SEO Search Engine Optimization Out of the Closet

To optimize a web page simply means to make it more appealing for the search engines. Making your web pages more appealing for SEO does NOT involve getting out your crayons and making the page prettier by using brighter colors or bigger images. To appeal to a search engine is to change, add to or reformulate the underlying existing HTML code. There are a variety of different ways to do this. How much you need to do this varies from page to page. Let me give you some basic steps to take, followed by some advanced areas to focus on. You can use a program like Dreamweaver to modify pages, or you can even use Note Pad.

Basic SEO steps for beginners:

SEO for title tags in your code.
Example: <title>this is a must area to concentrate on</title> – This area must be specific to the content that’s on the page. If the topic of your page is focused on selling Dr. Pepper, nothing unrelated should appear in the title. An appropriate title tag would look like this: <title>Dr. Pepper 12oz cans for sale</title>. An example of an inappropriate title tag on a Dr. Pepper product page would be: <title> Dr. Pepper from Frito Lay at stickyfluids.com</title> or <title>Dr. Pepper, Dr. Pepper, Dr. Pepper, more Dr. Pepper</title>. There are many ways to create something inappropriate. The first example drives me crazy because the site’s domain is included. This cannot help that page’s ranking and it’s completely unnecessary. The second problem with it is that if you’re selling 12oz cans, then the title is too vague. Be short and specific to the content.
SEO for the meta keywords tag.
<meta name=“Keywords” content=“dr pepper, dr pepper 12 oz cans”>. Make sure this tag is included on your page. Google doesn’t mind your page having this tag and it will consider its content in the overall page mix, however it will not use the keywords in it towards ranking the page by themselves. Other search engines will. I’ve seen a few examples on the internet where some people make this really long and others who make them really short. For basic SEO I recommend you don’t get wild with this, just list the keywords that are appropriate to the page and move on.
Search Engine Optimization for your meta description tag.
<meta name=“Description” content=“Buy Dr. Pepper 12 oz cans on sale for just .25 cents each through July with this coupon. Click here.”>. The length of your description and its contents are important. Google will crop your description at 150 characters. This is the part humans will see when considering your page in the search results. Anything over 150 is hidden, but not forgotten. Try to get your message across within the 150 character limit. The contents of that first 150 characters should contain your keyword phrase.
Optimizing your Headline tags.
headline tags look like this <H1>Dr. Pepper 12 oz cans</h1>. This is an H1 tag. H1, H2, H3,H4, H5 and H6 are all valid tags. The difference is the size (H6 is smallest) it appears at. This is another important area you’ll want to look for on every page. Your keyword phrase should be located here. Current theory is that Google values all the H tags probably equally. Use the H1 though if you only have 1 headline on a page. You can control its size with CSS formatting. H tags should appear near the top of the document.

Beyond the basics of search engine optimization:

The next steps in seo.
If you’ve already made the basic edits above, it’s time to move on to step 2. Some of the areas we’ll look at may be easier to see with a WYSWYG editor like Dreamweaver. It is never a good idea to use Microsoft Word to edit any web page. I would recommend staying far far away from Microsoft Front Page as well. They wreck havoc on your HTML code and will often give you more to clean up than you should have to do.

Find your alt tags
Example: <img src=”/myimage.gif” alt=” width=’121′ height=’5′>. Notice the alt=” section. Some images won’t have this reference where the image is listed. If yours doesn’t have this, add it. It’s optional HTML, but it’s SEO required. You’ll want to get a keyword phrase in there for 2-3 images. You’ll probably want to alter what you write in this section for each of the 2-3 you specify. Example: <img src=”/myimage.gif” alt=’Dr. Pepper 12 oz cans’ width=’121′ height=’5′> or <img src=”/myimage.gif” alt=’12 oz cans of dr pepper’ width=’121′ height=’5′> or <img src=”/myimage.gif” alt=’dr pepper rocks’ width=’121′ height=’5′>.
Find your hyperlinks
<a href=”http://www.stickyfluids.com”>StickyFluids.com</a> Hyperlinks are Google’s voting system. Links to your site (inbound links also called IBLs) are gold, especially when they come from a page that discusses your page’s topic. More on that later. Here however, we’re talking about what you are linking to. The hyperlink in this example is awful. What you say (with hyperlinks) about your own pages means a lot to Google. So a category that discusses soft drinks should have a hyperlink in the navigation system of your site that simply looks like this: <a href=”http://www.stickyfluids.com/soft-drinks/”>Soft Drinks</a>. Never link to your pages with “Click here” or “home” as they hyperlink text. Use a keyword you want to rank well for.
Order your page information
Google’s computers do not read your web pages as a visitor would. It can’t see the pretty pictures and interpret them. All it sees is your HTML code. You want to have clean and proper code but you also want to arrange the HTML body contents so that your keyword phrase appear towards the top of the document. That means you’re going to have to pay attention to how your pages are built. This is something to consider when hiring a programmer or marketing firm to handle your site.

Advanced Search Engine Optimization

Stuff I don’t tell anyone. Crazy stuff that’s worked wonders for me.

There’s a basic vague formula for getting websites to rank well. #1. is content. You must be able to talk the talk about your products. Fill your pages with valuable information that customers want, and Google will appreciate it. #2 is IBLs. Most websites need links to their site and #3 is the arrangement of #1. When you put all of that together and sprinkle on a little thyme (ha get it? “time”) you then have the formula for high rankings. But the devil’s in the details as they say.

A footer with plain text hyperlinks full of keywords will help you get around having a menu system that’s built in Javascript or flash. There’s no reason why you can’t have both.
You’ll get listed in Google faster if you put a link on a page that Google already knows about, than to submit a site using their web submit form.
DMOZ sucks. It’s riddled with people that have agendas. If you submit your site to them, and you should, you may be unfortunate enough to have a competitor deciding the fate of your submission. DMOZ’s categories are run by volunteer category editors. It’s to your advantage to be one.
Stop trading links with sites. You need web pages with links to yours that use your keyword phrases as hyperlinks on their pages that discuss the same thing. 10 of these is worth 100 of any other kind. Trading links (I’ll link to your if you link to me) is something Google has picked up on and it’s considered unnatural.
A press release can get you oogles of links all at once. Overnight link popularity. Embed your links in the press release.
Start paragraphs with a short sentence with your keyword phrase in it and bold the entire thing.
The javascript and CSS code in the header section of your web pages alter just how far your keywords appear from the top of the file. In other words, they push it down. This code can be off loaded (linked to) instead of being listed there.
Repeating your keywords in your titles sometimes helps. Try it.
You can use more than the 150 character limit for your descriptions. Use characters 150 and above to add additional keyword phrases (they still should appear on the page some place as well). These can be variants of the main phrase for the page or perhaps acronyms for the phrase. Experiment.
Hyperlinks have a Title tag just like images have an alt tag. Add some phrases in those that appear high on the page.
You can automatically add meta tag information for a large database of products. I’ve done it several times. A few changes to the server side code to a couple of templates goes a long long way.
Name your pages by your keyword phrases. example: http://www.stickyfluids.com/dr-pepper-12-oz-cans.html
Remove the commas between your keyword phrases in your meta tags. Spiders see commas as stop points. Without the commas your words have greater possibilities of keyword phrase combinations.
When you stumble across links to your website, make sure google knows about them. Add them to google yourself using their form: www.google.com/addurl

Stuff you don’t know:

Google just doesn’t allow a page to come out of no where and appear #1 over night. It’s spam control.
New websites and domains won’t rank well for at least a year. Until then work on developing content, obtaining links to your site and doing some pay per click advertising.
Write something. People who write and create new content all the time are gold for Google. They’re all about content.
Become the authority on your topic. Write about it. If you love Dr. Pepper. Become Mr. Dr. Pepper.
Stop using flash for content or navigation. Google can’t tell what you’re trying to say. It’s time to decide between being pretty and actually selling something to new customers.
If your site uses frames, give your webmaster 30 lashes with a wet noodle and rebuild.
You shouldn’t have to pay $3k month for SEO on a long term contract. All the hard labor is done in the first month. After that it’s just tweaking.
Malformed HTML could be what’s holding you back. Tags that open but don’t close for example. Stop letting your cousin who says he knows php run your website. If you want to make money, you have to spend it in the right places. Your website is one of those places.
CompUSA went out of business because they were SEO stupid. They insisted that when people link to them that they use the CompUSA logo to do it. Big mistake. That’s why they never ranked well online. They had thousands of the wrong type of link. They’d still be around at least as an online store if they’d have listened to me.

I’ll add more to this page as I think of them. Check back often.

Happy search.