by Stephen Grisham, Sr.
At the end of 2005, the overwhelming king of search was Google, with about 46-47% of all online searches. Yahoo came in second with roughly 25%, and trailing behind them was MSN, with roughly 11.4% of searches. At 350 million, AOL’s total share of all search engine searches was only 6.9%. The total Google searches were a mind blowing: 2.4 Billion! In the site-indexing race, MSN is the royal winner and Google is the turtle. Again, Yahoo falls in the center of these two. So if you have a new website you want to optimize for Google, keep in mind that the other two — Yahoo and MSN — can get you quite a bit of traffic as well.
Optimize your Site Key Words on Every Page Remember to set up each page of your website as if it were an entity unto itself. This boils down to using a unique heading for every page, with unique keywords targeted to any given page. Suppose you have a website for vitamins, with several pages for different kinds of vitamins. On your home page, or index page, you focus on general keywords like vitamins, health supplements, dietary supplements, food vitamins, and so forth. However, if the topic of the page is vitamin C, your target shouldn’t be these generic words. Instead, focus on keywords that directly relate to Vitamin C; some examples would be vitamin c, c vitamin, ascorbic acid or benefits of vitamin c. The heading for any given page needs to start with the most important keyword for search purposes. Again, in the vitamin C example, name your webpage something that starts with Vitamin C, as opposed to, say, “What You Need To Know About Vitamin C.” By designing and building your online site from scratch, it is possible to take this even further. The keyword you are targeting should begin your webpage file name. Again, with the vitamin website example, you should name pages about vitamin C with relevant names. For example, if you have a page that is about vitamin C and its benefits, you will want to name that page something like: vitamincbenefits.htm. That will make it easy to find in a keyword search. How can you tell, then, what the high-demand keywords are? Read on, and when you finish this article, there’s a list of excellent free keyword search tools. No one will be able to access the title of your file besides you as the site owner and the different search engine crawlers. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not the search engine, therefore it is unimportant if the title of your file is unpleasant to look at or say.
On-Page Keyword Optimization: Your first lesson is that every page is treated by search engines as its own entity. Basically, every page should have a different title and target specific keywords for each page. Why don’t we say that your site sells vitamins and has a variety of pages for all of the different vitamins. Your index page (home page) would direct general keywords like vitamin, health supplement, food vitamin, dietary supplement, and the like. However if the webpage has information about Vitamin C, it shouldn’t use such basic terms. Instead, it should focus on more specific Vitamin C-related keywords or phrases; for example: vitamin c, c vitamin, ascorbic acid, or benefit of vitamin c. The most important keyword (most searched for) should be the start of the title of every specific page. Again, using Vitamin C as an example, a good webpage title would not be “Information on vitamin C” but would be Vitamin C. If you really design and create your website from scratch, you can even do more. Start your naming of the webpage files with the targeted keyword. Again, using the vitamin site as an example, you should name pages about vitamin C appropriately. So if you have a page on vitamin C and its benefits, the name of the page should be a keyword/phrase about this, like vitamincbenefits.htm. How can you find out which keywords are regularly searched for? Don’t be concerned; the end of the article will include a list of good and free keyword search tools.
The search engine robots and possibly the network administrator are the only ones who might get a look at your file name. Therefore, even if it sounds strange, search engine robots don’t mind; that’s just not what they care about.
Understand that the search engine algorithms consider the keyword density of any given page. When they do in-depth analyses of the most visited websites for a particular keyword, they are sure to know something is wrong if your website has a keyword density of 10%. The reason for this is that Google considers ideal keyword density to be between 1.5 - 1.8 %. MSN considers it to be up to 3.0 %. Yahoo finds a number between these to be appropriate. The term for this is ’spamming’ which will cause search engines to throw up an instant caution flag.
What is the result for doing this? A new site won’t get the high ranking you want, and established sites might even see a drop in their rankings. One more thing to keep in mind is that Google “sandboxes,” or sequesters new sites until they’ve proven their worth. Why does this happen? The search engines are constantly in competition with each other to deliver the best results possible, and spam websites — the kind of sites that are just one page stuffed with keywords — want to subvert this to make a quick buck.
About the Author:
Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a Staff Writer for InfoServe Media, a
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