Companies boasting guaranteed search engine placement should be treated with suspicion. Top placements are a combination of optimised content, pagerank and back links. Article discusses optimisation.
Guaranteed placement
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o one can sucessfully offer guaranteed
positioning. See google
for confirmation of this fact.
If more than 10 companies use
Guaranteed positioning to get into the top ten of
a search engine for a particular keyword, someone is going to lose out.
These companies can guarantee to give your
money back, or spend additional time on your sites
promotion if you are not satisfied. In my opinion
the most reliable and long-term strategy is to
build in the optimisation into your sites design
and content.
Next time you are approached by
one of these sales people, I would engage them in a technical discussion using the advice on these pages, and Search engine watch.
It won't take long to establish whether they have a genuine understanding of the principles of search engine placement.
The question I would always ask is who cares more about your business you or them? Optimisation
is the means to bring business to your site. I wouldn't place the success of my business in anyone else's
hands - would you?
Lets run through the technical aspects on how to optimise a web page, starting with the Meta Tags.
Meta Tags
Lets kill off an old myth here - the keywords meta tag is NOT going to
solve your optimisation issue in one fell swoop. Pre-2000 maybe, but its use since 2002 has changed.
Its still important as we will discuss, but is only one of several elements to consider. Don't take my
word for it read more about
meta tags.
It’s
still a chance to mention your strongest keyword
phrases, perhaps four or five of them. Therefore
it’s worth some effort but the keywords meta tag
isn’t that important, except that keywords
mentioned here will be high up in the text (which
is important).
One way to test how relevant these tags are is to use
Google Adsense on your page. Try taking them out and running some adsense ads and
make a note of how relevant these ads are. Then put the tag back in and observe. In
fact this technique can be used for any combination of tag testing.
Ensure your Description Meta Tag
includes your main keyword once and make it readable.
This text often appears on search
engines as the description of your site in their
results listings, so its a great opportunity to advertise your page.
I recommend phrasing this sentence or couple of sentences in a matter of
fact way. you want your reader to gain confidence that your page will be
informative, not shouting some advertising mantra at them.
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The Title Tag is the most important place to include your main keyword for that page - i.e. the one you really want to be found for. Google displays the title in its search results and link text of your page. The text in the title must make sense and encourage visitors.
This phrase is shown in the top left hand corner of your web browser, further emphasising the purpose of the page. Finally its the default name of the page should you add it to your favourites.
Keyword density
There are differing opinions of
what is an appropriate Keyword density. By this I
mean the proportion of keywords to text. Keywords
do need to be prominent in the text. However I've seen a
no.1-ranking page with just 5% density.
Of course other factors came into play.
This particular site is well linked from other major
sites on its chosen topic.
Other articles suggest 10%, most agree that
too much is Spam, and it makes the
article less readable. Aim for a minimum of three
times regardless of page size.
Keywords that are placed
higher up in the body text will generally be
valued higher by search engines.
Make sure
the ALT tag for the logo, which is the first image
displayed, contains the main keyword you are
competing over and place keywords in your alt tags
to accurately describe your images.
Choose
your keywords before you choose your domain name.
Then select a domain name with some of those
keywords in it to maximise exposure to those
keywords
Ensure your keywords are in both
the text and the URLs of outbound links (we'll
cover inbound links and link popularity later).
Also use keywords in short searchable phrases;
flowery language will blur their effect.
Google recognises "themes" by the use of
keywords repeated consistently throughout the
Website, and increases the ranking of each page
for those keywords. This is why a well-written
article will rank highly as its naturally
including "themes".
