Optimizing Your Web Site for the Search Engines

One of the best and most obvious ways to gain new web design clients is by ranking better in the search engines. If you can’t afford to hire a professional search engine optimization (SEO) company then read this article all the way through because I’m about to teach you a few strategies that we’ve personally used to get Interspire.com ranked on the front page of Google for a lot of competitive search terms.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization (or SEO as it’s affectionately called) is the ongoing process of tweaking and modifying your website in an effort to rank competitively in the search engines for one of more keyowords that people will use to search for your business.
As a web designer I’m sure you’d agree that if more people were able to find your site in the search engines then you could dramatically increase the number of clients you have, right? Well it’s the same for most businesses, and a good SEO plan is where you should start.
The “One Hour a Day, 30 Day” SEO Plan
Search engine optimization is part science, part art and part luck. The good news is that we can use a proven scientific approach to help your website rank better in the search engines, but you first have to decide which keyword(s) you want your site to rank for.
If you’re a web designer in Los Angeles, then here are a few examples of keywords you absolutely would want to be on the front page of the search engines for:

• Los Angeles Web Designer
• Web Designer California
• Web Design Company Los Angeles
• etc…

To determine which keywords you want to rank for just ask yourself: “If I were one of my potential customers, which words would I use to find my company?”. You should be able to come up with at least a handful of keywords.
If you can dedicate just one hour a day (for 30 days) to the search engine optimization plan I’m about to show you then there’s a great chance that you’ll be able to significantly improve how your web site ranks in the search engines for the keywords people are using to find you.
#1: Getting Links Back to Your Website
This is hands down the most important search engine optimization strategy you can spend your time on. When another website links back to yours, Google sees this as a positive vote for your website, and as such will take this into account when determining which sites should be at the top of the pile.
The more sites you have that link back to you, the higher your site will appear in the search results, however there is one main factor to consider with this strategy, and that’s the credibility of the sites linking back to yours.
Google’s PageRank algorithm is a measure of the popularity of a website. If you download the Google toolbar you can see the PageRank of any site you visit. It’s just a measure between 0 and 10 – 0 means the site is new and has no popularity and a PageRank of 10 means the site is one of the most trusted and popular sites on the Internet.
Interspire.com for example has a PageRank of 7. Yahoo.com has a PageRank of 10.CNN.com has a PageRank of 9, Business.com has a PageRank of 7, etc.
When looking for sites to link back to yours, the higher the PageRank the more “points” Google will award you for having that site linking to you, thus pushing you higher up in the search results for your keywords.
The quickest and cheapest way to get sites linking back to your site is to send them an email and just ask for it, but what type of sites should you request links from? In general they should be similar in topic to your site, so as a web designer you might request links back from sites that talk about web design, marketing, attracting new leads and customers, etc.
A link acquisition strategy over the medium/long term is to get serious about publishing high quality articles on your web site that others will link back to. We’ve been using this strategy for years and we’ve written dozens of articles that are linked to from all over the Internet. Because we don’t have to actively solicit these links, it makes it much easier to get links using quality articles.
So what should you write about and how often should you write? One article a week is a great start. Aim for 500-1,000 words and write about what you know: how to choose a web designer, why it’s important to have a usable website, how to create a web page in Dreamweaver, etc. These are topics your potential customers will expect you to know about and after reading your articles they will come to respect you as an authority on web design.
#2: On-Page Search Engine Optimization
On-page keyword optimization involves making changes to existing pages on your website so they include the keywords you want to rank in the search engines for. On-page optimization includes a number of different “sub strategies”, which are:

• Keyword density: How often do the keywords you want to rank for appear on your page? This is measured as a percentage, such as 5.8%. So let’s say you want to rank on Google for “red sports cars”. On most pages of your site you’ll want to include the text “red sports cars” and also variations of this phrase, such as “red cars that are sporty”, “sports cars that are red”, “sports cars”, etc. There’s no hard and fast rule, but you generally want a keyword density of about 7-12% for the keywords you want to rank for. That means that if you have 100 words on your page, 7-12 of them should be “red”, “sports” or “car”. You can check your keyword density at www.ranks.nl.
   
• Header tags: You absolutely MUST include the keywords you want to rank for in a <h1>…</h1> tag on your site. H1 tags tell the search engines that the text between them is important, and you should aim for just one <h1> tag on each page as close to the top as you can. In our example you might use <h1>Red Sports Cars</h1> on one page and <h1>Luxury Red Sports Cars</h1> on another page.
   
• Page title: This is the most important on-page thing you can optimize. Your page title is the text that’s used to form the link back to your site from the search engines, so it needs to include the keywords you want to rank for, and usually in variations, such as <title>Red sports cars, luxury sports cars, racing sports cars , red sports cars</title>
   
• Internal linking structure: You want to use the keywords you want to rank for to link between pages on your site. For example, on your home page you might link to a category page using the text “sports cars” and on that category page you would link back to your home page with the text “red sports car”. This is an internal two-way link, and although internal links don’t hold nearly as much weight as external ones, you should link to different pages on your site using a few different combinations of your keywords.
   
• Keywords at the very top of the page: You should always include your main keywords as close to the top of the page as you can, because Google will look at the text on your site from top-to-bottom and will treat the text closer to the top of the page with a higher importance.

Conclusion
There’s a lot more to search engine optimization than I’ve talked about here, however what I’ve mentioned above is a good place to start if you can’t afford to hire an SEO company or want to get started learning about SEO so that you can eventually offer it to your clients as an additional paid service.

Google SEO Basics for Beginners

Posted on December 7, 2005 by mitchell.harper

Introduction

As many of us web developers already know, Google is rated by many as the number one search engine in the world. We personally know that our websites get about 90% of their search engine traffic direct from Google searches.
Getting indexed by Google can be a pain, but getting highly placed rankings for specific keywords seems to be the nut that not many web developers without SEO (search engine optimization) experience or seo training can crack.
Today we’re going to give you an informative primer on the basics of search engine optimization techniques — many of which we use everyday to optimize our websites and stay ahead of our competitors.

4 Steps to Better Rankings

We personally believe in the “practice what you preach” approach to all things business related — especially SEO. So, before we continue, here’s a sample of keywords and Google rankings for some of our websites:

Website	Keywords	Google Ranking
Activekb.com	Knowledgebase software	#2 of 4,980,000
DevEdit.com	Online HTML editor	#3 of 9,080,000
MyFreeTemplates.com	Free Dreamweaver Templates	#4 of 93,600

Step 1. Choosing The Right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimization around is an important first step. General or generic keywords are usually not the best approach, and sometimes it’s better to be a little more specific and focus on niche keywords relating to your product or service.
For example, let’s talk about www.devedit.com — DevEdit is our WYSIWYG HTML editing component that drops into browser-based applications.
The problem is, there are a LOT of WYSIWYG HTML editors, but how can we get DevEdit to appear in Google’s top 10 rankings? Well, let’s see. Trying to optimize for the keyword “HTML” alone would be a tough task, as it’s too general. There are HTML editors, HTML tutorials, HTML articles, etc.
We need to be more specific, which means:

1. Targeting a more suitable market that is looking for a content editing solution
2. Competing with fewer websites targeting the same keywords
3. Optimizing for keywords that people actually use when performing searches

Targeting a suitable market will depend on your website, as well as the products and services you offer. Try to be specific with your keywords, and remember that people no longer use single keyword search phrases – the average search phrase contains 3-5 related words.
For example, if you’re optimizing for a web development site and you’re located in Sydney, Australia, use keywords such as “web development Sydney” or “web development services Australia”.
To find out how many websites are competing with your keywords — either intentionally or not — simply do a search on Google and note down how many results are returned. In our case, for “online html editor”, we’re competing with 9,080,000 sites. The more sites that are competing for your keywords, the harder it will be to get on the front page.
Alternatively, to get a rough indication of how many people are actually searching for the keywords you want to optimize your site for, use the Overture search suggestion tool. It’s not exact, and doesn’t measure Google searches, but it does give a very good estimate.
The Overture search suggestion tool will also provide you with a list of similar keywords, based on the keywords you enter. This can be a great way to find other keywords to optimize your site for.
As a rough guideline, try to optimize every page on your site for a different search phrase. Each search phrase should contain 2 to 3 highly targeted keywords.
Step 2. Your URL and Title Tag
Two of the most determining factors in Google’s ranking are your domain name and title tag. For example, a domain name such as:
http://www.web-development-sydney.com will generally get ranked higher than http://www.companyname.com, assuming that they had identical keywords and page content.
For some of us, keywords in the domain name look too unprofessional, and we’ve already registered our domain, so it’s too late to change. An alternative — and also a useful tactic — is to add your keywords into the names of your pages, such as
http://www.companyname.com/web-development-services.html
Your title tag is equally as important as your domain name. Using keywords in your title tag can improve your Google ranking significantly. Trying to achieve a balance of professionalism with keyword density in the title tag however is sometimes a little more difficult.
Going back to our example of a web development company earlier, a good title tag would be:
<title>”Company name provides professional affordable web development services in Sydney Australia.”</title>
Usually, the closer to the front of your title tag the keywords are placed, the better.
Step 3. H1 Tags and Keyword Density
<h1> tags seem to have been depreciated by stylesheets these days, and are not used as often as they used to be.
The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you’re using a <h1> tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page. Here’s a quick example:

<h1>Google sees this text as more important</h1>
<p>… than this text</p>

By default, H1 tags aren’t the prettiest in terms of formatting, so using a CSS style to override the default look is usually a good idea:

H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }

Sprinkling keywords throughout your page content can also improve your sites keyword density. Keyword density simply means the ratio of optimized keywords to the rest of the content on your page. It is usually expressed as a percentage, and should be between 7% and 10% for each page on your site.
Don’t overdo the keyword density, however, but don’t overlook it either. A good example would be:
Before:

• Company name provides web design and site management services to our clients.

After:

• Company name provides web development services to the Sydney region in Australia

Notice how we use the keywords more efficiently the second time around?
Step 4. Links, Links and More Links
And this leads us to the toughest part of the Google SEO process — back-links. Back links are websites that link directly to your website. The general principal is the more back links you have, the higher your pages will be ranked, as your website must be good if so many other sites are linking back to it.
If you run a web development company, then adding a simple link to the bottom of each of your client’s websites, such as:

<a href=http://www.yoursite.com>Web development by Company Name</a>

… (With your clients permission of course) can help boost your back links, which will help boost your ranking position in searches.
Submitting your site to dmoz.org, Yahoo! and other directories is also an important step to increase the number of sites linking back to yours. Do remember however, that setting up back links takes time. I w
ould recommend emailing 5-10 websites each and every day to request back-links or partnership links (keeping in mind that the sites contacted should be relevant but not competitive) e.g. – If you sell chocolate, partnering with a company that sells Roses may just be a good idea. Within a couple of weeks, you should have a good 100 or so sites happily linking back to yours!

Conclusion

Google can be one tough search engine to crack. Hopefully, however, in this article we’ve provided you with enough basic tips to get started optimizing both yours and your clients website.

Submit webmaster video questions for December 2010

December 7, 2010

in Google/SEO

NOTE: This set of questions is now closed. We got 500 questions in less than a week, and taped 70+ answers. Thanks!
It’s that time again! Next week I’ll record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post questions or suggestions and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every single question, but I’ll tackle several popular ones plus a few of the more interesting questions. Please submit questions that lots of people would be interested in, not just a question about your specific site.
Just a reminder: please leave your question on the Google Moderator page, not in the comments here. When you leave a question on the moderator page, people can vote for the questions and I can see which questions people are most interested in.