ite a few more but these are the most important ones. This list will be most useful if your web designer hasnt had SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 24 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 24 a lot of experience with SEO. If you engage
an experienced SEO web designer theyll already know all the issues far more than are listed here. Dos Design your site rankmaniac 2012 in HTML i.e. HTML based copy and headings and text based links at the base of each page as per existing site Use static URLs Use standard rollovers andor rankmaniac 2012 CSS formatting for navigation menu Create a robots.txt file. This file is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed check out httpwww.123promotion.co.uktoolsrobotstxtgenerator.php for an automated
one. Alternatively you can rankmaniac 2012 do a similar thing rankmaniac 2012 by placing tags in the header section of rankmaniac 2012 your HTML for search engine robotsspiders to read. These tags are as follows o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTALL tells the spiders to crawl and index your entire site o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTNONE tells the spiders not to index anything. o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTNOINDEXFOLLOW says dont index this particular page but follow its links to other rankmaniac 2012 pages e.g. for use on secure or private pages. o meta nameROBOTS rankmaniac 2012 CONTENTINDEXNOFOLLOW says to index the page but not follow its links. Create a 404 error handling page and place a sitemap on the 404 page. Use absolute links not relative links. Donts Dont embed your copy within a graphic Dont use frames Dont use internal JavaScript or Flash Dont use id as a parameter if you want maximal Googlebot crawlage many sites use id with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter SEO rankmaniac 2012 Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 25 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 25 Redesigning an existing site If youre redesigning an existing site make sure you pay close attention to your file structure. If you move one of your pages from one directory to another its address will change. E.g. If you move your Cheap Second Hand Macs page CheapSecondHandMacs.htm from PagesProducts to PagesProductsMacs its address will change from rankmaniac 2012 httpwww.MadeUpWidgetComputers.compagesproductsCheapSecondHandMacs.htm to httpwww.MadeUpWidgetComputers.compagesproductsMacsCheapSecondHandMacs.htm. This change will mean that any links to the page from other websites will no longer work. It is vital that you do not let this happen. Remember backlinks are the key to a high ranking. There are two solutions to this problem i Dont change your directory structure or ii If you DO change your directory rankmaniac 2012 structure make sure you do 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. Your web designer will know what youre talking about when you instruct them to use 301 redirects. Also if your site already has a decent ranking or youve worked hard on your meta tags and youre happy with them make sure your web designer doesnt change your meta tags. Paying an SEO company to optimize your site If you decide to pay an SEO rankmaniac 2012 company to optimize your site for you always ask them exactly what they will be doing. Ask them what keywords they will be targeting and how will target them. There are no secret methods so if they can't or won't tell you DO NOT engage them. There are also some companies rankmaniac 2012 which will make rankmaniac 2012 grand claims about top 10 rankings in a week but don't rankmaniac 2012 specify which keywords you will rank highly for. Instead of ranking highly for the words that your customers are searching for you end up ranking highly for extremely obscure meaningless keyword phrases like red brochure book printing in Jamaica. Also always be clear in your own mind on exactly what you're paying for. Remember that there are two parts to obtaining a high ranking rankmaniac 2012 optimizing your site and generating links back to your site. Always get your SEO company to explain exactly which parts they will do for you and how they plan to do it. Chapter Summary Use your keyword frequently but not too frequently. Go for a sitewide average keyword density of around 2. Only target one keyword per page unless there is very little competition for your keywords. If you need to target more than one keyword create a new page for each. Use keywords in links and headings. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 26 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 26 Try to use keywords more often at the start of the page than at the end. Use your keywords in the Title Description Keywords and Alt meta tags. Structure your site around your keywords. Ensure spiders can traverse your entire site via text links. Create a text based site map which links to every page and which every page links to via text links. If your web designer is not an SEO expert make sure you provide rankmaniac 2012 them with some optimization rules. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 27 Step 5 Generate links back to your site 27 Step 5 Generate links back to your site Links are the single most important aspect of SEO. Generally speaking the more links you have back to your site the higher your ranking will be. Of course nothing is ever that simple. There are links and there are links. Before launching into a discussion about the best ways to generate links lets first discuss what kind of links you should be trying to generate. When deciding whether to display your site in its search results a search engine looks to see if youre part of a credible network of related sites. This means that the ideal kind of rankmaniac 2012 links are those that come from relevant sites sites which use the same keywords come from important sites have a high ranking include your keyword as part of the visible link text include varying link text not the same link text each time and come from a page that links to few other sites. When a search engine sees a link which satisfies most or all of these conditions it says Hey this site must be credible and important because others in the same industry are pointing to it. How do I generate lots of ideal links There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious like autogeneration software and sites set up by webmasters rankmaniac 2012 simply to rankmaniac 2012 host links to their other sites and I wont be discussing them here. Others like those discussed below are legitimate. NOTE Link generation is an ongoing often tedious task. You
need to be dedicated and systematic. In other words you need a strategy. Take a look through the link generation alternatives discussed below to see what suits rankmaniac 2012 you best. Then put your thinking cap on and get SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 28 Step 5 Generate links back to your site 28 creative. Its a new and very rankmaniac 2012 exciting field there are undoubtedly many undiscovered ways to generate links. This chapter is just a starting point. Add your site to DMOZ Yahoo Directories The first thing you should do is add a link in the following two directories DMOZ Open Directory Project httpwww.dmoz.comadd.html the largest most comprehensive humanedited directory of rankmaniac 2012 the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast global community of volunteer editors. DMOZ does not charge for submissions. NOTE This is the same as the Google Directory. Yahoo Directory httpsecom.yahoo.comdirsubmitintro Yahoo charges for rankmaniac 2012 submissions at the time of writing the submission fee was USD299. The search engines regularly crawl these directories in search of new links and they value these links quite highly largely because the directories are humanedited. Check where your competitors links are coming from Next check who is linking to your high ranking competitors. This method takes a long time but youll be surprised where some of their links come from. To check on the links rankmaniac 2012 of your competitors STEP 1 Go to Google and search rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 for your keyword. STEP 2 Make a note of the top 5 competitors who appear write
down their domain name. STEP 3 Return to Google and search for the first domain name in the list i.e. type www.competitorsdomainname.com in the search field. STEP 4 Google will then display a screen which says Google can show you the following information for this URL At the bottom of the list of option is Find web pages that contain the term www.competitorsdomainname.com. Click on this option. STEP 5 Google will display all the pages it can find that link to your competitors website. TIP If there are rankmaniac 2012 many results bookmark the search results page as this process will take a long time possibly months. STEP rankmaniac 2012 6 Visit each page TIP Right click on the first result and select Open in New Window. By opening a separate window to see the page you wont lose your search results page. STEP 7 Try think of a way to get a link to your website on the same page TIP Avoid sending them an email rankmaniac 2012 as webmaster receive a lot of SPAM and your email will likely go unnoticed. Try calling them instead. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 29 Step 5 Generate links back to your site 29 STEP 8 Repeat for each of your top 5 ranking competitors. TIP In the list of results the sites which appear high up in the list of results are likely to have a higher Google PageRank PR see Glossary than the sites which appear toward the end of the list. You should be more interested in obtaining links to sites with a high PR assuming theyre also relevant. Article PR Write and submit articles rankmaniac 2012 for Internet publication Next write articles and do some article PR Ive always found this to be the best way to generate inbound links. Write helpful articles and let publishers of newsletters and ezines use them f