One of the simplest things you can do to start generating some revenue is to install Google Adsense on your What is search engine optimizing and why should you worry about it? Well, if you have a website that's about NASCAR, for example, yours is going to be one of many such sites and when someone does a search on NASCAR, tens, if not hundreds of sites will be listed.
If yours isn't in the first page or two of results, your site won't be seen, so no visitors and that means no potential revenue. So how do you get a better search engine listing and improve your chances of being seen?
No one's privvy to the algorithms used by the various search engines (they're closely guarded secrets) but there are certain basic things you can do that will improve your rankings with the engines:
What Your Page Is About
An important one this: focus the content of your page on one topic and make that topic as narrow as possible. For example, on my photography website, rather than having a single page about SLR cameras, I have separate pages for Canon cameras and Nikon cameras.
Page Name
What's in a page name? A lot, surprisingly! Search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.) look at the file names given to your pages, and pages with meaningful names get a higher ranking than names that only mean something to their webmaster. Take this page for example - it's called search-engine-optimizing.html, so it tells the search engines that find it what the page is about. Much better than something like more-page4.html or some such.
<Title> Tag
At the top of each webpage there should be a section between <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. If you're not familiar with HTML, then these tags are something you really should familiarize yourself with as they are very important to your search engine ranking as well as other things.
To give you a quick primer: HTML files are simple text files that have tags embedded within them. These tags are within "<" and ">" brackets to separate them from ordinary text. Most tags come in pairs - an opening tag and a closing tag. Closing tags have a "/" after the "<", so a typical tag pair would be <FONT> and </FONT>. The tags tell your browser what to do with the text between them - whether that's to show the text in a different color, start a new paragraph, display the text as a link and so on. There are a huge number of tags, all designed to do different things which I won't go into here. With me so far?
Ok, the simplest web page consists of two tag pairs and a bit of text. The <HTML></HTML> pair tells your browser that the contents of the file are HTML rather than simple text. The <BODY></BODY> pair tells your browser that anything between them gets displayed in your browser. So here's the simplest HTML file:
<HTML>
<BODY>
Hello World!
</BODY>
</HTML>
Those HEAD tags I mentioned above? They go between the <HTML> and <BODY> tags like this:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Hello World!
</BODY>
</HTML>
And finally we get to the <TITLE></TITLE> tag pair - these go between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE></TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Hello World!
</BODY>
</HTML>
The text that you put between the TITLE tags is probably the single most important sentence that you will write for each of your webpages and this is doubly important for your home page (the front page of your website). You should take your time over each title and here's a key point: always include the words used in your page's name in your title (you can't do this for your home page but the search engines make allowances for that and it's also why you need to take more time over the title for your home page).
The text between the TITLE tags is also displayed in the title bar of your browser so the person reading the page can read it.
The title I selected for this wepage is "Insider Secrets To Search Engine Optimizing Your Webpages". Not the best engish you might think. But that's not important. Remember that the title is of more importance to the Search Engines than to visitors to your webpages. They'll get the information they want from the content on the page rather than the title.
So with my page title embedded, the simple HTML file now looks like:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Insider Secrets To Search Engine Optimizing Your Webpages</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Hello World!
</BODY>
</HTML>
Remember I mentioned about including the page name in the title? My title contains the same words as the webpage name - "Search Engine Optimizing". Search engines like this as it focuses the content of the page to a single subject rather than the page containing a mish-mash of different topics.
Titles can be long if you want although only the first 70 characters will be displayed in the title bar of your browser.
You should always try to include important words that relate to your website or page in the title. The more you include, the more unique your page will be to the search engines. You should try to include 3 or 4 such keywords where possible.
Keywords
That brings me on to the subject of keywords. All pages should be built around one or two keywords. How do you select such keywords? Think about a single topic for a webpage and write down all the words you can think of that relate to that topic. If you find you've come up with a huge number of keywords, maybe you need to break the page you're thinking about into two or more pages.
Going back to my camera example, I initially thought of a single page on cameras. So my keyword was going to be "cameras". But there are so many brands that it made more sense to create a page for each brand. So I ended up with two pages - one for Canon cameras, the other for Nikon (I haven't had the time to add pages for other manufacturers yet, but I will get around to it at some stage!)
Working with the Canon cameras page, the keyword became more specific at "Canon cameras". But that's a very broad term. My photography website is aimed more at SLR camera owners than compact camera owners, so the keyword list became "Canon cameras, SLR". Digital cameras have now appeared and, since they're related to the subject of the page, the keyword list became "Canon cameras, SLR, digital camera". After further thinking, the keyword list grew to: "Canon cameras, SLR, digital camera, canon slr, digital SLR, canon digital camera, canon camera, landscape photographs".
You may see some variation in the way terms are put together even though they mean the same thing.
Here's the important thing about keywords: search engines look for pages that have keywords matching what someone types into a search engine as a search term. So if some goes looking for "canon videocameras", my page won't be listed as the search term doesn't match any of my keywords. But if they look for "Canon cameras", my page will be listed in the results (it's position in those results depends on its page ranking).
The more keywords you have for your page topic, the more likely you are to get listed in the search results. But that doesn't mean you should use any old keywords. Make them very specific to the contents of your page. If you can only come up with one or two keywords, then maybe your topic is so specific that there will be very few results listed for a search and your page will automatically be near the top.
One more thing to do: put the name of your page as the first keyword in your list. That means you should first build a list of keywords for your page and select the best one as the name of your page.
So where do keywords go in a webpage? They go into a <META> tag that goes between the HEAD tags at the top of the page. META tags are one of the few that don't have corresponding closing tags. They also have two parameters - a "name" which tells search engines what the tag is for and "Contents" which is the associated information for the tag. For keywords, the name is "keywords" and the contents are the list of keywords you've come up with.
Using the list of keywords I came up with for this page, our simple HTML file now looks like:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Insider Secrets To Search Engine Optimizing Your Webpages</TITLE>
<META name="Keywords" contents="search engine optimizing, increase traffic, search engine optimization, search engine submission, search engines submissions, search engine listing, search engines submission, search engine optimization seo, search engine ranking, search engine ranking optimization, search engines optimization">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Hello World!
</BODY>
</HTML>
It's time to enthuse about Site Build It! (SBI) again: SBI provides the facility for creating a list of keywords, brainotorming them in fact, by determining alternative combinations and related terms and then telling you the supply/demand ratios for those keywords so you can see instantly which keywords are worth building pages around (that is, pages that will be profitable!).
Keywords are also important in determining what Google Adsense ads will be displayed on your webpages. The fee you receive for an ad that's clicked will depend on how much an advertiser has spent on it in the first place, so if your page targets high-paying keywords, you'll get more money per click. Top Earning Keywords For AdSense Success! is an ebook I've used with success for increasing the revenue I get from Adsense ads on my websites.
Page Description
The page desription is held in another META tag. This is what readers will see as the description of your webpage in the results screen of a search engine search. Make it punchy so people will want to click on your link rather than someone else's. Since this text is read by humans, you will need to make it readable (more so than the page title). However, search engines also look at the page description so, again, you should include the keyword phrase you selected as your page name in the description. It ties the description to the title and page name and search engines will love you for it!
In this case, the META tag name is "Description" and the contents are the page description. Our simple HTML page is now:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Insider Secrets To Search Engine Optimizing Your Webpages</TITLE>
<META name="Keywords" contents="search engine optimizing, increase traffic, search engine optimization, search engine submission, search engines submissions, search engine listing, search engines submission, search engine optimization seo, search engine ranking, search engine ranking optimization, search engines optimization">
<META name="Description" contents="Here are some insider secrets to improving search engine optimizing of your webpages">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Hello World!
</BODY>
</HTML>
Page Content
We're almost done. All that's left is to write the actual content for your webpage. Work the text to include your primary keyword phrase into the first 90 characters of your opening paragraph. This ties your content to your title, page name, keywords and page description.
If it's possible, also try to include your primary keyword in your closing paragraph. As for the rest of the text on your page, work in some of the other keywords from your keyword list.
Conclusion
Even if you use
webpage authoring software and never get your hands dirty with HTML, there will be boxes into which you can type the above information and they may be things you've overlooked in the past. It's still worth your while familiarizing yourself with the tags mentioned above because this knowledge will let you determine why another page ranks higher than yours. All you need to do is view the source for the competitor page, look at their page name, page description, title and keywords and see how they differ from your own. I've used this technique myself to improve the search engine ranking of some of my websites.
To summarize the steps to take in search engine optimization:
- Research your keywords and select good ones to build a page around
- Pick the best keyword phrase from the list - this is your primary keyword
- Name your page with your primary keyword
- Put your primary keyword in your page title
- Put your primary keyword in your page description
- List your selected keywords on the webpage (manually using the META tag or through webpage authoring software), with your primary keyword being first in the list
- Work your primary keyword somewhere into the first 90 characters of your opening paragraph
- Work your primary keyword somewhere into your closing paragraph
- Pepper your page content with various keywords from your list
As you can see, the subject of search engine optimizing isn't exactly a simple one and designing a webpage for better ranking requires a little bit of work. You'll find that all the pages on this website use the techniques I've outlined above.
