Looksmart at date of writing was not accepting new submissions TIP My website httpwww.divinewrite.com reached no.1 worldwide on Google.com for my primary keyword copywriter without a dollar being spent on search engine submission. I only ever submitted my site to the engines that offer free
submission. Do I need to submit my site to other search engines As a rule no. rankmaniac 2012 With an estimated 8.8 billion pages indexed approximately 76 of the Internet Google is number 1 when it comes to search engines. Its argued that once Google rankmaniac 2012 has indexed your SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 13 Step 2 Submit your site to Google 13 site the other search engines will follow. Theoretically you dont actually need to submit your site to Google either because its always on the lookout for new content and will eventually find your site of its own accord. Google actually states Given the large number of sites submitting URLs it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form. Google Information for Webmasters httpwww.google.com.auwebmasters1.htmlA1 Personally I wouldnt like to take the risk. Having said that it certainly doesnt hurt to submit your site to other search engines especially if you havent developed any content for it yet. Chapter Summary Submit your domain name to Google as soon as you register it even if you havent rankmaniac 2012 built your site yet or done anything else. Although you dont actually need to submit your site to the other search engines you may as well submit it to Yahoo and MSN as they offer free and simple submissions. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 14 Step 3 Choose your keywords 14 Step 3 Choose your keywords The first thing you need to do when you begin chasing a good search engine ranking is decide which words you want to rank well for. This is called performing a keyword analysis. Keyword analysis involves a bit of research and a good knowledge of your rankmaniac 2012 business and rankmaniac 2012 the benefits you offer your customers. There are several websites specifically designed rankmaniac 2012 to rankmaniac 2012 make keyword analysis easier. Two examples are Overtures inventory tool which you can find at httpinventory.overture.comdsearchinventorysuggestion. This tool is free and very easy to use and understand but it only tells you how many searches have been conducted in the previous month for your keyword and similar keywords. WordTracker which you can find rankmaniac 2012 at httpwww.wordtracker.com. WordTracker is a much more powerful tool but you have to pay to use it you can subscribe for a day for around 10. WordTracker helps you find the most appropriate keyword for your site by telling you what people are really searching for. Heres how it works You type in a word which summarizes what you do and it tells you how many times that word has been searched for in the last month. It also tells you how many other websites are using that word as a keyword i.e. targeting the same customers you are. Based on this information it rates the word. The best keywords are the ones that a lot of people are searching for but which few websites are targeting. WordTracker even suggests and rates alternative related words. TIP When youre using WordTracker bear in mind that its just talking about numbers and numbers dont always tell the whole story. So dont just jump in and use the best rated keywords you need to consider your own situation. It may be the case that youre forced to select a keyword phrase which is not rated particularly highly. There are two situations in which this might happen i. Youre in a niche rankmaniac 2012 market with relatively few customers searching for the keyword. In this situation youll probably find it relatively easy to reach the top of the rankings but you wont generate a huge volume of traffic when you get there. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 15 Step 3 Choose your keywords 15 ii. A rankmaniac 2012 lot of your competitors are targeting your keyword its hotly contested but its the only one you can use. If you target it youll just have to work a bit harder on your backlinks in order to rank highly. When theres a lot of competition for a keyword its likely that the traffic payoff is good once you reach top. Single Keyword v Keyword Phrases Generally speaking youre better off targeting phrases not single words. For most businesses theres rankmaniac 2012 simply too much competition for single keywords. For instance if youre in computer sales your normally wouldnt choose computers as your keyword. Go to Google and search for computers and youll see why There are nearly 200 million results and the top rankings rankmaniac 2012 are dominated by rankmaniac 2012 the multinationals at the time of writing Apple and Dell. Whats more research shows that customers
are becoming more searchsavvy theyre searching for more and more specific strings. Theyre learning that by being more specific they rankmaniac 2012 find what theyre looking for much faster. So instead of targeting computers try to think of a more specific keyword phrase. Ask yourself whats unique about your business Perhaps you sell cheap second hand computers Then why not use cheap second hand computers as your keyword phrase This way youll not only stand a chance in the rankings youll also display in much more targeted searches. In other words a higher percentage of
your sites visitors will be people looking to buy cheap second hand computers as opposed to people after brand new computers people researching the history of the computer and people trying to figure out how they can use a computer to bath their dog. Develop a keyword strategy Also think about rankmaniac 2012 developing a keyword strategy. If you start out targeting a very specific keyword phrase rankmaniac 2012 as rankmaniac 2012 described above make sure it includes the more generic hotly contested single rankmaniac 2012 keyword. For example youll notice that the keyword phrase above cheap second hand computers includes rankmaniac 2012 the single keyword computers. This way youre really targeting both at once. As your sites importance or PageRank and search engine presence increases youll start to rank for the single word as well. In time youll start ranking well for computers even though youre only rankmaniac 2012 actively targeting cheap second hand computers. TIP Google PageRank PR is how Google scores a websites importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. By downloading the Google Toolbar from httptoolbar.google.com you can view the PR of any rankmaniac 2012 site you visit. Chapter Summary Find out what words your customers are searching for and make them your keywords. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 16 Step 3 Choose your keywords 16 Use keyword phrases instead of single keywords but develop a long term keyword strategy which will increase your ranking for hotly contested single keywords even as you target your specific keyword phrase. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 17 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 17 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search Engines Once youve figured out what words your customers are using at the rankmaniac 2012 search engines you need to use those words frequently on your site and in the right places both within your copy and within your HTML code HTML meta tags. This is a big part of what is known as optimizing your website for search engines. There are also some site structure or information architecture and web design considerations discussed below. TIP When you optimize your website for a particular word youre essentially telling the search engines to include you in the results when people search for that word. How high up the rankings you
appear depends largely on the number of links back to your site there are. For more information on generating backlinks see Step 5 Generate links back to your site on p.27. Optimizing your web copy The trick to optimizing your copy is using the most important keywords frequently and in the right places without compromising the readability of your copy. But how do you define frequently And what are the right places What if you want to target a few different keywords And for that matter what should rankmaniac 2012 the wordcount of my pages be Below are a few tips which will help you out. What should the wordcount of my pages be Youll hear a lot about the importance of a lot of content. While I definitely agree that content is king there is no need to write volumes. You can reach the top of rankmaniac 2012 the search engines with a page wordcount of between 1001000. Below 100 rankmaniac 2012 is probably too little for the search engines. Above 1000 is definitely too rankmaniac 2012 much for your visitors. Certainly dont be intimidated into writing pages and pages of copy for your home page or any other page where short succinct copy is required. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 18 Step 4 Optimize Your Website for Search rankmaniac 2012 Engines 18 How many times should I use a keyword You dont want to fill every page up with every keyword youre targeting. This simply dilutes your sites relevance and reduces readability. Search engines and visitors alike will object the search engines will see your site as spam and visitors to your site rankmaniac 2012 will find it hard to read if not meaningless. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a sitewide average keyword density of around rankmaniac 2012 2 measured using LiveKeywordAnalysis httpwww.livekeywordanalysis.com. Density is a measure of frequency in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words and your keyword phrase appears 10 times its density is 5. When you actually try to do this youll see that 2 isnt easy to achieve. The rankmaniac 2012 easiest way to do it is to be specific. As you write every sentence ask yourself Could I be mo