alansclassroom-search-engine-optimization-guide.php

INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Advertising
Blogs
Content
Directories
Domains
Forums
Freshness
Google Keyword Tool
Getting To The Top
Incoming Links
IP Addresses
Keywords
Links
Pagerank
Search Engines


SEO Guide
The AlansClassroom Search Engine Optimization Guide is a free guide that will help you increase your website traffic. Rather than writing a book, we put it all here on the internet for free. You might ask we do this for free. We know that many of you will just take the information and use it to increase your website performance without benefitting us at all - that is perfectly fine. We also know that many of you don't have a clue about how to do this effectively implement these ideas due to the complexity of website design and maintenance, and most importantly you have a business to run. Those folks might consider hiring our sponsor http://www.searchtermmarketing.net to help you out. In either case, please use this guide however you would like. It really is the best of the best techniques that will help you be successful.

Chose Your Domain Name Carefully
If you have a child I am sure you spent countless hours thinking about the name for each of your children. My second child was supposed to be a girl as told to us by the ultrasound technician. What a laugh of surprise I had as she came out as a 'he'. For the next forty eight hours my wife and I spent most of our time deciding that perfect name for our son. I suggest you spend a long time making sure your domain name or domain names are correct. The search engines give extra bonuses in their rankings if your domain name matches what the users are searching for. I actually employ a technique of building multiple web pages to target multiple search terms that match the products we market with the products or services people are searching for. I think it is most important to make sure your domain name will be positive in influencing any potential customers to click to your website. That is really the most important factor.

Limited Supply Gives Domain Names Meaning
When Google, Bing, and Yahoo rank a website for every search term, they give a heavy weight to their algorithm on the domain name. It is quite simple if you break it down like this. If you are a company that sells fuzzy blue widgets, then there are only a few top level domains that match that product: fuzzybluewidgets.com, fuzzybluewidgets.net, and fuzzybluewidgets.org. Of course there are other extensions, but you might look at the domain area of this document to dive more into that. With a limited supply of domain names, it is fairly safe to assume that the domain that matches the search term will likely be about that search term. That is a good match for the Search Engine's customer, the searcher, and the website that they will be directed to. A good match keeps the search engines in business, and that is very important to them. Since there is a limited supply of domain name matches companies that are in that business will promote their products and service on those domains.

Content, Content, Content (and Links)
The three keys to real estate are location, location, and location. The three keys for Internet marketing is content, content, and links. Yahoo loves content. Bing loves content. Google loves links and content. By developing lots of content for your website you are sure to perform well in the search engine ranking. You can do well simply by generating lots of content in all three major search engines to do well in Google though you need to go beyond that and develop incoming links your website as well.

Google Loves Links
I saw a website that had only incoming links for a certain search term and they performed well even after the company went out of business and basically shut down their website just a few words on homepage they still are ranking number one in Google for that Search Term. They worked so hard in developing and incoming links for that search term. The website has a PageRank of two and is number one for that search term. How do I Optimize My Current Site?
If you are like me you probably get pretty overwhelmed with all of this advice on how to integrate these search term marketing ideas into your website. I started off every meeting with my web development team saying 'do not get overwhelmed'. When we covered the massive amounts of information and new ideas we easily got overwhelmed. The best place to start with revamping your website is to do it incrementally one step at a time. You will have to get your management team past the notion that you need some way to add content. Words MUST to go on your website. My wife has a family business that I would try to help out on occasion. Their website was aesthetically very pleasing. It looked great. The only problem was is that it didn't have many words. Being in business for over 40 years, and having a website for over 15 years, it was able to have an average pagerank of 3. This pulls a lot of weight into their niche business, but they lacked words. Convincing people at that company to add some words was such a difficult task that it still remains word-poor today. Unfortunately that also means that it is SERP poor as well.

Early Changes with Big Payoffs
The first step is for you to take the existing pages on your website and add content to them. Do not change the page name as that will reset all of the historical strength that page has. The best place to add content is on the bottom of the page. That will be the most hidden (I am not saying hide it) and won't be seen by most people at all. You can put this content in a tabbed section if you want to shrink it down a bit. I will say again, do not create new pages but add content to your existing pages. Pick a few search terms to narrow this page down to and make sure you repeat those search terms within the content of this page several times. A lot has been written about the best keyword density. In my hundreds of websites I found that I have never been banned from having too high a keyword density. I cannot be sure that it never put me lower in the rankings, but I am sure that some of my very high keyword density web pages have hit the top spots for Google, Bing and Yahoo and have stayed there for many years. Now that you have added some search term rich content, make sure the title, headers, meta tags, image alts, etc all are focused on those directed search terms.

Next Steps for Creating Content
The next step is to make pages specific for certain search terms. This should be palatable to your marketing department. What they need to realize is that the need for more prospective customers is greater than the desire for a perfectly clean and tidy website. A nice way to get content rich web pages is to make an index page or glossary that has an innocuous link from your home page. This index page or glossary will have a list of search terms that you will make as links to these pages. Build those pages taking your content from your regular pages and modify it to contain your targeted search term for that page. Do the top ten SEO Tips for each page and you will start scoring high in the search engines for each of your targeted words.

Content is a difficult commodity
Go ahead and look at most of the websites on the Internet and you'll find that they are lacking content. That is one of the most difficult things to do is to write content specific to Search Terms for your website. The problem is twofold. First of all people don't have time to write good content since it takes work and a good command of the English language to be able to write good content. Secondly, content doesn't look good. Words on web pages don't necessarily make the best looking web pages. People like images, flash, video, and all kinds of things like that. They don't like to read a bunch of words.

1. Content, Content, Content. Have at least 5% search term density in at least 350 words.
2. Number of links to your site from relevant sites (high Google PageRank)
3. Links to your site should have the search term in the text body.
4. The Domain name should match or include your targeted search term.
5. Page Title
6. Page load time must be quick
6. ulr name contains your targeted search term
7. Page Meta Title
8. Page Description
9. Use the search term in the ALT Image for images
10. Header, Bullets, Bold, and Italicize your targeted search terms