Starting a Business Tutorial Series: Creating a Search Engine Presence
You may have read in the Building Your Website chapter that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a minor part of running a successful online business. There are many that may disagree with that sentiment but after years of experience (and many offline years before that) it is my personal opinion. I try to judge everything by using a time to benefit ratio, that is comparing the amount of time spent on a particular discipline versus the amount of benefit (profit) you receive from it. I don’t dispute the Search Engines bring in a lot of traffic but in the majority of industries where physical product is being sold, there are many more time efficient methods.
All of that being said, you should do at least the basic amount of SEO to get your site going, which is what this chapter covers. If you have the staff or the spare time and want to make SEO an integral part of your strategy, I will include some resources for getting the information and advice needed.
In order to apply the basics of SEO, you will need to understand how the Search Engines find you and how they rank your site against all the others. We will firstly talk about finding you (called Indexing) as this is the one thing I believe all businesses should actively seek. When you run offline campaigns, it is very common that you will have people that remember your name but not your url, especially if it is long or has dashes. It is for this reason that you want to rank first for your business name, which if unique, would happen merely by being indexed. Search Engines basically work by going to sites which it knows are there and following every internal and external link on those pages. When following internal links, it adds the pages it finds which is how your entire site can show up in the results. When it follows external links, it adds the new sites it finds to its results and so on. So it is possible to have a site for years and if there is not a single link from a recognized site to it, it would never be recognized by Google. Anyone doing the basics should be able to get their site to appear in approximately 7-10 days. I have gotten sites indexed within hours before while I have also had it take considerably longer. The speed at which it does get indexed depends on the number of links which point to it. The thinking there is that the more links point to a site, must correspond with how popular or important it is. How to get these links will be included further down the road in this chapter.
So once the Search Engines find you and add you, they need to decide where to place you in the rankings. There are a few things you can do to your site to improve your rank. The first is to be sure to utilize your title. With so many people using template systems, I see the title tag wasted by having every page just list a few keywords there. What you should be doing instead is give a descriptive and unique title to every page you have. Try to avoid unnatural language as most times, your title will appear the the Search Engine Results and when it comes to click through rate, a smart and interesting title will bring in a lot more people then one which makes no sense, even if it uses all the words you are targeting. When it comes to on page factors, you need to always remember that customer experience should figure in higher then SEO benefit at all times. Those that are most successful with SEO are able to balance the two perfectly. After your title, your attention should turn to the keywords you use throughout the copy on each page. Although on site text benefits you more in Yahoo and MSN, it can still affect your position in Google. Again, be sure to use natural language. To avoid an overcrowded or spammy feel, if you are targeting multiple keywords create unique pages for each. I never advise anyone to have all of their products on one page as it is very difficult to SEO. If having this setup is customer friendly, I suggest then adding a “More Info” link to each product. You can then use laser precision to SEO each page while keeping the page itself clean and crisp. Although the description and keyword meta tags have very little bearing on the major Search Engines, they should still be used and unique to each page. Avoid any other metas as they are not time efficient as the Search Engines do not even look at them. Most SEO’s will advise you to use H1 tags for your keywords but this should only be done if it does not take away from the design of the page. They are not given the recognition they used to get from the majors so its only a “If you can” situation. The last area of on site optimisation is to be sure to have clear and inclusive navigation (using text links where possible) and a comprehensive site map within one click of your index page. Your site map should not be a auto generated one but instead a hand coded page using descriptive keywords for every link. This is important for both customer retention and SEO.
Once you have your site in order, it is time to turn your attention to linking. This is the area you will most likely spend your time and is quite important. There are several ways to get others to link to you which I will outline below. They are in no specific order as the usefulness of each method and its effectiveness is a topic for debate. This tutorial is meant to give you the tools with the hope you will use them to form your own opinions.
Useful or Unique Tools and Games
This is probably my favourite although it can be the most difficult to use. I am sure most people have linked to something they thought was cool. It basically works on the principle that if you provide something people truly like, not only will they email the link to others, if they own a site they will probably link to it there. In the past it has been a great way to generate related links which although there is a debate on whether Search Engines give a bonus because they are related, there is no debate that they bring a higher quality (judged by conversion rate) of traffic. If your programming skills are lacking, you can go somewhere like Rent a Coder and as long as you know what kind of tool you want, they can create it for you for very little cost. Although they are now a dime a dozen, a good example would have been different mortgage calculators for a finance site. Almost every industry can work in some tools which will bring in traffic and create links. Last year one of my tools brought in 500,000 unique visitors and generated 1,000’s of links. The creation of the tool cost me around $20.
Reciprocal Linking
This is by far the most popular and used method. The basic principle is that, in exchange for a link to your site, you place a link to their site. There are many that would say a recip link is not counted or viewed upon as highly by Google, but I have seen sites of mine rank highly purely with reciprocals. The downside is that due to its popularity, there are a lot of hijinks associated with these trades. It is common for conmen to remove your link a few days after your trade and not telling you, adding a nofollow to your links (So SE’s don’t count them), or disallowing their linking page in their robots text file. All of these things mean that you either have to spend a lot of time tracking these things down or you lose a lot of the benefit of the links you worked so hard to achieve. It is for these reasons you should not rely on this method exclusively. There are some tools to increase your efficiency such as Link Market and Click Sentry amongst many others but just because you use these tools, it doesn’t mean you don’t have exposure to the issues outlined above.
Linking Networks
After people started seeing success with recip’s, it didn’t take long for them to start developing automated systems. These systems allowed you to put a piece of code on your site that would display a prespecified number of links and in exchange your links would be displayed on others sites. All of these links would be Search Engine friendly and because they are part of a system, you would never have to worry about being cheated. These systems are highly effective but in order to take advantage of them you need to have a site which has a lot of pages indexed and/or a high PR. My personal advice would be to be careful though as although they will help in your rankings, be sure that text link advertisements will not hurt your sales or conversions. You are able to specify footer links which seem to have minimum negative effect on customer conversions versus something like a flashing banner or pop ups. Probably the two biggest and most trusted are Link Vault and the Coop Network.
There are many more aspects to SEO but as this was a guide for the beginner, using the tips and suggestions outlined above should give you a good start at very little to no cost. I always suggest people start with the basics as there are many more important uses of your time for a new business. Once you find you have the time to commit to SEO after all your initial work, you can do more research at places like SEOmoz which is an excellent resource. My only warning would be to be careful to not get too bogged down. That site represents professional SEO’s who tend to be proactive in their approach. This is great for someone who does nothing but SEO but any business owner should practice reactive SEO where you use proven knowledge which you implement on your site. In most industries this will get you Top 10’s with very little expense or work and is much more resource efficient. Leave the experimentation to the big guys as your only focus should be converting sales.
by jason :- the source is here
All of that being said, you should do at least the basic amount of SEO to get your site going, which is what this chapter covers. If you have the staff or the spare time and want to make SEO an integral part of your strategy, I will include some resources for getting the information and advice needed.
In order to apply the basics of SEO, you will need to understand how the Search Engines find you and how they rank your site against all the others. We will firstly talk about finding you (called Indexing) as this is the one thing I believe all businesses should actively seek. When you run offline campaigns, it is very common that you will have people that remember your name but not your url, especially if it is long or has dashes. It is for this reason that you want to rank first for your business name, which if unique, would happen merely by being indexed. Search Engines basically work by going to sites which it knows are there and following every internal and external link on those pages. When following internal links, it adds the pages it finds which is how your entire site can show up in the results. When it follows external links, it adds the new sites it finds to its results and so on. So it is possible to have a site for years and if there is not a single link from a recognized site to it, it would never be recognized by Google. Anyone doing the basics should be able to get their site to appear in approximately 7-10 days. I have gotten sites indexed within hours before while I have also had it take considerably longer. The speed at which it does get indexed depends on the number of links which point to it. The thinking there is that the more links point to a site, must correspond with how popular or important it is. How to get these links will be included further down the road in this chapter.
So once the Search Engines find you and add you, they need to decide where to place you in the rankings. There are a few things you can do to your site to improve your rank. The first is to be sure to utilize your title. With so many people using template systems, I see the title tag wasted by having every page just list a few keywords there. What you should be doing instead is give a descriptive and unique title to every page you have. Try to avoid unnatural language as most times, your title will appear the the Search Engine Results and when it comes to click through rate, a smart and interesting title will bring in a lot more people then one which makes no sense, even if it uses all the words you are targeting. When it comes to on page factors, you need to always remember that customer experience should figure in higher then SEO benefit at all times. Those that are most successful with SEO are able to balance the two perfectly. After your title, your attention should turn to the keywords you use throughout the copy on each page. Although on site text benefits you more in Yahoo and MSN, it can still affect your position in Google. Again, be sure to use natural language. To avoid an overcrowded or spammy feel, if you are targeting multiple keywords create unique pages for each. I never advise anyone to have all of their products on one page as it is very difficult to SEO. If having this setup is customer friendly, I suggest then adding a “More Info” link to each product. You can then use laser precision to SEO each page while keeping the page itself clean and crisp. Although the description and keyword meta tags have very little bearing on the major Search Engines, they should still be used and unique to each page. Avoid any other metas as they are not time efficient as the Search Engines do not even look at them. Most SEO’s will advise you to use H1 tags for your keywords but this should only be done if it does not take away from the design of the page. They are not given the recognition they used to get from the majors so its only a “If you can” situation. The last area of on site optimisation is to be sure to have clear and inclusive navigation (using text links where possible) and a comprehensive site map within one click of your index page. Your site map should not be a auto generated one but instead a hand coded page using descriptive keywords for every link. This is important for both customer retention and SEO.
Once you have your site in order, it is time to turn your attention to linking. This is the area you will most likely spend your time and is quite important. There are several ways to get others to link to you which I will outline below. They are in no specific order as the usefulness of each method and its effectiveness is a topic for debate. This tutorial is meant to give you the tools with the hope you will use them to form your own opinions.
Useful or Unique Tools and Games
This is probably my favourite although it can be the most difficult to use. I am sure most people have linked to something they thought was cool. It basically works on the principle that if you provide something people truly like, not only will they email the link to others, if they own a site they will probably link to it there. In the past it has been a great way to generate related links which although there is a debate on whether Search Engines give a bonus because they are related, there is no debate that they bring a higher quality (judged by conversion rate) of traffic. If your programming skills are lacking, you can go somewhere like Rent a Coder and as long as you know what kind of tool you want, they can create it for you for very little cost. Although they are now a dime a dozen, a good example would have been different mortgage calculators for a finance site. Almost every industry can work in some tools which will bring in traffic and create links. Last year one of my tools brought in 500,000 unique visitors and generated 1,000’s of links. The creation of the tool cost me around $20.
Reciprocal Linking
This is by far the most popular and used method. The basic principle is that, in exchange for a link to your site, you place a link to their site. There are many that would say a recip link is not counted or viewed upon as highly by Google, but I have seen sites of mine rank highly purely with reciprocals. The downside is that due to its popularity, there are a lot of hijinks associated with these trades. It is common for conmen to remove your link a few days after your trade and not telling you, adding a nofollow to your links (So SE’s don’t count them), or disallowing their linking page in their robots text file. All of these things mean that you either have to spend a lot of time tracking these things down or you lose a lot of the benefit of the links you worked so hard to achieve. It is for these reasons you should not rely on this method exclusively. There are some tools to increase your efficiency such as Link Market and Click Sentry amongst many others but just because you use these tools, it doesn’t mean you don’t have exposure to the issues outlined above.
Linking Networks
After people started seeing success with recip’s, it didn’t take long for them to start developing automated systems. These systems allowed you to put a piece of code on your site that would display a prespecified number of links and in exchange your links would be displayed on others sites. All of these links would be Search Engine friendly and because they are part of a system, you would never have to worry about being cheated. These systems are highly effective but in order to take advantage of them you need to have a site which has a lot of pages indexed and/or a high PR. My personal advice would be to be careful though as although they will help in your rankings, be sure that text link advertisements will not hurt your sales or conversions. You are able to specify footer links which seem to have minimum negative effect on customer conversions versus something like a flashing banner or pop ups. Probably the two biggest and most trusted are Link Vault and the Coop Network.
There are many more aspects to SEO but as this was a guide for the beginner, using the tips and suggestions outlined above should give you a good start at very little to no cost. I always suggest people start with the basics as there are many more important uses of your time for a new business. Once you find you have the time to commit to SEO after all your initial work, you can do more research at places like SEOmoz which is an excellent resource. My only warning would be to be careful to not get too bogged down. That site represents professional SEO’s who tend to be proactive in their approach. This is great for someone who does nothing but SEO but any business owner should practice reactive SEO where you use proven knowledge which you implement on your site. In most industries this will get you Top 10’s with very little expense or work and is much more resource efficient. Leave the experimentation to the big guys as your only focus should be converting sales.
by jason :- the source is here
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