.

1. List the keywords (words and phrases) you think people will when searching for your product or service. Be very specific. Words like “handbags” are too broad. Keywords like “custom leather handbags” are much better.

2. Go to http://www.wordtracker.com/trial.html and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to see how many people are searching for your keywords.

3. Revisit your list from your customer’s perspective as customers rarely use industry jargon. How do your customers search? Contact your existing customers and ask them, “If you had to search for me in Google what would you type into the search box?”

4. Take a test drive. Type your keywords into Google and see what comes up. Take at look at your competitors and how many results appear for each keyword. If you are competing with over a million sites it may be difficult to show up on the first page.

5. For the most important keywords, consider variations of the keyword - misspellings, plurals, and merged words. For example “highend handbags” vs. “high-end handbags”.

6. Narrow your list to 15 keywords. I like to start off with the most important keywords.  

Now that you have identified your keywords, it is time to place your keywords throughtout your website. I can probably write an entire books on keyword placement. But…I won’t instead I invite you to read next months article where I will teach you how to place your keywords throughout your website.

How do you know if Google, Yahoo or MSN/Live will like your site? Or are you concerned that Google, Yahoo or MSN/Live will like your site? The information in this article will answer your question by describing how to accomplish that.

In last month’s Internet Marketing article, I explained search engine optimization (SEO) and outlined the building blocks of search engine success. To recap, the building blocks of search engine success are:

1. Build a website that is search engine friendly. That means search engines can find your website and capture the content on your site.

2. Identify what search terms people will use to find your product or service and ultimately your website.

3. Identify reputable websites that can link to your website.

4. Analyze results and revisit the first three building blocks.

This article will focus on the first building block - creating a search engine friendly website. There are many facets to creating a search engine friendly website. You may want an appealing or an attractive website, but you also want a website that is search engine friendly. You can accomplish this balancing act by understanding how search engines visit your website.

Search engines visit your website using a program called a spider to download the website pages, read the content and hyperlinks, and store this information in their database. Once it is in their database your site is “indexed”. You will want your website to be indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live. These are the big three search engines.

Two things must be accomplished by the spider for your site to be search engine friendly.

First, it must be able to read the content on your website. The website content tells the search engine what your website is about. When someone types “Honda Cars, Brewster NY” in Google, Google can tell that www.brewsterhonda.com sells Honda’s in Brewster.

Second, it must find every page on your website. To do that, it must find links to the other pages from within your website. For example, if on your home page you have a link to About Us, the spider can find the About Us page from the Home Page.

Basically, the easier it is for the spider to crawl through your site and gather your content the less risk you have of being ignored by the search engines.

The main elements of search engine friendly design are:

1. Use a Site Map - A site map is a web page on your website that has links to every page within your site. A site map ensures that every page on your website is one click away from the home page. You can view an example site map at http://www.marknetgroup.com/sitemap.php.

2. Avoid Frames if Possible - A site that is full of frames makes it more difficult for the spider to crawl your website. Therefore, the spider will not capture all of the pages on your website. There are ways to make frames more search engine friendly but we recommend you avoid them. Here is a sample frames site http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/.

3. Avoid Flash Only Sites - The search engine spider cannot read the content that is within Flash. We can recommend ways to make it work but most designers won’t know the techniques. I should note, you CAN use Flash on your site but you should adhere to the following:

a. If your home page is one big Flash file the spider won’t crawl to the other pages and won’t read your content. Use Flash to enhance specific areas of your webpage but not the entire webpage.

b. Use the noembed tag. Yes, it is a technical term that you can pass on to your web developer if they created a Flash only site.

4. Avoid a Graphic Only Home Page - The spider can only read text. Therefore, if you have a home page that is one large graphic the spider cannot gather the content.

5. Keyword Placement is Important - Next month I will show you how to find your keywords and how to place them on your website.

Be sure to read next month’s issue, my article will define one of the most important aspects of search engine success.

HELP my site is not showing up in Google or Yahoo, what do I do? This is a question I hear on a daily basis. A frustrated caller spent thousands of dollars on a beautiful website, then the website did not show up in the major search engines (Google, ahoo, MSN).

The caller is concerned and rightfully so since 75% of web users looking for a product or service start their shopping experience with a major search engine. [1] High search engine rankings will drive visitors to your website. Basically, search engine success means your website is helping you grow your business!

I immediately ask the caller for their website address. Then I visit the site to determine if it is search engine friendly. If it is not search engine friendly, I proceed to explain to the caller why they are not achieving search engine success and share with them information about search engine optimization.

So what is search engine optimization (SEO)? Search Engine Optimization is the process of achieving high rankings on the search engines. High rankings mean showing up on the top positions of the search engine results page. There is no magic formula to achieving high search engine rankings. Instead, it requires doing several things right.

So what do you do now? Implement what I call the building blocks of search engine success.

The building blocks of search engine success are:

1. Build a website that is search engine friendly. That means search engines can find your website and capture the content on your site.

2. Identify what search terms people will use to find your product or service and ultimately your website.

3. Identify reputable websites that can link to your website.

4. Analyze results and revisit the first three building blocks.

Achieving search engine success takes time - it simply does not happen overnight. The first step is to see how you currently fare in the search engines? Let’s take a test drive.

Step 1. The Search Engine

Go to: http://www.google.com

Type your product or service in the search box. Do not include your region for this search. In my example, I will search for a Honda car dealer. I search for “Honda dealer” and I get 4,950,000 results.

Step 2. Where do you show up?

Jot down how many results appear and note if you show up on any of the first three pages of results. The number of results is listed in the upper right above the results.

Do not go past the third page since most searchers will not either. Depending on your industry, it may be difficult to show up on the first page of results when competing with millions of web pages.

Step 3. Narrow the search.

Now, let us narrow down the search to your local area by adding your town or county and State. I will search for “Honda dealer Putnam County New York“. The results have been reduced to 62,200 and I immediately see www.brewsterhonda.com on top. Most people shop for cars locally; therefore, Brewster Honda has achieved search engine success.

Have you achieved search engine success? If yes, that is great! If not, stay tuned for next month’s newsletter where I will break down the first building block to search engine success - creating a search engine friendly website.

---

[1] Source: Real Names Corporation Study