SEO Steps

Step 0 - Search Engine Optimization Overview

What is Search Engine Optimization? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science of search as it relates to marketing on the web. It is mostly technical in nature, combining programming with business, persuasion, sales, and a love for competitive puzzle solving into a written form capable of maintaining desired revenue goals while achieving high rankings in the organic sections of search engine results pages. It is not just technical, nor copywriting, nor links, nor just search engine submission, but an intricate blend of over a hundred variables into the fabric of a website. It is difficult to accomplish without a formal proven methodology and strong proprietary tools. We offer you a tutorial on all of that and more on these pages...

Before you start, you should understand that top 10 rankings with every single major search engine and directory can be obtained, although very few sites can get there and the effort is often beyond reason. Note: URL ranking results change week-to-week due to competition, so maintaining a top ranking requires constant keywords monitoring and information rework. Search Engine Optimization never rests, much like your competition.

"It is not the job of Search Engine Optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the web site so that it becomes an eagle."

The key information on this page includes how to prepare both you and your site for the search engines, choosing the right keywords, how to analyze your competition, what is submission and how is it best accomplished, when to monitor your ranking, instructions for performing an analysis of your site results, complete with tools and aids. This site covers all basic and advanced strategies and the common mistakes to avoid.

Step 1 - How to Identify Your Competition

To select keywords that you expect surfers to use to locate your site, submit your obvious keyword terms and use our Research Tool to locate top ranked competing sites. Then create a list of the top one to five site URLs that return from each search. The results are sorted by sites with the most top-25 rankings (with the best first for near-duplicates). The numbers represent their current (real-time) ranking position (1 is first, 3 is third, etc.).

Try your major keywords (ours will be Search Engine Optimization or search engine ranking). You will find that in a web-sized audience of billions of web pages, your competition will generally rank well in several search engines. True high rankings are achieved by having a first page ranking in most of these search engines for many keywords (not just one or two).

Try our Competition Research Report - The purpose of the Competition Research Report is to provide a real-time search engine ranking report for your specified competition for your keywords. This report produces a table with rows, labeled by the ranked corresponding competitors web site, and columns, labeled by the major search engines.

You should keep track of any URLs that you happen to know are well ranked or your major competition. You may also visit the search engines directly to see specific results. For instance, type your keywords into the search field for each search engine and view their individual results pages.

Search Engine Optimization and other website placement hints, tips, and advice are reported by our comprehensive and free search engine tools! These are the analysis tools our staff uses day after day when optimizing our + -/' sites. Additionally, this free step-by-step tutorial covers keyword research, link analysis, submission, a Keyword Density Analyzer, a position monitor, and many, many free ranking reports. Presented in an easy to understand and sequential step-by-step manner, the free tutorial coupled with these search engine analysis tools have helped thousands of people each week to transform their website rankings into top positions for their important keywords. Designed for do-it-yourself novice users with little or no HTML experience, we discuss how to optimize your web pages without utilizing spamming techniques.

Step 2 - How to Use Link Tracking: Locating the Links TO a URL

Link tracking allows you to identify and choose possible sites that you will want as link partners once your site is content-rich and optimized. If these sites link to your competition, then you want them to also link to you! This is also done so that these potential link partners can be checked for META keywords that might be related to your site that were missed by your competition. Add these URLs to the URL list from Step 1 to be used in Step 3. You might also try putting the http:// in quotes and using Google (above). Hint: the number and authority of the links to your site is a factor in determining how well your site will rank with some search engines. Popularity is good. Popularity with well respected sites is better. You will want to begin to develop links as soon as possible.

On the subject of popularity -- we consider links vital to long-term Search Engine Optimization and ranking. The objective is this: if you get a site to link to you then you gain popularity points. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot of points, but if that site has few quality sites linking to it, you get only a few points. As such, a link from Microsoft.com would be worth more than a link from Bobspage.com provided both had content similar to yours. In essence, if enough quality sites link to you then your site becomes a quality site by association. So you want the best sites, not the most, to link to you. Likewise, if you link to other quality sites then your site is assumed to be a quality site by association. However, the sites must be covering the same topics as your linking page in both directions. All other links are minimal importance (or in the case of spam they are ignored or even a penalty). And do not bother to buy hundreds of URLs and cross link them or to buy into an advertising network. The search engines can locate them and filter them out faster than you can perform submission on these pages. At best they are short-lived.

Step 3 - How to Identify Keywords

It is critical that we understand the search terms and keywords used to locate your site as a part of a search engine query. To help in this keyword analysis effort we offer advice and tools to research the competition and query history information available through several sources.

If you find that there are no META keywords in the site, the chances are that the site is using a server technique designed to hide keywords (such as server side includes), such server scripts submit alternate pages when a specific search engine looks for the page. These stealth CGI scripts were designed to offer content to the search engine that is exceptionally keyword loaded in an attempt to bias the spider into a higher ranking position, or both.

Step 4 - Repeat Steps 1 through 3 Until you Have Finished All Your Keyword Searches

Be sure to mix up the sequence of the keywords if appropriate, for example: 'word1 word2 word3' then 'word3 word1 word2' then 'word2 word3 word1', etc. Keep searching until you are satisfied that you have most of the keywords. Simply put, you can never have sufficient search engine ranking. If you think you do, simply add some more keywords appropriate to your site.

Step 5 - How to Combine the Keywords Based Upon Frequency of Use and Applicability

You will end up with hundreds of words that you should sort by your perceived descending order of importance (how likely it is that they will be used by visitors as search words). If uncertain, leave them in the order used by the highest rated pages. Be sure to identify two-word or three-word phrases if used, or if applicable. It is also important that you add words to help clarify the use of your keywords. For instance "capital" might have very different meanings -- such as intellectual capital, state capital, capital letters, venture capital, etc. So a keyword or two that helps the index builders learn the context of your keywords will help raise your search engine rankings. Hint: each keyword in your META tags must also appear within your content to avoid spamming penalties. Also, consider common misspellings [sic] as additions to your keyword lists.

Once you have your personal list, validate each phrase for popularity as a search term. There are several free tools which allow you to get a glimpse of the usage of various words and phrases. A good one to use is our affiliate KeywordDiscovery.com. The best tool for determining what stemmed word is commonly used is Wordtracker. It is so good that we recommend it to our clients in our SEO training courses. The results will indicate what terms generate the most searches, thus those are the most important terms (if they are appropriate to your page).

Search Engine Optimization and Ranking Advice: Excessive use of META keywords is going to cause a search engine to ignore or decrease the weight for that keyword. And if you use a single word as a keyword, and later repeat it in your keyword string, then you may also be penalized. The string "Web, Web Design, Web" would be considered spamming. Also, keywords like 'word, words, wording, worded' may cause indexing to fail. Things are definitely getting tough, and it is advised that you use extreme caution when creating your Meta Tags. If you are indexed by any engine, and remain indexed for a week, then you have probably passed their test. Run our Keyword Density Analysis tool (step 3) on your site before listing with the search engines. The guidelines are accurate and will help a lot. We recommend a repeat limit of three times.

"For best results, the following Web publishing techniques should be avoided:

• Overuse or repetition of keywords
• Use of keywords that do not relate to the content of the site
• Use of fast meta refresh
• Use of colored text on same-color background
• Duplication of pages with different URLs
• Use of different pages that bridge to the same URL"

It is also important to discard potential keywords that are not likely to be used in a search if they do not contribute to your revenue. Properly done, you might end up with as few as ten or as many as a hundred major keywords. If you add all of the words it will dilute the importance of each keyword, so select well. In general, you will have a hard time keeping the keyword analysis list short if you include plurals and various combinations of words to maximize your frequency counts. This site has many keywords in various forms and combinations but we felt each word was important when we designed our keywords. The last keyword should be your site identification taken from your URL (ours is bruceclay.com), for ranking and placement reasons discussed later. Be sure that this string appears as content to avoid spamming (can be in a URL string or mailto at the bottom of your page).

As for spamming technologies, there is evidence that the major search engines look across pages within their index for long-string repeats, so mix up your keywords in the ALT tags to be sure they are not identical in sequence to words used elsewhere (text or META tags). Duplicate content is a very bad thing, and it can cause site-wide penalties. Hint: Be very careful not to replicate content on other URLs, and if it happens (as with affiliate sites) you have a serious problem. Duplicate content is a real problem when doing SEO.

Also, repeating your keywords in the content, as long as it is within a reasonable sentence construct and has appropriate context, will not be considered spamming. A search engine usually cares about spamming outside of the standard sentence construct when reviewing content instead of sentence spamming issues. Using exotic "hidden" text techniques will usually have you eliminated, so avoid them when possible.

Step 6 - How to Add Your Keywords to the Content

You are about to discover your real issue... you have insufficient or weak content. It takes a lot of words to convince a search engine that you are a subject matter expert. Also, most sites use images to relay their message to humans, but are now discovering that search engines are blind and do not see images. Or the site content comes from a data base and the data base has little unique content. Or the site accepts feeds from other expert sites but this makes all of their content someone else's, and they either get no credit for it or are penalized for duplicate content. In any case, the design and content on your web site may very well need to be restructured and expanded. [If this is not you, buy yourself a drink -- you have earned it!] Avoid mistakes, use clean optimized graphics and do it right, minimize the use of flash, avoid pop-up windows, restrict the scope of forms except where really needed, make javascript and css files external to the source code, always use a site map, solve obvious problems first, and by all means keep it simple. Web page layout problems really hurt SEO projects.

So where do you add keywords? It is important that your page TITLE be as descriptive as possible of what you do and that it contain your top few keywords, but generally fewer than 12 words. Listings that include the dominant search terms in the META TITLE and META description tags have a higher ranking and a higher clickthrough rate (often more than double the traffic) than those that do not! Use these keywords to make up your Search Engine Optimization targets. Also, review your content to add these keywords, especially two- and three-word phrases, into the content without losing the message. This is important for a search engine that does not reference META tags. You want to use these phrases time and again without spamming a search engine. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta description fields. Such a search engine will exclude some appropriate keywords unless you use them throughout your content. And try to keep the title and description fields as short as possible to prevent you from diluting the keyword impact.

Additionally, it is good to practice a basic rule: begin each word in your META keywords list with an initial capital letter. There has been a lot of discussion about the continued use of META tags. META tags (actually the major HEAD section tags) we consider important to Search Engine Optimization. What is not known is what is meant when it is said that search engines "ignore" a META tag. Our research is that they are not ignored and that they actually do count. It is commonly known that the title is vital, and that the description is often used as an abstract, but thought that the keyword tag is ignored. Knowing the history of spammer abuse for these tags, it would not be surprising to find them of lesser importance than before, and that perhaps words are ignored if and only if they do not appear in the content of the page -- but they are used if they are in the content. Is selectively ignoring words the same as being "ignored"? And if you were a search engine wouldn't you tell spammers not to bother?

Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right, you would never be penalized for having them (unless you spam), and not all engines will ignore them and maybe not forever. You can never go wrong by using META tags, and only hurt yourself if you don't use them.

You must also unconditionally, absolutely, positively have keywords (and certainly sufficient content containing them) throughout your body section. We recommend that you have at least 400 words of clean, grammatically correct sentence-structure content on every page. You must also have your keywords appear as the most common (without excess) phrases on your pages. In many cases there are ways to do this that work well for whatever your page format or content, all of which is customized to the look-and-feel of the site and the nature of the content.

And you also need to link pages together using the keywords of the landing page in the anchor text of the sending page. This is a must... use text links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are related. If the topics are not related, then use image links so the search engines do not see the text and get confused.

And never, ever create doorway pages, or information pages, or hallway pages, or whatever they are called today. Spam by any other name is still spam. If you cannot make the real page into a subject matter expert, then hire someone that can. But do not try to make a pig fly!

Step 7 - How to Tune Your Keyword List

Some search engines will allow you to submit (to replace or add a page to the index) a URL once every day and changes are usually live quickly (faster than other search engines), so use the search engine with the fastest indexing process to 'debug' your keywords and Search Engine Optimization tactics. Unfortunately this submission cycle varies, so you might need to submit pages to all major engines, but certainly not all 200 search engines. It is important to understand that the time it takes for a search engine to actually respond to a submission and to place you into their index varies greatly day-to-day. Search engine indexing was once a matter of hours, and now is weeks. You would be wise to consider submission to other engines as well to cover your bases. How search engines work is a wondrous thing, and every engine is different.

Once you have selected your major keywords, add the main words to your TITLE string, your META description string, your META keywords string, ALT tags (image tag parameter), and especially imbed them into your top-of-page displayed content. Try to use as many keywords as grammar will allow in your opening few sentences since this sets the topic for the page and contributes to the theme of the site.

Keyword tuning is an iterative loop; you keep doing it until you rank reasonably well on several search engines. At that point you at least have the right words and a reasonable META keyword tag. But some search engines use different strings to determine keywords and their algorithms downplay or ignore META tags. These search engines extract keywords from the content on your page, so you need to place your best search words throughout the displayed content for your page. An example (grossly oversimplified) would be:

important-keyword-phrase

anchor-text-with-keywords

your-content-with-appropriate-keyword-phrases-goes-here

Note: If you are not "programming" the design of your own web site and are not familiar with how to add HTML code, please contact your web designer and request that they add these commands.

We have a Keyword Density Analyzer that is part of our SEOToolSet™ Search Engine Optimization tool that will list the top keywords plus all words used in your META tags. This report presents the density for each word in the various categories: META TITLE, META Description, META Keywords, ALT Tags, Heading Levels, and two categories for Body copy. Following our specified methodology, you would review these reports and web pages to see what you need to change or add to your pages. Red and Blue colors are "bad".

Hint: some search engines ignore content in comment blocks, but some other engines may process this content. Also, some engines process ALT text for your images as keyword text as long as you do not spam these areas. However, at least one search engine has added indexing logic to consider the exact (or long-string) duplication of substantial portions of your keyword list in this fashion as spamming, and your entries will be removed within a week of their addition. To get around this, reword your keyword list to read as sentences, and place them in content appropriate to the page.

It is the mission of SEO to make the content worthy of high ranking by being more relevant and competent than your competition. Placing the keywords in the right spot at reasonable frequency is critical, but there is much more... you want your content to be the best it can be and then just maybe you will be considered relevant. Subject matter experts always do better than rambling text with randomly inserted keywords. Yes, you need the keywords, but you need to also be worthy.

This would also be a good time to perform a last minute check on the "spider-ability" of your site, and to detect any redirects or other issues that may prevent your site from being well ranked.

Step 8 - How to Submit to Each Major Search Engine

Once the same words are in your META title, description and keywords, and also in other text (Alt and comments) and displayed content, and you are satisfied with your results, and only then, is it appropriate to submit your URLs to each major search engine. For search engine submission to just the top few search engines you may use our URL ADD page with links to the add pages of the major search engines.

We suggest that you pace your search engine submissions, adding only up to five pages per day per site as a maximum, and not doing submission more than two or three times per week. As a result, performing the above add requests as scheduled will allow you to remain within the acceptable range for most search engines.

Hint: the engines will regularly discard search engine submissions without processing them. By resubmitting you have a higher probability of having one of your submissions "take." Also, some indexes appear to give preference to "fresh" submissions as determined by the date of last update and the last submission date. So you should update your site often following prescribed Search Engine Optimization tactics and resubmit at least twice per month.

Allow two to four weeks for each search engine submission to be indexed in each major search engine. If you do not show up (as is common), then resubmit. If you continue to miss the search engine rankings results you desire, then go back and review your keyword usage, either increasing or decreasing frequency until you have the desired results. Suggestion: on the Yahoo directory, register regionally instead of nationally (they will add you everywhere as well, but you get registered much quicker regionally), and on the others, register frequently until you are listed. Your ratings in the organic search results appear to be affected and while Yahoo is changing this is still a good move.

Once you are happy with this ranking placement, you are ready to promote your site with all of the other search engines and directories by going to our announce area. If you desire Placement Services to maintain your site and expand your search engine coverage, we provide a tutorial on our Placement Services page.

Step 9 - How to Recheck Your Search Engine Registration

It may take a few weeks for accepted search engine submissions to actually become effective with the major search engine. In some cases, it may take several submissions before you get registered. Considering that the Web is growing at an exceptional rate, it is a wonder at all that any search engine can keep up. Keep trying to get registered. Visit the search engine that you care about and see if you are registered by searching for your url. Your ratings will improve with time under our methodology. Hint: one way to see if your latest change has been indexed (if the title did not change) is to check the Google cache and see if that source matches your current page. If it does then the current page has been indexed.

Step 10 - How to Check Your Search Engine Placement

There is a very specialized high-tech market for tools that convert raw data into intellectual capital that you can actually use. It is hard to have a great product, and those that do must charge for their wares in order to justify the effort. Fortunately, most of the truly good products offer a free trial and easy upgrade path. The power of Search Engine Optimization tools justifies the effort, so we recommend that you visit our SEOToolSet Free Trial Page. Our Search Engine Optimization monitoring tools (there are several) are straight forward and reports are easy to understand. If you like the free search engine advice in the visitor versions, there is a much more powerful set available on a subscription basis. These tools are very powerful, and they are recommended. But then, we are biased.

Once you have these ranking results, you can easily identify where you need to go back and re-submit your site and fine-tune your keywords. Hopefully you will be placed at or near the top of your search results page.

Step 11 - Now the Other Stuff

This is a restated and clearer translation of a Google quote that we received a while back. We have made it "modern" in response to a forum thread request so it is obviously no longer a quote but simply our interpretation of the quote. It says a lot about the Google desire to avoid deception and "hidden" code. To be well ranked in all major search engines you should avoid all hidden links, avoid hidden text, and avoid cloaking as these are usually forms of deception. Most search engines prefer for their spiders to get the identical page that users see. In general, you can assume that most search engines are as conservative as possible. Avoid hidden links/text in divs/layers/iframes/css, or links that are inconspicuous or punctuation, for example. Similarly, cloaking or sneaky redirects in any form, whether it be user agent/ip-based, or redirects through javascript, meta refreshes, 302's, or frames frequently result in ranking penalties.

Step 12 - Start Again - This Never Ends!

Go To Step 1 again and again. We will be adding steps and additional Search Engine Optimization tools to this page in the future. You will want to visit this site frequently to make sure that you remain ranked where you need to be.

Search Engine Optimization and ranking, although great, is not enough. There are many that are too new to the web and do not know how to find a search engine, let alone how to use it. To many, the Internet is email, and nothing more. You still need to consider the other forms of placement as discussed on our Internet Marketing Strategy and Philosophy page.