Best Internet Marketing Strategies

A key element of your Internet marketing strategy is search engine optimization or SEO. SEO helps the search engine spiders to read your site correctly and to rank it appropriately.

==> Search Engine Optimization For Your Website <==

In Lesson Three we looked at Keywords and Keyword phrases. Choosing and placing keywords is related to today’s subject, which is “SEO”, or Search Engine Optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is simply the process of making changes to your website to improve your site’s search engine ranking for specific keywords. SEO is a universally recognized way of setting up your website so that it will climb the search engine rankings more easily.

When people use a search engine to find information about a particular topic, the search engine lists results based on the best matches it can find.

Optimizing your website for the search engines is simply a matter of providing content relevant to the keywords you want to be found for, AND presenting it in the way that search engines prefer.

When you do those two things, your website is guaranteed to climb up the search engine rankings.

SEO IS NOT DIFFICULT

Anyone can do SEO when they know the basic steps. It is simply a matter of being methodical and applying the same principles to every page on your website.

In Lesson Three you learned about placing keywords between snippets of html code such as (H1)(/H1) (with > < brackets) for your headline and so on. Those actions are done for the purposes of search engine optimization, so you are already familiar with some SEO operations.

In today’s lesson I am going to show you what else you need to do to your webpages in order to optimize them for the search engines.

SEO OF MENUS AND SIDEBARS

It may surprise you to know that the placement of your menus and sidebars, or the titles of the buttons and links will affect the optimization of your website.

Search engine spiders read the HTML on a web page from the top to the bottom of the page, left to right. So, if you place your navigation menu at the top or on the left hand side, the spider will read it before it reads the main content of the web page.

If you have used your keywords in your menus then there is no need to worry about the placement of your menus. HOWEVER, if your navigation menu is at the top or on the left and contains content that bears no relation to your keywords then you should either place the menu in the right hand column, to the right of the main content, or add your keyword phrases to the menu if you prefer to leave it on the left or at the top of your web page.

If your website is already up and running and you don’t want to change the design, you could get over the problem by placing your keywords in the left hand sidebar – write a short piece about the theme of your website, or a catch- phrase to encapsulate the spirit or purpose of the site.

PLACE YOUR KEYWORDS HIGH UP ON THE PAGE

Search engines give more weight to keywords that occur in the top quarter or third of a web page, so it is good SEO practice to make sure that your keywords crop up near the top more frequently and with more prominence than other less important phrases. You will need to adapt your writing style so that you can slot in keywords without sounding false or strained. (See Lesson Nine.)

ADD A SITEMAP TO YOUR SITE

A sitemap is simply an ordered list of links to all the pages on your website.

A sitemap helps both your visitors and search engine spiders check the contents of your site. Placing a sitemap on your site ensures that the spiders find, crawl and index every page.

WordPress.org users can easily create a site map by installing the XML-Sitemap plug-in.

If you have an HTML website and the prospect of building a sitemap to catalogue every single page of your site does not appeal to you, you can use this tool to generate and maintain a sitemap automatically:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

Once you have made a site map, head over to Google and set up a free webmaster account at:

http://www.google.com/webmasters

You will then be able to add your sitemap URL and have Google crawl your website.

LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING (LSI)

The purpose of a standard keyword search is simply to checks whether a web page contains a given keyword or not, and how frequently that keyword occurs.

Latent Semantic Indexing takes the process a stage further by considering the relationship of all the words on the page, but particularly those words and phrases which have similar meanings to each other.

Most search engines are now capable of LSI analysis so it is important to take account of this when you write copy for your web pages.

As well as placing your keywords as described in this and the previous lesson, it is also important to deploy some variations of your keywords throughout the body of the page, and also in some of the links and the alt=”" section of html image code snippets.

Actually, writing web page copy to cater for LSI will produce a text that reads more naturally than one that has been written around a single keyword phrase. It will be less mechanical and repetitive. It will flow more naturally because the semantic variations more closely represent the way people tend to speak or write in ordinary life.

Similarly, you should also vary the keyword phrases you use in the anchor text that you use in your external links that point back to your site. (See Lessons Three, Nine and Twelve.)

If you are not sure what kind of keyword variations you should use, do a Google search placing a ~ character in front of your keywords to find similar phrases.

HTML VALIDATION

Search engine robots will give up crawling a website with invalid HTML, preventing it from achieving a high rank for its given keyword terms.

You can prevent this from happening to your website by using an HTML validator. You can easily find free HTML validators by doing a Google search.

An HTML validator checks the HTML coding on your website and reports any errors or problems that could result in the search engines not indexing your page correctly.

Although the errors reported may or may not be critical, you should confirm that you’re not losing visitors to your site and search engine ranking as a result of an HTML issue.

It may be a simple matter of broken links or incomplete code which anybody with a little experience of HTML will be able to trace and correct.

JAVASCRIPT AND SEO

If your web pages have javascript code on them, move the script to a separate file because search engine spiders are unable to read javascript. Javascript also fills webpages with code that search engine spiders cannot read. Javascript increases download time and makes it likely that fewer of your keywords will get read and indexed on the search engines.

It is easy to remove the javascript code from a web page. Simply cut all the code from “” to “” and paste it into a separate file with a .js suffix attached.

Next, replace the javascript code on the web page with:

(SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript” SRC=”MYSCRIPT.js”)(/SCRIPT)

Of course, the round brackets should be replaced with HTML brackets.

Best wishes,

David Hurley

P. S. Here’s how you can get set up with a Free WordPress Website complete with unique content using your keywords…