ng 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 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 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 10 and in the HTML code behind the page. As a rule of thumb the more frequently you use these keywords the rankmaniac 2012 more relevant youll be considered by the search engines and the more likely you are to appear in rankmaniac 2012 searches for those words. For more information 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 site Links to your site tell the search engines rankmaniac 2012 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 are the single most important factor in ranking. The more links 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 site and a lot of links from other relevant sites you stand rankmaniac 2012 a good chance of being 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 site or thought about your content submit your domain name to Google. In fact even if you havent fully articulated rankmaniac 2012 your business plan and marketing plan submit your 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 a new site. Even assuming you do everything right it takes months before your site is even indexed and rankmaniac 2012 more months before it starts to rank well. As a rule of thumb never expect to rank highly within 6 months of submitting your rankmaniac 2012 rankmaniac 2012 site to Google. The second reason is a recent phenomenon 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. It does this to rankmaniac 2012 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 built your site and developed your content and written your business and marketing plans Google will probably see no need 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 your website the next time theyre out and about. Of course they dont guarantee that youll be included in their results. IMPORTANT rankmaniac 2012 As mentioned above it takes quite a while for your site to appear in the search engines. This is partly because the
search engines are big and slow especially when it comes to new sites. It will take a minimum of 68 weeks before your site is indexed. How to submit your site to other search engines There are hundreds of search engines on the Internet. Its a lucrative business after all But dont panic studies suggest that the top 11 search engines account for about 90 of web traffic. In other words if you have the top 11 covered theres no need rankmaniac 2012 to submit to the rest. Whats more at the rankmaniac 2012 time of writing most of the top 11 dont actually accept submissions. The rankmaniac 2012 only ones that do are Google described above Yahoo and MSN. Heres a list of the available submit pages. Yahoo httpsearch.yahoo.cominfosubmit.html offers free submission MSN httpsearch.msn.comdocssubmit.aspxFORMWSDD2 rankmaniac 2012 offers free submission Alta Vista covered by Yahoo submission Netscape covered by Google submission Fast All the Web covered by Yahoo submission Ask Jeeves Teoma at date of writing was not accepting new submissions Hotbot at date of writing was rankmaniac 2012 not accepting new submissions Lycos at date of writing was not accepting new submissions AOL at date of writing was not accepting new submissions 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 rankmaniac 2012 engines As a rule no. With an rankmaniac 2012 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 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 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 business and the benefits you offer your customers. There are several rankmaniac 2012 websites specifically designed to make keyword analysis easier. Two examples are Overtures inventory tool which you can find at httpinventory.overture.comdsearchinventorysuggestion. rankmaniac 2012 This tool is free and very easy to use rankmaniac 2012 and understand but it only tells you how many searches have been conducted in the previous month for your keyword and similar keywords. WordTracker rankmaniac 2012 which you can find 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 rankmaniac 2012 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. rankmaniac 2012 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 rankmaniac 2012 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 market with relatively few customers searching for the keyword. In this situation youll probably find it relatively easy to reach the rankmaniac 2012 top of rankmaniac 2012 the rankings but you wont generate a huge volume of traffic when you get there. SEO Secrets V1.3 Copyright Divine