Increase your rankings in Google Yahoo and MSN

Before you start

You should understand that Google has over 91 million searches a day and has approximately 65% of the search market, Yahoo has approximately 20%, MSN has approximately 8%, and Ask has approximately 3% leaving approximately 4% to other smaller search engines such as Dogpile etc.

This means that concentrating on Google and Yahoo reaches a greater proportion of people than others and so they should be your key. I will write this for Google as it has the greatest reach.

Why Bother?

Consider that its estimated more than 999,000 people searched for "pubs" and more than 27,000 estimated searches for "chinese takeaway" last month alone. So is there people searching for your business? Is there a market? Is there a distinct lack of competion in most fields? YES, YES, YES.

Research your market

The very first thing I do is complete a keyword analysis, this is simply finding all of the phrases people use to search for your business. As different people have a different vocabulary it makes sense to add different keywords or phrases into your pages.

The easiest way to do this is to load Google Adwords

Search for a basic phrase that relates to your business eg: "Cars" (if you sell cars) This tool will tell you advertiser competition, the last months search volume and and average search volume.

Download as a .csv file into ms excel and work out how effective each keyword will be otherwise known as KEI or Keyword effectiveness indicator. Put simply divide average search by advertiser volume, then arrange the column first by advertiser volume smallest to largest, then by kei largest to smallest.

Then remove all of the words not relevant to your business eg cheap cars if you sell luxury cars. There is no point being at the top of the "cheap car" search query if you sell expensive cars as your conversion rate will be poor. It would be more profitable to get yourself to the top of "car dealership" query or "fast cars" where people are actually looking for your type of business.

Understand a large proportion of people would type in car dealership and not get what they're looking for then they may attempt "car dealership lincolnshire" or "car dealership lincoln". This may not show up very well on Google adwords as the amounts are smaller.

Once you have a list of keywords or phrases can you put some together like "fast car dealership" allowing you the benefit of "fast car", "car dealership" and "fast car dealership"

Research your competitors

By using a free tool like SEO for firefox to find "off the page factors" and Web Ceo to analyze "on the page factors". Both are free and come with instructions on how to use them.

Also the amount of links with relevant anchor text directly effects the search results. An example of this is directories tend to put your domain name as the link eg: http://www.swgsolutions.co.uk but blogs and forums etc can put the link to your site in the text like this: seo. Which is achieve by putting this code in as your text

Off the page factors basically include who links to you and how many links you have, generally the better the domain linking to you the better your ranking. Links from .gov, .edu wikipedia, the Yahoo directory and dmoz have a lot better effect on your ranking than a link from a normal new website.

It is all logical really from a search engines point of view as its their job to return the most relevant results to their searchers. Google also is aware of synonyms in its anchor text.

Example:

Lets say you build the fastest car in the world a whole heap of press, wikipedia and normal blog writers, forums etc will link to your exclusive car dealership of the fastest car in the world in all of the forms above. The chances are if your a searcher using the terms "fast car dealership" or "fastest car in the world" your probably looking for this exclusive dealership and Google wants to return this for you and if Google wasn't brilliant at bringing that up you may use Yahoo or MSN (Their competition).

This also poses a problem of getting these links which I will cover later, as if your a small business and most of your work comes in from Yellow pages, referrals or past business due to being local how do you compete locally, nationally or world wide with businesses on the web

On the page factors basically include the links in and out of your page, note that Search engines rate a page for a particular term and not a site though weight is placed on a domain name, some say Google places far too much weight on an older domain name than it should but that is the way it is so that is what we have to work with.

They also include the keyword or phrase and its synonyms on the page, in the title, Google puts a lot of weight on the title, the heading tags <h1> <h2> etc and linking text on your page. It also looks at keyword density, though I believe it (this is something I am investigating) takes keyword density differently depending on the search term.

Setting up your page:

Write your page content freely and use your own words as Google penalizes duplicate content and bear in mind up to three keywords or phrases in your list

Using the free version of Web CEO you can take your search term and find out where the leading competitor is using their keyword and how, then give a slightly higher density; not too much as stuffing your page full of keywords is penalizable, not only that you want people to buy your products and who would buy from a page that uses the term fast car dealership 500 times. Some people hide text by making it very small or the same colour and are getting away with it to maintain a good looking well designed page, but this is penalizable by Google and you can be removed from their index. Think your competitor may see it and report you after all this is not an ethical choice but a business one. You can keyword stuff to increase rankings and hide it, it makes sense to do what you have to to gain a better position and earn a living, but from a competitors point of view it makes sense to report you to Googles spam page so they can earn a living. You choose your own path.

Ensure your title tag has your keyword or phrase in it and don't bother with common words like "and", "it","or" or words such as "Excellent" unless it is part of your keyword or phrase.

EG:

<title>SEO Search engine optimization keyword ranking Scunthorpe North Lincolnshire</title>

Ensure different pages have different titles and all pages have titles and unique descriptions.

The description is rumored not to be important for Google in the rating of the page but I recommend having a variation of your keywords and phrases in there; though just as important is a call to action from your description eg"Search Engine Optimization SEO company based in Scunthorpe North Lincs, Limited offer on now". The description is based in normal text just below the title in Google and keywords of the search phrase will be in bold more importantly humans read this before deciding to go into your site. So make your description appealing to the searcher or they may go to your competitor.

That's about it for on page seo though also it could be advisable to make all of your keywords or phrases a link to a page that contains more of that same keyword or phrase. Imagine one of the most competitive search terms is SEO that is because all of the leading SEO's who know all of this info and more are applying it competitively to be the leading seo in the world. This page www.ihaveawebsite-nowwhat.co.uk/ has SEO all over it and if you look at the cached text version here. You can see every time it is used it is a link to seo.htm which is another page filled with the term SEO.

Note: Use text link navigation and avoid flash animation as the search engines cannot read other navigation's like front page rollover buttons (which are an image) on that point it doesn't know what an image is either.

You need to think about off the page factors while writing your site, why?

Remember the fast car analogy earlier, where everybody links to the fastest car in the world, as a business you need to do something that your customers are interested in and that will give you anchor text links for the phrase your working on. Real Eg's:

A top 10 fastest cars in the world

A list of the fastest cars in the world 0-60mph

You know your business so think creatively about what you can do to gain links, its called link baiting and its sole purpose is to gain links but it has the added benefit of improving the quality of information available on the web. Those people who are interested in buying fast cars are definitely going to be tempted to visit the top 10 fastest cars in the world page then while they are on your page you can start planting the seed of how to get one eg loan agreement rates, article headline like "How to afford a porsche 911" linking to another page etc etc. There is a very good link baiting article here called 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website. It is link baiting brilliance as you can see I have linked to it but it also provides quality information, thus improving quality of the web. Also if you search Google it is top for: "101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website", "Link Building Tips to Market Your Website" and "Tips to Market Your Website". This is an example of fantastic SEO, especially since it leads to the sale of an SEO Book (which i own by the way).

Off the page factors

Now that you have a website with a good keyword strategy and excellent link baiting content for your site its time to build your links so submit to Google and Yahoo's search engine, submit to DMOZ in the category that matches yours business and follow their guidelines. Has your content got enough of a new idea to gain a link from wikipedia?

Go on Yahoo site explorer and type "link:www.yourcompetitor.com" and see who links to them and ask them nicely to link to you for seo you remember www.ihaveawebsite-nowwhat.co.uk is competitive for the term seo and if you do link:www.ihaveawebsite-nowwhat.co.uk you will see there are 4,298 inbound links, WOW! and note these are high quality links, I told you this field is competitive. The good news is number 1 for simple keywords are a lot higher I have seen upwards of 250,000 in certain areas but you can be number 1 with less links as long as they are higher quality. So get focusing on building that award winning idea for content for your search term(s).

Please note that I havent engineered this page for search engine results on purpose. This is so only the lucky people who have found this site get this information, if it was easy to find my job doing seo would be a lot harder. It is more here for my clients to show them some of the processes I use. Also most of this info can be found for free if you float from forum to forum looking for relevant info, just beware of who you trust as naturally some seo,s may give incorrect info on purpose to make them seem better, oh and if there is anything on here that you feel is wrong let me know and I will investigate.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts about this content to seo@swgsolutions.co.uk

It was written on 25th January 2008