Musings, SEO

Promotion

The Basic Principle
There are two types of search engine: the deep engine, like Alta Vista and Infoseek, which sends out a robot to your site and saves the info from your page itself, and then there’s the standard engine (also known as “directory”) which doesn’t use any info from your page, only the info which you give it by way of an online submission form. The most important of all search engines is Yahoo! and it’s absolutely vital to take extreme care when you submit to this one.
Looking back and ahead, the one thing we can determine for sure is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is CONSTANTLY changing. And, Almost anything we write will be out of date soon enough. Yes, Google is still the dominant player in the field (as of August 2018) and planing for their Pay Per Click topology, whether you actual buy key words or not, will hold you in good stead. Meaning: vet your key word phrases using their Adwords Keyword Planner and use that info to help you plan your Organic Search Strategy. Once your organic search is in place, you can then move on to determine which key words are the most cost effective to your business and or marketing plan.
Everything must Change (hat-tip Quincy Jones), That being said, don’t overlook (submitting to or registering with) the following:
Bing which has implement a host of new tools
Yahoo Search (as mentioned above, it is vital to take care when submitting)
ASK
AOL Search
Web Crawler
Google Search – in Google’s own words

The life span of a Google query is less then 1/2 second, and involves quite a few steps before you see the most relevant results. Here’s how it all works, in the words of Google’s Matt Cutts.

More SEO info in our Client Tools section

SEO / SEF strategies

 

Building A Keyword List
Before you touch anything, you have to decide which words are best suited to the topic of your site. Think carefully because the key is to match the words your potential visitors are likely to type into a search engine. Users tend to be fairly general with their initial searches, then they narrow it down. So, if you have a pet shop the keyword ‘pets’ is going to be more powerful than ‘dogs’.

You can choose between a short, powerful keyword list which is likely to put you high up but with only a limited number of words, or you can have a long list which will put you slightly lower, but with a broad spectrum of keywords.

Now that you’ve got your list, here’s what to do with it…

Tips On Keywords And Descriptions

 

  • Describe your Web site, not your company. The name of the game is getting Web site visitors. Once they’ve arrived you can talk to your heart’s content about your annual turnover or whatever.
  • Empathise with your users. Think what they might be searching for, which may not even be something you’re actually selling but may be related to something you’re selling. The user may thank you for selling them something better. The keywords are more important than the facts!
  • Test your keywords. Search for each one on any search engine and then examine the top few Web sites to see if there are any other keywords you might like to add to your list.
  • Plurals: always use the plurals of keywords. A user will search for ‘pet’ or ‘pets’. Your keyword ‘pets’ will match in both cases.
  • Common words: don’t use words like ‘web’, ‘internet’, ‘services’ – if you think one of your words might be a common one, test it on Alta Vista. If the response is something like:ignored 19,152,057 servicesthen don’t use that keyword!
  • Keyword phrases: your keywords don’t have to be one word. Users often search for well-known phrases like ‘web site promotion’. If your topic has a natural phrase like this, use the words together as one keyword phrase – in your META tag (enclose all 3 words between two commas), TITLE and even URL.
Preparing Your Page
The first thing to do is to ‘doctor’ your page so that when the deep engine robots visit, they think “Hey, this is a powerful page with strong keywords, I’ll list this one high!”

There are a number of aspects of your site (some of which you may not even have considered) that you have to ‘load’ with keywords:

 

TITLE
I’m talking about <HEAD> <TITLE>The Page Title</TITLE> </HEAD> – not the first heading on the page itself.

The first, and most powerful aspect. Keep it short, keep it interesting and put one or two (no more) of your most powerful keywords in it. Do the same for your subpages. Never put a looong sentence in your TITLE.

Don’t put too much effort into trying to have a title which is low alphabetically. If it’s naturally low, then good, but it’s becoming of less and less importance.

 

META Tags
Not as powerful as as they used to be; but, important, nevertheless. While you can put a lot of keywords in your META tag, but don’t repeat more than a couple of times otherwise you’ll get penalised and sent to the bottom of the list and BE SURE to include your META tag description which seem to have more weight than the key words alone :
 <HEAD> <TITLE>The Page Title>/TITLE><META Name="description" Content="Something interesting brief description of the page content including your focus keyword phrase. Keywords not required at all. 150 characters maximum.">
<META Name="keywords" Content="Your keywords, the whole list repeated twice in entirety, each word separated by a comma."> While some CMS plugins no longer inculde a section to add key words; they are helpful to build a seed list of terms.</HEAD>
BODY
The number of keywords isn’t important, only the percentage compared to the rest of the page. I’ve seen pages with nothing on them but a couple of graphics, and no META tags. They had one word in the TITLE and a few words of text in the BODY. Very small pages. But they were right at the top of the list for the keywords used.

 

URL
Use it! Not many people do because they like to have a short, “cool” URL. If your site is www.johnsmith.com and it’s about pets, you can still have your site as www.johnsmith.com, but you can copy the whole site to www.johnsmith.com/pets/ and submit only this URL to the search engines. Keep the main URL to put on your printed material and to tell your friends.

 

 

Submission Time
Warning
Make sure your page is absolutely perfect and that you’ve double-checked everything before you submit. Once your page is listed it’s very difficult and time-consuming to change it. Likewise, take great care over the listings you submit to the directories.

 

Tip
Submit all your pages, including your sub-pages whenever possible. Yes, the robots will crawl the rest of your site if you only submit the home page, but it can take longer.

 

Categories
On the standard engines, like Yahoo!, choose the most relevant categories. Then eliminate the ones that are deep in the hierarchy (ie. have long names). When you have the best two, put one in the main category box, and put the other in the ‘additional categories’ box. Yahoo! definitely won’t let you have more than two. You’ll be lucky if you can get more than one.

 

Yahoo!
Get this one right and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. If you’ve done your TITLE right, it should have the two most powerful of your keywords in it, so put the same title for your Yahoo caption. If the main heading in the BODY of your page doesn’t match the title, change it so it does! The Yahoo! staff always check sites before they list them. I’m not kidding. And they’re very sharp at spotting questionable tactics. Anything dodgy and you’ll get a rejection message. It’s the toughest of them all but also the most rewarding.

For the description, use about ten words to avoid it getting chopped short by the staff, and include as many keywords as possible whilst still making a sensible sentence. Nobody said it was easy.

 

while we are in the process of updating the content on this page, some of the basic info provide here is still good! Sadly, Alta Vista died a slow death finally succumbing in 2013. Yes, Adelphi Agency has been doing SEO since the 1990’s but, this page has been slow to be updated (the old “cobbler’s children have no shoes” syndrome)