Why would you want a site? Why indeed? The unceasing growth of
the World Wide Web has resulted in an enormous number of sites,
and new ones show up daily. Why would you want to create more?
And what do you think about the widespread opinion that the
Internet has been made for evil, and that people may get
permanently lost there, breaking their connections with real
life and all its virtues? There is only one way to reply to
this. Good or evil dwells inside us, not in the tools intended
for everyday use. If the Internet is evil then so is the car,
since people meet their deaths under its wheels. Fire, knives,
pills and even water find uses in good and bad. It depends
entirely on context. So how should we use this phenomenon, still
pretty new for the majority of us, to make it work for people,
not against them? What can it do for the hypothetical site owner
described below? You are a site owner. What next? It is by no
means hard to become a site owner. A person just has to register
his or her domain at any free web hosting service. Respectable
enterprise owners prefer a paid hosting, since the domain name
will not be a mixture of the trade name of the business and the
hosting company’s name. Your web site is your virtual business
card. From the look and feel of it your visitors will judge how
much you respect yourself. Let’s say you have registered a
domain:
www.myowncompany.co.uk. You’ve uploaded some HTML pages
presenting your business (let’s assume, it is selling mobile
phones, second-hand office equipment and labour-saving devices).
Your site has been available online for several months, yet
nobody calls your office, and nobody sends emails to you to
enquire about your goods. Web statistics show that during the
last week your site was visited just three times (two of those
visits being, most likely, your own). What is going wrong? Most
probably, you have not ‘paved the way’ to your site. People know
nothing about it, so what could induce them to type its URL in
the address field of their browsers? The route to your site runs
through search engines. First of all, you will need to inform
all the major search engines about your domain name – every
search engine has a web interface intended for this purpose. (We
are planning to discuss this aspect in detail in one of our
future articles.) The site must be easily found Let’s assume
that all the major search engines have found your site and
indexed it – will it guarantee crowds of new visitors coming to
your site? Not necessarily. Of one thing you can be sure: your
site has lots of competitors, and each of them wants the top
position. That puts forward your next task. Every time the
search engine user carries out a search for the keywords for
which you want to be found, your site should appear on the list
as close to the first line as possible. That’s where search
engine optimisation (SEO) comes into play. SEO is a new skill
for a new century. SEO starts from a few simple rules. Work on
your site copy; pick up keywords and key phrases with the utmost
care The visible content of every page on your site (also known
as the site copy) is used by the search engine to define the
main topic of your page. Your visitor will see the same text,
read it (or refuse to waste time reading it!) and decide if it
is worthwhile coming again. Your site needs to be helpful for
customers. It is important that a page’s copy: •clearly
describes what the page is dedicated to; •is easily understood;
and •is interesting for the target audience. Of course, the
search engine is incapable of estimating how ‘interesting’ the
page is. The nature of your business and the quality of language
are not for a search engine to judge. It is, however, capable of
detecting the relevancy of the content to one or another keyword
or phrase. That’s why you should very carefully pick up words
and phrases to optimise your pages for. The key phrases selected
with the use of WordTracker or similar tools should be included
in the page copy as often as possible. It is desirable to target
not very competitive but comparatively popular key phrases. It
is agreed that one page should be optimised for one, two, or at
most three key phrases, otherwise all the optimisation efforts
will be wasted. The key phrase density will drop, and the search
engine will not know which key phrase is the most important one.
Yet it is even more important not to go too far (this rule is
general for SEO) and not to yield to a temptation to include the
targeted keywords in your copy too many times. Your copy should
remain readable and sound natural when read out loud. If your
key phrase sounds importunate, then there is a chance that
people will not read your page, and that search engines will
penalise it for abuse. Let us get back to our example:
www.myowncompany.co.uk. The main topic: selling mobile phones,
second-hand office equipment and labour-saving devices. One of
the SEO rules reads that you should not describe all these goods
on the same page. In each case, there must be a separate page
optimised for its own key phrase. And do not forget to find out
how popular your key phrase is. You might spend months polishing
your content up for ‘second-hand office equipment’, and then
suddenly discover that people much more often prefer to search
for ‘used printers’.
http://www.highrankings.com/makingkeyphraseswork.htm There is no
commonly acknowledged opinion as to the optimum page size (in
terms of SEO). Some 200 to 250 words is the value accepted by
some experienced SEO experts and disputed by others. Your own
experience might some day lead you to the right solution. One
thing is known for sure: keywords located nearer to the top of
the page are considered more relevant (and, consequently, affect
the ranking more noticeably) than those found in the last
paragraph (the so-called keyword prominence concept). The
importance of your keywords can be increased. Words can be made
‘important’ by placing them in the title of an HTML page
(<title> tag), in section subheaders (<h1>–<h6> tags), in
hyperlinks (<a> tag), or simply by highlighting them in bold
font (<b> or <strong> tags). The <title> tag is the most
important thing to consider. It is worth noting that meta tags
such as <meta name="Keywords" content="your keywords"> and <meta
name="Description" content="your description">, that were
specially introduced to help search engines, long ago lost their
value as SEO tools. They appeared to be too easy a means of
deceiving search engines. For example, Google, the ‘king of
search engines’ now ignores keywords meta tags completely and
does not give the description tag much credit. It has been
suggested that Google does read them, but only to detect and
penalise over-optimised pages. Build links to your site Spiders
crawl all over the Internet, following the links they find on
web pages, and indexing the whole web bit by bit. The more sites
link to you, the more big, medium and small spiders will visit
your site on a daily basis, and the more authority your site
will get from a spider’s ‘point of view’. Yet it is important to
remember that a link from a site that has a high rank on the net
and is similar to yours in theme is much more valuable than just
any link. In order to achieve the result, you can choose the
simplest way that exists. Let’s imagine that you wish your site
to have a good position in search results for ‘high quality
coffee-grinders, mixers and toasters’. Visit the search engine
you are targeting and perform a search for the keywords of your
choice. You will get an enormous list of sites that match the
query. Choose those with better rankings (positioning). Contact
the webmaster of a site you have picked up and try to compile an
interesting, convincing letter that will explain why your site
should be interesting to the visitors of that other site. Offer
a link exchange. Your offer might be rejected, especially if the
other site belongs to a competitor. But some site owners will
agree. It is better still if the anchor text of the link matches
(completely or partly) the targeted query. But be careful of
that, and do not overuse the anchor text. Although the
reciprocal linking method is now considered obsolete and not
very effective, many webmasters still find it useful. So pay
attention to the content of your site, and make sure the inbound
links appear to be natural. This will be covered in the next
section. Work hard to make your site interesting The more pages
your site contains, the easier it will be to apply to it the
main SEO rules and techniques. The more interesting the
information on those pages, the more likely it will be that
other site owners or webmasters will link to them. Interesting
articles, your business’s latest news, FAQ pages and forums will
attract a good audience to your site, especially if you actively
publish your articles on the Net. Such publications should
always contain links to your site. If your articles are
informative enough, the information you give is trustworthy, and
suggested solutions are reliable, your resource will soon be
well known by web surfers. Your business will be talked about
and your reputation will benefit as a result. Make your site
intuitive and usable To be successful on the net, the site
should be easily navigated, well structured and categorised and
should meet all basic usability requirements. The aim is never
to confuse your visitors. Every page should be easily accessed
from the home page via plain text links, otherwise a spider will
fail to find those pages. If your site has a colourful, funky
graphics, rich design, and all the links are implemented via
‘hot images’, it is reasonable to duplicate them all as text
links (for example, at the bottom of every page). If the styles
are handled skilfully, these text links won’t ruin the harmony
of your design, while your visitors will be grateful for the
improved usability, and spiders will find all your pages without
trouble. Just make sure you do not yield to the temptation to
make those links invisible, as this is one of the commonest SEO
errors.
Finally, try to stick to fair competition and not get tempted by
unethical, unfair methods that might cause discomfort to
Internet users. Let us build the Net together and make it
user-friendly, so that it will remain a source of free
information that is reliable and easy to access, as well as
being the best means for self-education, communication and
business promotion.
About the author:
Irina, Ponomareva, 32. I joined Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK),
Dartford, Kent, on March 2003. I've been working as a web
master, a developer, and an SEO specialist ever since.
