ge. Site map You should also use a site map to link all of your pages together. A site map is a single page rankmaniac 2012 which contains a list of text links to every page rankmaniac 2012 in the site and every page contains a text link back to the site map. Think of your site map as being at the center of a spiderweb. TIP Site maps are used by both search engine spiders and human visitors so remember to make it userfriendly. Try using rankmaniac 2012 bolding and indenting to represent your site hierarchy. See httpwww.divinewrite.comsite.htm for an example. Optimizing your web construction Search engine spiders and robots dont see websites the way you and I do. They require your site to be designed a particular way. If you dont observe a few rules of thumb you can severely hamper your search engine presence. Following is a list of the main things you need to be aware of. There are quite 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 theyll already know all the issues far more than are listed here. Dos Design your site 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 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 do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of 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 pages e.g. for use on secure or private pages. o meta nameROBOTS CONTENTINDEXNOFOLLOW says to index the page but not follow its links. Create a rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine Write Copywriting Pty Ltd 25 Step 4 Optimize Your rankmaniac 2012 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 httpwww.MadeUpWidgetComputers.compagesproductsCheapSecondHandMacs.htm to httpwww.MadeUpWidgetComputers.compagesproductsMacsCheapSecondHandMacs.htm. This change will rankmaniac 2012 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 structure make sure rankmaniac 2012 you do 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. Your web designer will know what rankmaniac 2012 youre talking about when you instruct them to use 301 rankmaniac 2012 redirects. Also if your site already has a decent ranking rankmaniac 2012 or youve rankmaniac 2012 worked hard on your meta tags and youre happy with them make sure your web
designer doesnt change your meta rankmaniac 2012 tags. Paying an SEO company to optimize your site If you decide to pay an SEO 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 which will make grand claims about top 10 rankings in a week but don't specify which keywords you will rank highly for. Instead of ranking highly for the words that your customers are searching for you end rankmaniac 2012 up ranking highly for extremely obscure meaningless keyword phrases like red brochure book printing in Jamaica. rankmaniac 2012 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 optimizing your site and generating links back to
your site. Always get your SEO company rankmaniac 2012 to explain exactly which parts they will rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 at the end. Use your keywords in the rankmaniac 2012 Title Description Keywords rankmaniac 2012 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 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 links are those that come from relevant sites sites which use the same keywords come from important sites have a high ranking rankmaniac 2012 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 simply to 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 rankmaniac 2012 Copywriting Pty Ltd 28 Step 5 Generate links back to your site 28 creative. Its a new and very 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 the Web. It is rankmaniac 2012 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 submissions at the time of writing the submission fee was USD299. The search engines regularly crawl these directories in search rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 check on the links of your competitors STEP 1 Go to Google and search 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 many results bookmark the search results page as this process will take a long time possibly months. STEP 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 sendi