Search
Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine
marketing is the art and science of gaining high search
engine placement for search phrases that will attract
your ideal prospects. For example, when someone searches
for "the abundance course" we want them to find
this site. And they do!
There are numerous
opinions about how to do search engine optimization (SEO).
This is for a variety of factors, but there are two that
are primary:
1. The search
engines are constantly changing their algorithms (the
criteria used to rank a page).
2. Each search engine uses different variables that determine
how "relevent" a page is.
I follow the
advice of Brad Fallon, co-author of Stomping the Search
Engines. I've heard Brad speak a couple of times and he's
a smart guy. Besides that he can prove his theories true
by showing number one placement of his web sites in very
competitive markets.
Brad's approach
to SEO is this:
Gain enough
inbound links to your site to reach the top-10 search
results, then worry about on-page optimization.
What's
an Inbound Link?
An inbound
link is a link on somebody elses web site that points
to your site. There are three important factors when we
talk about inbound links.
1.
The popularity of the site linking to you; not
all sites are equal in the eyes of the search engines.
Google uses what is called "page rank" to determine
this. The higher the page rank of a site, the more valuable
that a link is from that site. A page rank of 5 is good.
Anything above that is very good to great.
2.
The number of links pointing to you. Although
one link from a site with a PR7 is terrific, 50 links
from a number of sites with lower PR is good too. The
more links pointing to your site, the more "authoratative"
your web site is considered.
3.
The anchor text. This is EXTREMELY important.
Anchor text are the words used in the link that points
to your site. If you want to rank well for "abundance
course", then you want many links pointing to you
with those words - for example abundance
course instead of http://www.abundancecourse.com
or click here
How
to do an anchor text link? It's easy.
<a href="http://www.mysite.com">YOUR
TEXT HERE</a>
You can
watch a short video on how
to creat text links here.
It's important
to vary the anchor text when doing link trades. You don't
want every site pointing to yours to say "abundance
course"; instead you want "abundance course
audio program", or "the release technique |
the abundance course", etc. Attempt to get as many
relevent keywords in your anchor text as possible, while
eliminating irrelevent keyords.
The
Most Efficient Ways to Get Links to You
1. Hire Someone
on Rent-a-Coder.com; You can find people who will arrange
link exchanges with you and pay them on a "per link"
basis.
2. Article
Submissions; Submit articles to article directories. Publishers
of other web sites will use your writing on their sites.
3. SEO Elite.
This is a piece of software I use that finds sites that
do link exchanges, autotically fills out the forms and
then creates a recipricol link page that you place on
your site. I highly recommend this software to all do-it-yourselfers.
What used to require hours of effort, I can now do in
20 minutes. Learn
more about SEO Elite.
Search
Engine Optimization,
Quick and Easy
1.
Keyword Research
- Choose the
RIGHT WORDS
- - Relevant to Your Offer
- - People are SEARCHING FOR IT!
o http://inventory.overture.com
2.
Offsite Optimization
- Number of
inbound links (sites that link to you)
- Quality of the sites those links appear on
- What the links, the anchor text, says
3.
Onsite Optimization
A. Include
exact keywords you want placement for it your page title.
Eliminate non-essential words, characters and phrases
people are not likely to search for.
Example:
YES - "Sedona Arizona Real Estate Agent"
NO - "sedonarealestate.com - John Barker is a swell
guy meeting all your needs"
B. Include
keywords in page names and directories.
YES - sedonarealestate.com/FSBO/for-sale-by-owner.html
NO - sedonarealestate.com/dir1/page23.html
C. Use H1 and
H2 tags for headlines; use at least 2 headlines.
D. Include
primary keywords in both headlines.
E. Include
keywords in every paragraph, at least once.
F. Linking
within your site, use text links that include important
keywords that describe that page.
YES - Sedona
Real Estate Listings
NO - Click here for info
G. Use similar
guidelines for images - ie, sedona-arizona-home.jpg instead
of pic3.jpg and use alt tags that accurately describe
the image, utilizing keywords.
H. Most important
pages, only, should link directly from home page. Use
a site map for other pages.
4.
Other factors
- With SE's
in mind, learn to view your site upside down; a funnel
that feeds your home page, not a home page that feeds
the rest.
- META Tags (for more on metatags,
click here)
- - Description
- - Tag that tells SE's to spider and index "all"
- <meta name="robots" content="all">
- robots.txt file
(upload this file, as-is, to your main site directory
- ie, public_html)
5.
Only Search Engines that Really Matter
- Google (Most
important factors: Offsite factors and page title)
- Yahoo (Most important factors: Currently shifting, balance
of offsite/onsite)
- MSN (Most important factors: Primarily onsite factors
- easiest to get placement on right now)
What
do I need to know about metatags?
In general,
they are no longer relevant to SEO
because so many people abused the use of them.
Here are the tags I include in my sites - and I
recommend you do too. You can copy and paste
them into your HTML document right BELOW your
title tag.
------------------
<html>
<head>
<title>The Abundance Course</title>
<meta
name="description" content="AN
ACCURATE DESCRIPTION OF THE CONTENTS OF YOUR PAGE.">
<meta name="keywords" content="5-7
WORDS THAT ACCURATELY DESCRIBE YOUR PAGE">
<meta name="allow search" content="yes">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
</head>
------------------
These are what I use on all of my sites - you want
to replace the CAP text with
your words. The 'allow search'
and 'robots' tags are important because they tell the
search
engines to follow all links and index all pages on your
site. |
