SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING ORANGE COUNTY

BASICS OF SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING - 3rd STEP

You have completed steps one and two. Your site should be optimized to a point where both Yahoo! and Google will find all of your pages "Search Engine Friendly." Now, you need to do some things that are more difficult, but will drive traffic much faster and get your site ranked higher faster.

• Time
• Page Ranking - Google
• Back Links
• Site Map

Timing - The Longer your web site is online, the better
Search Engine Placement

If you are starting a site for the first time, your site obviously has not been online long enough to gain enough attention from either of the engines. The longer a site has been online, the more chance it has of gaining credibility from the engines.

You can't create time so you'll have to be patient. While you're waiting, you need to perform other tasks which will also help your site gain higher rankings. These include back links and a site map for Google.

Page Ranking - Google Search Engine Placement

For the Google Search engine, all of the optimization you performed will result in a page ranking. If your site has relevant or educational content for a visitor (not just corporate content), your pages will be ranked higher. The Google algorithm places more emphasis on this type of content than simple, random content. You can find your Google page ranking by downloading the google toolbar.

Click here to download the google toolbar http://toolbar.google.com/index_xp.html

Once the toolbar is downloaded and shows on your internet browser, click on "Options" and select the Page Ranking view

Back Links - Search Engine Positioning for Google and Yahoo

Before you understand why back links are important, you need to understand how search engines find and index pages of website. Each search engine employs Spiders or crawlers to "cruise" around the internet. These spiders look at web pages and determine if the pages are linked correctly and look at all of the pages to see if the content is relevant. The more relevant the content and the better the page is organized, the higher the ranking for the pages FOR SPECIFIC KEYWORDS in that page.

The spiders return information to the search engine database and penalizes sites for bad links and for not having the correct format. Finally, one of the most important things the spiders look for is Back Links.

Back links are those links from other web sites that link back to your web site. Odds are, if you're just starting a web site from scratch, you probably have no back links to your site. If you have had a site online for a long time, you can check back links to your site using a number of online tools.

Again, going back to the Softnik tool, you can select "Site & Link Popularity". This will tell you how many links link back to your site and how many pages you have indexed in the major search engines.

Google Back Links

This is one of the major differences between Yahoo and Google. Yahoo will count each back link equally and therefore, the more links you have IN GENERAL linking back to your site, the better chance you have in better page ranking. Google, in contrast, analyzes the page ranking of each site that links to your site (Remember, only Google's algorithm has Page Ranking, not Yahoo).

Google's algorithm takes into account the page ranking where the link to your site takes place AND how many other links are on that page (if your link is the only one on the page, you will get a higher score for that link). Homepage links are also favored more than pages that are deeper down in the linking site.

What if You Don't Have Any Links to your site?

This is one of the most important aspects of search engine ranking. If you don't have any links to your site, it will take a longer time to index your pages. All of the optimization you've done will work over a long period of time, but you will not see results for quite a long time.

Our recommendation is to work with companies that maintain hundreds of sites with highly ranked pages that will add a link to those pages for quicker indexing of your web site. Contact us for more information about these and other companies with Keyword phrases and back links.

Anchor Text

For Google, not only are back links important, but the words IN the back links. You want the links to have your keyword or phrase in the ACTUAL link.

Site Map

Also for Google, you need to submit a site map of your web site. A site map is an xml file you create that includes all of the pages of your web site. The file is submitted to Google so the spider can read a file of all of the pages of your web site rather than having to figure it out itself.

<< Go back to Step Two