Business Articles For Online Businesses

Showing up at the top of the major search engines can be easy or difficult depending on the competitiveness of the search term. This said, there are some basic steps that you can follow to make sure your web site shows up well for semi-competitive search terms.

Terms like “credit cards” or “weight loss” are examples of super-competitive terms that can take even an experienced search marketer over a year and hundreds of hours to rank well for. At the other end of the spectrum, ranking well for your company name or a geographically-clarified term like “Hillsborough Law Firm” can take nothing more than putting your target keyword on your web page a few times and building a couple incoming links to your web site.

Regardless of the competitiveness of the terms you are targeting, there are three basic steps to follow first. These steps are:

Determine What Keywords You’re Targeting
Put those keywords on your home page
Build links to your web site from related web sites

Let’s discuss each of these steps.

Step 1: Determine What Keywords You’re Targeting

The first step is to determine which keywords you want your web site to show up for. You can use the Keyword Suggestion Tool from at searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/ to get an idea of the number of times a specific keyword (or keyphrase) is searched each month. Try to come up with a main keyword(s) that you will optimize your home page for and less competitive keywords (“Secondary Keywords), that you can optimize other pages on your web site.

Step 2: Put Those Keywords on Your Home Page

Now that you have determined your main keyword(s) and your secondary keywords you want your web site to show up for, take your main keyword(s) and put them naturally within the text on your home page. Repeat the main keyword(s) 4-5 within the content. The ratio of the number of times your main keyword shows up in your content to the total words on the page is called keyword frequency. Increasing keyword frequency in the text content of the homepage is one of the most helpful and easy things a web site owner can do to improve their ranking.

In addition to adding the keywords to the text content of the homepage, it is also critically important to add the main keyword(s) in the Title tag of the page, which is between the and tags in the code. Other less important, yet still helpful tips include putting your main keyword(s) in a few of the ALT tags on the images and adding the main keyword(s) to the meta description and meta keywords tags on your home page.

Step 3: Build Links to Your Web Site from Related Sites

The third step is building incoming links to your web site from other related web sites. Search engines rank web sites based on authority, and authority within a topic can only be gained by getting web sites that are about the same topic as yours to link to your web site. The two most common methods for building links are offering to exchange links with similar web sites or writing articles and asking similar web sites to syndicate them on their web site. Ideally, you want your main keyword(s) in the link itself, the words that are underlined, clickable, and usually in blue. Building quality links from related web sites can take time, but it critically important to establishing top rankings, especially if you are attempting to get a good ranking on a competitive term.

The number of incoming links needed is generally dependent on how many incoming links the top web sites for the targeted terms have in the major search engines. You can see how many links the top ranked sites have for your target keyword by typing that keyword into Google, then copying the domain name of the top ranked web site, then pasting in “link:domainname.com” in the Google Search box, where domainname.com is the actual domain of the web site of which you are checking the incoming links.

While there are many more tips for improving the rankings of your keywords, these three steps (determining the keywords to target, increasing keyword frequency, and building incoming links from relevant websites) are the most important initial steps to take to ensure that your web site shows up for your targeted search terms.

Search Engine Optimization Questions & Answers

I have a new web site. What is realistic to expect in terms of how long will it take to show up?

It is important to keep in mind that for a brand new website, it can take up to 9-12 months to start showing up in the top rankings for competitive search terms. If you’ve completed the optimization steps mentioned above on a new web site and it isn’t yet showing up for top rankings

What else can I do to improve my ranking?

While improving keyword frequency, adding your targeted keywords to your title, meta, and alt tags, and building incoming links from relevant web sites are the most important steps, there are a few other things that are important. These include building lots of quality related content pages on your web site, updating the content on your home page every couple weeks to ensure content freshness (which is a factor in the rankings), and cleaning up your code.

Why is my site not showing up?

If your site is not at all showing up in Google or Yahoo, it can be because you don’t have any other web sites linking to yours. Type in “link:yourwebsite.com” into Google and make sure it is showing up that you have other web sites linking to your web site. If you have built incoming links to your site but Google isn’t showing them, it is possible Google’s spider hasn’t yet found the page with the link to your site.

You can submit the page where your link exists at google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl. If you do have incoming links showing up in Google, it is possible your site may be penalized. You can use the Google Webmaster Tools at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus to diagnose issues with why your web site may not be showing up in Google. Do note that if you have a new web site, it can take at least two months for the site to show up at all once you have at least one incoming link to your website and as much as 12 months for the site to start performing well on searches for competitive keywords.

Is it better to hire a professional SEO firm or do it myself?

Hiring a SEO firm can save a good deal of time and cost less than doing it yourself and often get better results—depending of course on the firm you hire. In order to find a good firm, ask for references from clients they’ve worked with in the past and for actual search results for competitive keywords that they’ve obtained high rankings.

While I’m certainly biased, I would recommend checking out Virante, Inc. for any search engine optimization or web marketing needs you may have. Virante is an SEO and marketing consulting firm I started in 1998 and now is run by search marketing experts Bob Misita, Malcolm Young, Russ Jones, and Jeff Staub as I’ve focused on being CEO of Broadwick, the company behind the IntelliContact email marketing software. You can learn more about Virante at virante.com.

Ryan Allis is the Chief Executive Officer of Virante, Inc., a web marketing consulting and search engine optimization firm in Durham, North Carolina as well as the CEO of Broadwick Corp., providers of the leading email marketing software service IntelliContact. He is the author of the book, Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to One Million in Sales. You can read more of Ryan’s articles at ryanallis.com ryanallis.com

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In the early days of the Internet, you could often generate traffic just by being there. The billions of sites that exist now didn’t exist then, and those who built sites early on got tons of traffic and profits just by having a presence. Those “build it and they will come” days are gone; the Web is not astonishingly competitive, especially in business and marketing niches. Savvy Website operators know that it’s much harder to make the public know that their site exists and they devote a lot of time to a process known as Search Engine Optimization.

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is about designing you site in such a way that the major search engines, such as Google, will see your site as relevant to a particular topic. There’s a science to that, and numerous consultants charge a fortune to share their “secrets” of how to build your site so that the search engines will rank it highly for search results. The high price of these consultants and the amount of work required for effective SEO has led to the creation of software packages designed to make search engine optimization easier. Perhaps the most heavily promoted of these Web position tools is SEO Elite.

SEO Elite, like most Web-related software, makes bold claims about what it can do for you. They emphasize the value of having hundreds (or even thousands) of quality sites linking to yours as an important component of search engine optimization and claim that SEO Elite can find suitable linking partners for you in mere minutes. They also claim that you can use this program to determine how the high ranking sites for a particular topic managed to achieve that ranking so that you can copy their technique. And finally, they claim the tool can keep you notified on a daily basis as to how well your site ranks in the major search engines. If your site moves up a few notches in Google, SEO Elite will tell you.

Can it do all of that, or are the creators of this product just engaging in the usual hyperbole? Actually SEO Elite does exactly what the creators say it will do, provided that you are willing to make the effort to use it correctly. Building a network of links to your site is a time consuming process, and SEO Elite can, indeed, find hundreds of potential link partners in mere minutes. You simply need to contact them through an easy-to-use interface that will save you countless hours over doing it manually. Each time you tweak your site, you can use SEO Elite to see how well your changes are working. This tool can genuinely save you time and ease the process of search engine optimization.

All of this isn’t magic, of course. Tweaking your site to optimize it for the various search engines and your particular topic takes time and effort. There is no “instant” solution that will bring thousands of people to your site. Having quality content on your site is still a big part of the process. But SEO Elite is a powerful tool that, used correctly, can help you build a site that ranks highly for the topic of your choice. If understand the importance of search engine optimization, SEO Elite represents money well spent .

©Copyright 2006 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of retro-marketing.com/ Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to informational Websites, including a site devoted to seoelite-exposed.com/ search engine optimization.

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