Search engine positioning
Teacher: Case Stevens

High search engine positioning brings traffic. That's good web site promotion! But high positioning needs careful planning prior to submission of a website to an engine. Read this before making a registration to any engine. Do website submission afterwards.

Define a niche first

Ask yourself: who are my visitors, what do they read, where are they, what do they do? Try to understand your typical customer.

Specify your niche as much as possible. Place yourself in a visitor's position. Find out what they are looking for.

Make a Keyword List

When you're done, find words or phrases that they will probably use to find what they want. These are keywords.

Try to find phrases rather than single words. "Beginners Web Design" is more specific than "Design". When we refer to keywords, we (also) mean phrases.

Make a list of them. Come up with at least 10 or 20.

Type the keywords in the searchbox of your favorite engine and enter. View every source code of top sites you find. Add keywords that aren't on your list. Come up with some others.

Expand Keyword List

Go to WordWeb.co.uk.

Download WordWeb, a little Thesaurus/Dictionary. Type the keywords and add synonyms.

Visit JimTools.com

Enter keywords to generate others.

Other places to look for keywords:

WordTracker.com

Mall-Net.com

The1000.com

OK, the list must contain over a hundred phrases by now.

Select Keywords

Now, go to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion.

Type generic keywords (design instead of web design; design will show all possible combinations).

That results in numbers followed by keywords (representing the number of requests for that word in a month).

Save results in a spreadsheet and sort them. This way you will build an important source of information you can use when developing websites.

(I use Excel, but any spreadsheet will do. Make 2 columns, 1 for the generic keyword and 1 for results; sort them and make subtotals per keyword so you can find them again at sorted subtotal level.)

Now select keywords that have a count between 100 and 800. (GoTo represents about 3% of all traffic, so you may expect 30 times that number for all engines.) Lower counts aren't interesting, higher counts mean way too much competition.

Design a Page!

Make a template page. For an example visit
http://www.anownsite.com/articles/template.html

View the source, copy and paste it in an HTML-editor. Make necessary changes.

Now take one (1) main keyword and write your text around it. Mix another keyword into it. Keep the number of words between 400 and 800. (Use Text Statistics in Tools Menu of Note Tab Light, available at NoteTab.com.)

Put your text in the template. Use the keyword as your page name.

Now visit BruceClay.com.

For this particular subject visit Search Engine Ranking Tools (but definitely read everything else on his outstanding site).

Read all information carefully. Apply exactly as written by Bruce Clay.

Finish it.

Now visit AnalogX.com.

Download Keyword Extractor.

Count the words in your page. Sort them by weight. Keywords should rank high and must be present in title, description, keywords, comment, alt's and links (main one at the start and NOT next or close to eachother). Review Bruce Clay information.

Keywords should also appear in body text. A thumb of rule: if the body text contains 400 words, keywords should appear twice, at 600 three times and at 800 four times in the body.

Rewrite if necessary and finish with 1 keyword occurrence in the closing paragraph.

Submission Time!

Now your page has a fair chance of relative high ranking.

Review Bruce Clay. Follow his submission instructions.

Success to you.

About the teacher:
Case Stevens, moderator of AnOwnSite.com where Beginners make a Free Test Ride and Advanced find Successful Web Solutions. Subscribe to their FREE newsletter.