Laodan's Search Engine Optimization Machine
- Keywords
selection
About the selection of your keywords
People start a search with the input of a keyword
Most visitors find their way to your site through Search engines. The keywords you select will thus determine who are the majority of your site's visitors. If you chose the wrong keywords you could be stuck with the wrong visitors...
How does one find the keywords that will generate the best leads
Until very recently the target of page optimization was sheer volume of visits. But that assumption is now being questionned and the quality of incoming visitors is considered to be the real determinant of the success of a website. Quality means your visitors enter your site by searching for the same keywords as the ones on your page. It is thus the quality of your keywords that is determinant.
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1 Select what you think are the best words defining what your site is all about.
2 Click on the buttons here above. This will bring you to FREE online tools that will help you to find the most productive keywords related to your particular activity.
3 Prepare a fact sheet for each page to optimize and follow the impact of your optimization sessions. This document will be your optimization memory and it will guide your steps into the next session. - Your competitors
What distinguishes your competitors' pages?
What are their keywords? What are their meta-tags?
What is determinant for a website is its content. Only interesting content will keep your visitor's eyes on your site. And the length of time they stay on your site determines if your site is successful. But once you have interesting content you have to optimize it for the search engines, for, they see something else than your visitors.
What is the quality of their incoming links (rank) and how many do they have?
Search engines seem to give more weight to an incoming link originating from a site with high ranking. It is thus not the number of incoming links, per se, that is important but their rankings. You can try emulate your most successful competitors and try to get the same incoming links as them.
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1 There is no reason not to emulate your most successful competitors..
2 Check what page title, what description and what keywords they use. Analyse their incoming links and scan their page for the sites that link to them. This is material to use on your own site...
3 Check also their text ratio to code, the download speed of their pages, the age of their site... - Keywords Optimize
About the optimization of your keywords
In the meta-tags.
The title of your page should integrate as many of your keywords as possible (60 characters max). Your title can then become the first section of your description (250 characters max) and the keywords in it should appear first in your keyword list (less than 1000 characters).
In the content of your page.
As a rule of thumb the density of your keywords on the page should be between 2% and 10 - 15% depending on the length of your text. But be carefull search engines penalyse keyword spam... Keywords should also be integrated in the alternate text of images and in headings.
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1 First thing run the meta-tags generator and insert the generated code in the head section of your page.
2 Keyword optimization is done in successive sessions. Each session being followed by an analysis of the results in term of density, repeats and prominence (relative position of one keyword on the page) The cycle Optimization + Analysis should be repeated at least 3 times to reach valid search engine results.
3 As a rule of thumb there is no fixed SEO ratio. Experience is what distinguishes SEO'ers from others. - Links
About your incoming links
Incoming or outgoing links?
The Search Engines only consider your incoming links. Outgoing links seem not to affect them. All of the major search engines use link popularity to determine how well a site will rank - so the more high quality, relevant links that lead to your site, the higher it will rank.
What gives weight to your incoming links?
The Search Engines calculate the weight of your incoming links by using a formula integrating several parameters. Nobody knows for sure what are these parameters nor what is the weight of each of them.
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1 First run the link extractor and extract links from the web pages that get the highest rankings for your keywords. You'll soon accumulate a lists of sites with the highest weight for the search engines.
2 Install the link machine. It's free it runs from your personal site and it automates your Reciprocal Link Exchange Shores.
3 Add a link to the search engines that give free submission. You can also spend some money on submitting to the directories that are the most authoritative in your field of activity.
4 Check your link popularity with the Search Engines and find more incoming links to higher your popularity. - Other
Other determinant variables
Tools to complement this SEO machine.
Web Developer Toolbar is an excellent Firefox extension that I use as a complement to all the tools referenced in this SEO machine. (view CSS, html code) Google Webmaster Tools has also some remarkable functions: list of incoming links per page, Web crawl errors, statistics and sitemaps.
Other parameters
People have no patience to wait for a page that downloads very slowly. They click away. Slow download speed is often cited as one of the biggest usability complaints for websites. A faster download speed therefore leads to increased usability, and a web usability redesign can increase the sales/conversion rate.
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1 Check the speed. The speed report shall advise you about what should be done.
2 The higher the text versus code ratio the better the content of your site appears to be in the eyes of the Search Engines.
3 To increase the text ratio, and also to speed up the download time, it is advised to replace as much html code as possible with external CSS or Java files. - Validation
Validation of your html/CSS, links and spelling
CSS and html validation
Validate your code in order to avoid misreadings by the search engines. It also speeds up the download time to have code well formatted.
Links, spell check and clean-up.
Broken links and mispellings are displeasing for most web users. Broken links also suggest trouble on your page to the Search Engines who will penalize you with lower rankings. And don't forget to clean up your html code from unnecessary clutter that lengthen the size of your page and reduces its download speed. Html Tidy is able to fix up a wide range of problems and to bring to your attention things that you need to work on yourself.
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1 Validate your html and CSS.
2 Spell check your copy.
3 Validate your links.
4 Clean-up the clutter hanging around in your html code. (html tidy) - Submit-monitor
Submission and monitoring
Sitemap and submission
Sitemaps helps both new and existing sites improve their Google presence. It can help new sites with few links get more extensive crawls when Googlebot visits, and large sites with PageRank should see deeper crawls and speedier page discovery by showing Googlebot the layout of their site. Uour page is now ready for submission.
Monitoring the position of your page in searches
Google suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. Among search engines Google is the highest referer. Practically that means that something like 80% of all visits sent to your page by the Search Engines has been sent by Google. No drawing needed...
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1 Create a sitemap in xml format. This FREE Sitemap Tool will spider your site (up to 1000 URL's) and give you an xml file to load into your site.
2 Submit your site to the most important search engines. Submit only your entry page. Your sitemap will then let the search engines discover all your other pages.
3 Monitoring. Discover failures on your site to correct them. Follow your rankings and take action to increase them. - Articles
A selection of very useful articles
My del.icio.us link page to SEO articles
About keywords and meta-tags
- Find Out What Keywords Your Customers Are Searching With
- keyword density, frequency, prominence and proximity
- Keyword Density in Search Engine Ranking
- Improve your search engine listing and placement with META tags
- Improve Your Search Engine Ranking on Google
Incoming links
- Incoming Links Guide
- Whitepaper on Link Building
- Incoming Links Aren't Hard to Come By With the Right Content
Other stuff: WEb page design, content.
- Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Visibility
- Does Content Play a Role in SEO?
