ywriting Pty Ltd 6 Introduction 6 Introduction If youre like most people the term search engine optimization will mean very little. Either that or it just means expense But it doesnt have to be that way If you feel like youre standing in a dark room handing money to strangers to get you in the search engines then this ebook is written rankmaniac 2012 just for you. This ebook is written by a business owner for other business owners CEOs marketing practitioners and webmasters. It explains Search Engine Optimization or SEO in laypersons terms. It wont rankmaniac 2012 make you an expert but it will give you some insight into what youre spending your money on what you should be spending your money on and just as importantly what you shouldnt. Why should you believe me Because Ive reached the top of the search engines using the very methods I advocate. Take a look at About the Author on p.7 to learn a little more about me my background and my experience. As you work your way through this eBook refer to the Glossary at the end if youre unsure of a particular term. If you have any suggestions or feedback or would like to be notified of future updates to this book please email me at glenndivinewrite.com. NOTE If you would like to make a PayPal donation to ensure that this book remains current please visit httpwww.divinewrite.comseosecrets.htm . SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 7 About the Author 7 About the Author Glenn Murray is a professional copywriter specializing in copy for websites search engines and print materials. Using the methods described in this ebook Glenn has achieved a page 1 worldwide ranking on Google.com for his website www.divinewrite.com for all of his targeted keywords Keyword Google worldwide rank copywriter 1 SEO copywriter 1 2 website copywriter 1 2 website copywriting 1 advertising copywriting 2 advertising copywriter 4 Based in Sydney Australia Glenn has 12 years professional writing experience. Numbered among his clients are some of the worlds leading companies including Toyota Honeywell KimberleyClark SafenSound Doubleday the Australian Government Raine Horne PMP Limited Volante and MYOB. Glenn has a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and English Literature and a Master of Arts in International rankmaniac 2012 Communication. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 8 Step 1 Understand what SEO means 8 Step 1 Understand what SEO means Before launching straight into an explanation of SEO lets talk a bit about search engines. A little about search engines Approximately 7580 of website traffic comes through search engines. Whats more research shows that most people dont rankmaniac 2012 look beyond the first 2 pages of search results. This means if your website doesnt rank in the first 2 pages of the major search engines its only receiving 2030 of its rightful traffic and revenue. And remember being ranked number 1 when you search for your company name or web address doesnt count. You need to rank highly for the words your customers use at search engines. Search engine results
The biggest concern for search engine companies like Google and Yahoo is finding content that will bring them more traffic and thus more advertising revenue. In other words their results must be relevant. Relevant results makes for a good search engine irrelevant results makes for a shortlived search engine. Most search engines these days return two types of results whenever you click Search NaturalOrganic The real search results. The results that most users are rankmaniac 2012 looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches the search engine displays
a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they rankmaniac 2012 are. Paid Pure advertising. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers pay the search engines to display their ad whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results but are normally labeled Sponsored Links and normally take up a smaller portion of the window. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 9 Step rankmaniac 2012 1 Understand what SEO means 9 When people use search engines to find content they normally pay a lot more attention to the natural results than the paid results because they know these results are more relevant and they know the Sponsored Links are simply ads. When we talk about search engine ranking were talking about ranking well in the natural search results. This ebook does not cover Sponsored Links. How search engines decide what appears in the natural search results IMPORTANT You cannot pay a search engine in return for a high ranking in the natural results. You can only get a high ranking if your content is seen as relevant by the search engines. Search engines identify relevant content for their search results by sending out spiders or robots which crawl rankmaniac 2012 analyze your site and index record its details. Complex algorithms are then employed to determine whether your site is useful and should be included in the search engines rankmaniac 2012 search results. This is where SEO comes in So what is SEO SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the art of making your website relevant and important to the search engines in order to rank highly in their results. The two main weapons in your arsenal are Keywords for relevance Links to your site for importance TIP Think of the search engines as a big election. All the websites in the world are candidates. The copy on your website is your campaign. The links to your website are votes. The more votes rankmaniac 2012 links a candidate website has the more important it is and the higher its ranking. Keywords Search engines send out robots or spiders to analyze your website. They look at the words youve used to figure out what you do. This tells them when to display your site
in their search results. Keywords are the first thing you need to think about when you start your SEO journey. Figure out what words your customers are looking rankmaniac 2012 for at search engines. These words are known as keywords. The idea is to frequently use these keywords in the copy of your website SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 10 Step 1 Understand what SEO means rankmaniac 2012 10 and in the HTML code behind the page. As a rule of thumb the more frequently you use these keywords the more relevant youll be considered by the search engines and the more rankmaniac 2012 likely you are to appear in searches for those words. For more information rankmaniac 2012 on choosing keywords see Step 3 Choose your keywords on p.14. on using keywords on your site see Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines on p.17. Links to your rankmaniac 2012 site Links to your site tell the search engines how important your site is. They assume that if its important enough for a lot of other sites to link to its important enough for them to display at the top of the rankings. Links to your site backlinks or inbound links rankmaniac 2012 are the single most rankmaniac 2012 important factor in ranking. The more links rankmaniac 2012 you have to your site from other sites the better your ranking. For more information on generating backlinks see Step 5 Generate links back to your site on p.27. Chapter Summary If you have a lot of the right keywords used in real sentences distributed realistically throughout your rankmaniac 2012 site and a lot of links from other relevant sites you stand a good chance of being rankmaniac 2012 ranked highly. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 11 Step 2 Submit your site to Google 11 Step 2 Submit your site to Google As soon as you register your domain name submit it to Google Even if you havent built your rankmaniac 2012 site or thought about your content submit your domain name to Google. In fact even if you havent fully articulated your business plan and marketing plan submit your rankmaniac 2012 domain name to Google. Dont wait There are two reasons for this. Firstly getting on the search engines has always taken a long time for rankmaniac 2012 a new site. Even assuming you do rankmaniac 2012 everything right it takes months before your site is even indexed and more months before it starts to rank well. As a rule of thumb never expect to rank highly within 6 months rankmaniac 2012 of submitting your site to Google. The second reason is rankmaniac 2012 a recent phenomenon rankmaniac 2012 called Google Sandbox. Many SEO experts believe that Google sandboxes new websites. Whenever it detects a new website it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine credible long term site. rankmaniac 2012 It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites sites which serve no useful
purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site. By submitting your domain name to Google as soon as you register it youre establishing a site history even if the site has no content. By the time youve rankmaniac 2012 built your site and developed your content and written your business and marketing plans Google will probably see no need rankmaniac 2012 to sandbox you. If you wait until launch day to submit your site youll spend a month or two maybe more sitting in the sandbox watching potential customers spend their money elsewhere. How to submit your site to Google Dont waste money by paying someone else to submit your site to Google. Its easy Simply go to httpwww.google.com.auaddurl.html enter your URL domain name and a few comments or keywords to describe your site. Then click Submit. Thats all there is to it. You only have to do it once and only for your top level page i.e. Home page. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 12 Step 2 Submit your site to Google 12 Googles robots will then crawl you