Savvy Affiliate

Day 12 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

Eventually, one thing that every webmaster must focus on is increasing his rankings in the search engines.  A new site will likely get most of its traffic from direct referrals from other sites.  A mature site however will get the vast majority of its traffic, over 75%, directly from search engines.  As far as search engines go, the one that you really care about is Google.  Google has over 55% market share of worldwide searches.  Its two closest competitors, Yahoo and MSN, take 22% and 9% respectively.

So for a webmaster just starting out, what do they most need to know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?  Well below are some SEO basics, later on we’ll go into more detail, but extra detail is mainly just tips and tricks on to how to do these better.

1) Search Engines Rank Sites by incoming links - Its no secret that the main way Google ranks web pages is by who is linking to a specific site, and what keywords they use to link to it.  A link to a site is considered a vote for that site in Google’s eyes.   Get more incoming links and you will get more votes.  Google takes the anchor text of the link and uses that and the surrounding text to determine what they site being linked to is about, and what keywords it should rank for.  This inspired the Google bomb, an attempt to rank highly for a specific keyword by getting tons of backlinks for that phrase.

2) Some votes count more than others - Although no one knows exactly how Google weights each links, it is well known that links from highly ranked sites count a lot more than links from other low ranked sites.  This is why links on high ranked sites are in demand, and can sell for 100’s of dollars a month, whereas links on low ranked sites are worth very little.

3) You can rank for a specific phrase by using a Keyword frequently, and getting people to link to you with that phrase - When you are doing search engine optimization, you want to pick specific keyword targets, and you want to be #1 for those targets.  You can rise in the rankings for a specific keyword by using it frequently in your post, in your post titles, and in your meta information.  More importantly is getting people to link to you with that keyword.  Perhaps no one is taking this to a greater extreme than John Chow, who is on a binge trying to get links with the Anchor text “Make money online”

4) Ranking is only half the battle, the next step is getting users to click on your site -  Even when you appear highly in the search engine rankings, you still have to convince the searchers to come to your site.  You can do this with targeted page titles and targeted site post descriptions.  Some people don’t take the time to write excerpts for their posts.  That is a mistake.  Writing a concise excerpt for your post is one of the easiest ways to get more search engine hits.  Posts I write excerpts for generally get 50% more Google hits than posts I skip doing this.  Additionally there are loads of wordpress plugins which are designed to help you optimize your search engine rankings.  The one I prefer is All in one seo pack.

5) Be prepared to get hits for things you never though of - Although targeted keywords are great, and will be your top referrals, by far the majority of your Google traffic will come from long tail keywords.  These long tail keywords are phrases you might never have thought of, or even tried to rank for.  In fact they could very well be unique phrases that no one has searched for before, or is likely to again.  The trick to having a strong long tail keyword ranking is to mix up your content.  If you use many different keywords, and write lots of different content, then there is a lot of combinations which will hit your site.  Some of those combinations will inevitably drive users to your page, where you can turn them to dollars.