A quick guide to your search engine ranking and link building.
I know I set this site up to give you an independent view of site building tools, but I answered a question today for someone that I think you'll also benefit from reading, so I've decided to post it here for you.
The question was "How do I get my site 'seen' at the top of the search engine results".
Here's my answer, I hope you find it useful.
Here's the low-down on links:
But first - Get yourself a copy of SEOElite
This will let you find out the things I'm about to mention.
Your question isn't silly, and in fact it's one of the most important questions you can ask if you're intending to base the revenue of your site on 'organic' search engine results.
The concept of 'being at the top of the search engines' needs a little clarification.
1) All of the main search engines are different (MSN, Yahoo, Google, Teoma), and their algorithms give different factors a different amount of importance - which means that being optimised for one search engine doesn't guarantee good results in any other.
2) Where you rank on each search engine depends entirely on which keyword you're refering to.
There's no such thing as 'generic' ranking for a website. Where you rank for any specific search term is a function of how optimised (for that search engine) your site/page is for THAT TERM.
If you use a different search term, you'll rank differently depending on how optimised you are for that term.
Right, now that we've got that out of the way, I'll tell you what you actually wanted to know ;)
There are several steps to ranking at the top of the search engines.
As for the difference between them, here's a quick summary:
Google - You NEED quality links to get indexed and ranked well.Yahoo - On-page optimisation is important, but links are important too.MSN - On-page optimisation plays a large part in MSN and you can rank well with much less attention on links if your page optimisation is good.
So, the question of ranking well in Google is answered by "optimise your pages and then GET LINKS", and really the advice is the same for the others, but Google require links much more than the other search engines.
If you aim to rank well in Google, you'll do well in the others (as far as you can without specifically factoring their algorithm elements).
Now that we've covered that, let's get to actions you can take to rank better.
Here's a guide you could use as a template and should serve you well:
1) Make sure you research your market properly.
This is an element most people get wrong!
To be able to sell something to a market on a consistent basis you need to understand what they need/want, what their problems are, and what solutions are already available.
You need to find where those people are, and how to communicate with them.
If you make the mistake of assuming you know what 'they' want, and go ahead and create a product, website or both - you may well end up wondering why you can't get traffic, and no-one seems to be buying what you're offering.
This is critical as the rest of your efforts rely on how well you do it.
Here are some ideas of what you can do:-
a) Go to your local news agent and see what magazines there are related to your intended market - see if there are people advertising in those magazines.
b) See if there are relevant products being sold on Amazon, Ebay, Clickbank etc.. to make sure there are other people who you can assess and model, even have as affiliates/partners.
c) If needed, do some offline research. I recently recommended one of my clients should go into their town center and carry out a survey, getting people to look at their products and give feedback and answer questions.
e) Use tools such as Wordtracker to find out how many people are searching within your target market, and all of the variations of terms they're using.
f) Refine the list of terms that people are using into a smaller list which you intend to optimise your site for.
(remember that for any single page to be perfectly optimised for any one keyword, the page name, title etc.. within the meta tags needs to be optimised - this means that only one term can be fully optimised per page, so don't think you can optimise your site for 50 keywords by having one page of content. 2 or 3 keywords per page is about the most you should attempt)
2) Once you have your keyword list of terms that you want to rank well for, prepare a worksheet for these areas:
a) On-page optimisation
b) Articles
c) Link building
Those are the 3 main elements that you'll need to work on.
Make 3 worksheets (1 for each subject) and list all of your chosen keywords.
You can use this as a check-off list to keep track of what you've done.
3) You might at this point want to consider using this keyword list as the basis of a pay per click (Google Adwords) campaign, to immediately start sending traffic to your site to get statistics on how many of your chosen market will actually buy from your site, so that you can modify the site to improve conversion rates as you go.
4) On-Page optimisation
One way or another you need to create some content for your site which contains the keywords and phrases that your target market are searching with.
One good way to do this is to modify the wording of your pages to include the keywords you've identified as being the ones you want to 'be found' for.
If you create a separate page for each product you sell, and use a small selection of your chosen keywords on each page, focussing more heavily on the terms you want to rank better for - that's a good start.
5) Articles - another good way to add relevant (keyword dense) content is to write articles related to your niche.
6) Links - the links that other websites use to link to you can have differing levels of impact depending on things such as: the 'theme' of the site (better if it's on-topic with your own), the number of inbound and outgoing links on the page they're linking to you with, and the wording in the link (and whether it's text or a graphic link).
That's the basics of the most important elements.
Here's how to tell how much of that you need to do.
1) Goto HERE and type in your url and those of your top 3 competitors.
This is a 'link popularity' tool that will show you how many links each major search engine acknowledges that point to your website.
As you'll soon see, they'll all be different due to the different ways each search engine works.
If your competition have 5000 links, then you know that you're going to have to be creative to beat them, or you have a long slog ahead of you.
If they have 50 - 100, you can easily beat them without too much effort. But bare in mind that Google is a lot more selective than the others, so 50 links in Google are harder to get than 50 in MSN or Yahoo.
The very first way to get decent one-way links to your site is to submit it to as many website directories as you can.
Here's a list I put together a while ago that you might find useful.
If you need to do more than that, submitting your articles (if you wrote any to help with your optimised content), writing online press releases (Check here for how to do that) and contacting other website owners can help a lot (SEOElite can help make that easier)
For a more detailed assessment of exactly how many, what type, theme, and other detail the links to your competitors sites have - get SEOElite.
This will show you all the links going to your competitors, and all of the important information about those links, so it really will give you a very good idea of exactly what number and type of links you need to get.
There are more advanced, and subtle ways to get links which include things like forum posts (the signature file you have can include a link to your site.
If your profile is held in a central place, when you change it, every post you ever made is updated - this can mean a LOT of instant links with one small change), which we can talk about another time.
I also run a membership website Here with another online marketer, where we'll be sharing information and providing tools to enable you to get large numbers of links to your sites, so this may be of interest to you.
I hope you find this information useful and use it to improve your results.
Regards,
AndyH
The question was "How do I get my site 'seen' at the top of the search engine results".
Here's my answer, I hope you find it useful.
Here's the low-down on links:
But first - Get yourself a copy of SEOElite
This will let you find out the things I'm about to mention.
Your question isn't silly, and in fact it's one of the most important questions you can ask if you're intending to base the revenue of your site on 'organic' search engine results.
The concept of 'being at the top of the search engines' needs a little clarification.
1) All of the main search engines are different (MSN, Yahoo, Google, Teoma), and their algorithms give different factors a different amount of importance - which means that being optimised for one search engine doesn't guarantee good results in any other.
2) Where you rank on each search engine depends entirely on which keyword you're refering to.
There's no such thing as 'generic' ranking for a website. Where you rank for any specific search term is a function of how optimised (for that search engine) your site/page is for THAT TERM.
If you use a different search term, you'll rank differently depending on how optimised you are for that term.
Right, now that we've got that out of the way, I'll tell you what you actually wanted to know ;)
There are several steps to ranking at the top of the search engines.
As for the difference between them, here's a quick summary:
Google - You NEED quality links to get indexed and ranked well.Yahoo - On-page optimisation is important, but links are important too.MSN - On-page optimisation plays a large part in MSN and you can rank well with much less attention on links if your page optimisation is good.
So, the question of ranking well in Google is answered by "optimise your pages and then GET LINKS", and really the advice is the same for the others, but Google require links much more than the other search engines.
If you aim to rank well in Google, you'll do well in the others (as far as you can without specifically factoring their algorithm elements).
Now that we've covered that, let's get to actions you can take to rank better.
Here's a guide you could use as a template and should serve you well:
1) Make sure you research your market properly.
This is an element most people get wrong!
To be able to sell something to a market on a consistent basis you need to understand what they need/want, what their problems are, and what solutions are already available.
You need to find where those people are, and how to communicate with them.
If you make the mistake of assuming you know what 'they' want, and go ahead and create a product, website or both - you may well end up wondering why you can't get traffic, and no-one seems to be buying what you're offering.
This is critical as the rest of your efforts rely on how well you do it.
Here are some ideas of what you can do:-
a) Go to your local news agent and see what magazines there are related to your intended market - see if there are people advertising in those magazines.
b) See if there are relevant products being sold on Amazon, Ebay, Clickbank etc.. to make sure there are other people who you can assess and model, even have as affiliates/partners.
c) If needed, do some offline research. I recently recommended one of my clients should go into their town center and carry out a survey, getting people to look at their products and give feedback and answer questions.
e) Use tools such as Wordtracker to find out how many people are searching within your target market, and all of the variations of terms they're using.
f) Refine the list of terms that people are using into a smaller list which you intend to optimise your site for.
(remember that for any single page to be perfectly optimised for any one keyword, the page name, title etc.. within the meta tags needs to be optimised - this means that only one term can be fully optimised per page, so don't think you can optimise your site for 50 keywords by having one page of content. 2 or 3 keywords per page is about the most you should attempt)
2) Once you have your keyword list of terms that you want to rank well for, prepare a worksheet for these areas:
a) On-page optimisation
b) Articles
c) Link building
Those are the 3 main elements that you'll need to work on.
Make 3 worksheets (1 for each subject) and list all of your chosen keywords.
You can use this as a check-off list to keep track of what you've done.
3) You might at this point want to consider using this keyword list as the basis of a pay per click (Google Adwords) campaign, to immediately start sending traffic to your site to get statistics on how many of your chosen market will actually buy from your site, so that you can modify the site to improve conversion rates as you go.
4) On-Page optimisation
One way or another you need to create some content for your site which contains the keywords and phrases that your target market are searching with.
One good way to do this is to modify the wording of your pages to include the keywords you've identified as being the ones you want to 'be found' for.
If you create a separate page for each product you sell, and use a small selection of your chosen keywords on each page, focussing more heavily on the terms you want to rank better for - that's a good start.
5) Articles - another good way to add relevant (keyword dense) content is to write articles related to your niche.
6) Links - the links that other websites use to link to you can have differing levels of impact depending on things such as: the 'theme' of the site (better if it's on-topic with your own), the number of inbound and outgoing links on the page they're linking to you with, and the wording in the link (and whether it's text or a graphic link).
That's the basics of the most important elements.
Here's how to tell how much of that you need to do.
1) Goto HERE and type in your url and those of your top 3 competitors.
This is a 'link popularity' tool that will show you how many links each major search engine acknowledges that point to your website.
As you'll soon see, they'll all be different due to the different ways each search engine works.
If your competition have 5000 links, then you know that you're going to have to be creative to beat them, or you have a long slog ahead of you.
If they have 50 - 100, you can easily beat them without too much effort. But bare in mind that Google is a lot more selective than the others, so 50 links in Google are harder to get than 50 in MSN or Yahoo.
The very first way to get decent one-way links to your site is to submit it to as many website directories as you can.
Here's a list I put together a while ago that you might find useful.
If you need to do more than that, submitting your articles (if you wrote any to help with your optimised content), writing online press releases (Check here for how to do that) and contacting other website owners can help a lot (SEOElite can help make that easier)
For a more detailed assessment of exactly how many, what type, theme, and other detail the links to your competitors sites have - get SEOElite.
This will show you all the links going to your competitors, and all of the important information about those links, so it really will give you a very good idea of exactly what number and type of links you need to get.
There are more advanced, and subtle ways to get links which include things like forum posts (the signature file you have can include a link to your site.
If your profile is held in a central place, when you change it, every post you ever made is updated - this can mean a LOT of instant links with one small change), which we can talk about another time.
I also run a membership website Here with another online marketer, where we'll be sharing information and providing tools to enable you to get large numbers of links to your sites, so this may be of interest to you.
I hope you find this information useful and use it to improve your results.
Regards,
AndyH
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home