Search Engine Positioning

A Basic Tutorial

Dozens of books have been written about search engine positioning. This is just a basic tutorial to help you understand the technology and techniques.

Keywords:  The Keys to Success

The foundation of positioning, for any search engine, is keywords. Keywords are what you think people will type in to the search engines to find your site. Let's say you sell satellite dishes. Your keywords, or phrases would be: satellite, satellite dish, dish satellite, dishes, tv dishes, satellite tv, and I'm sure there are others. Ask ten friends what keywords or questions they would use to find your service. There is an online service called Wordtracker that will help you figure out what your keywords should be. I've used it a few times and it's a very nifty service.

Your keywords are never "cast in concrete". When you do your web analysis you may discover that people are using keywords or phrases that you never thought of. Conversely, you may find that some of the keywords you thought of are never used.

Getting the word out

After you've figured out your keywords, there are two ways to get traffic from search engines. The fastest is paying for ads/positioning. Google, Overture, and Spinks are examples of paid advertising sites. Most of them are pay per click (PPC) which is the best from your perspective. This means that you only pay when someone clicks on the link and goes to your site. The other option is pay per view (PPV) which means that every time your ad is shown, you pay.

What you have to figure out is how much is a visitor worth? If you sell a $10 product, and one visitor out of 100 buys, the max you can pay for a visitor is ten cents. Of course, that's all your profit from the sale. If you sell a $100 product and one visitor out of 100 buys, then you can pay $1 for each click. Again, that's all your profit on the sale.

Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, MSN, AOL, etc. are some of the search engines that are important to get high ranking on. These are free, some have paid advertising as well, but each one of them has its own idea why your site should be ranked highly. That's the rub.

There are numerous software developers and consultants who work hard to break down the apparent positioning "magic" into routine steps that will get high rankings on a consistent basis. By the way, you may have several pages on your site that are there to focus on specific keywords. From our satellite example, you may have a page that only refers to satellite tv and another for satellite dish.

The Search Engine View

In general, the search engines are looking at:

• Your Title - Does the title of the page contain the keyword phrases that are being searched for?
• Meta Tags - Description - Does the meta tag description of the page contain the keywords?
• Meta Tags - Keywords - Do the keywords in the keyword meta tag match the keywords?
• Headline - H1 - Does the headline for the page match the keywords?
• Body Copy - Does the body copy of the page contain the keywords?
• Images - Does the page have images with ALT tags that contain the keywords?
• Links - Does the page have links to other pages on the site with the keywords in the link?
• Links From Other Sites - Do other sites have links to your site and how many pages link to that site?

Moving up through the ranks

There are several ways you can set up your pages to enhance your rankings in the search engines.

• Do it yourself. Read everything you can find about positioning to get up to speed. And, using your HTML editor, like FrontPage, edit the items noted  above to "help" the search engines rank your pages highly. This is the most time consuming and prone to not getting the results you expect.
• Use a program, like Web Position Gold, to assist you in developing the pages to improve your rankings. There is a learning curve here. Once you've figured it out, it can go pretty rapidly and give you respectable results. Find out more, click here!
• Use a service that works at positioning. If you're using a web developer to do your site, he or she may well be versed in the art of positioning. There are also services like Top10 that specialize in positioning. Always get references.
  
  This is potentially the most effective in terms of results. And it's also the most expensive in a financial sense.

Beware of Empty Promises

If you've done your own preparation, you still want to submit your pages to the search engines. The other methods have built-in tools to do this. There are services that will help you submit your pages to a number of search engines. Watch out for the services that say they will submit to 100+ search engines. They are taking a shotgun approach to the submission process, which isn't going to help you. And they are submitting to search engines that no one you know has ever heard of.

You can count the important/top search engines on your fingers plus a couple of toes. Focus on submitting to those.

A great newsletter about positioning, that I pore over each month, is available here.