Search Engine Secrets: Build a Search-Engine Friendly Web Site Samsunshine Levy

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Search Engine Secrets Build a Search-Engine
Friendly Web SiteSamsunshine Levy
www.thenetcave.com
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Search Engines Who Needs em?

• Ever heard of these

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If you do this
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You can get this
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Great!

• Where do I sign?
• How much do I pay?
• Who do I trust?
• How is it done?

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The Secret Questions

1. Who Wants You?
2. What To Cultivate?
3. When To Change?
4. Where Does It All Go?
5. Why No No-Nos?
6. How is Your House Built?

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Who Wants You?

• You want people
• But Who Wants You?
• You want people who
• need you but
• dont yet know that you exist
• (Yes, that would be new customer acquisition)
• (Dont use jargon in a presentation)

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Keyword Research

• Wordtracker www.wordtracker.com
• Free Trial (unlimited uses)
• Uses MSN daily data
• Google Adwords adwords.google.com
• Pretend to want to sign up as a new advertiser,
  and research keywords for your campaigns
• Non-Targeted Marketing

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ROI, KEI, SEO KWP

• (Dont use acronyms in PowerPoint presentations)
• To target a niche market, and achieve best SEO
  potential
• Maximize Searches
• Minimize Competition
• Content of site will address normal, more
  competive keywords and keyword phrases
• Narrow down to 15-20 w/ best potential

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What To Cultivate?

• Factors to raising your search engine rankings
  and relevancy are
• Useful TITLE META tags on each page
• Keyword-rich, sole-source, expanding, plain HTML
  textual content
• Footer, Site Map Linked Text
• Longevity of site domain name
• Plus

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Search Engine Friendly URLs

• Happy

• Unhappy

www.greatskin.com/loccitane/shaving-cream.html www
.nmipa.org/members/join Query Strings / database
generated pages www.skin.com/store/pr.asp?cID42B
pID6x5Q14z Unfriendly Spaces www.skin.com/onl
ine40store/my_great_product.html Abbreviated or
too-long pages/directories www.skin.com/s/c/d/g/a
reallygreatpagetolookatnowforyou.htm Domain
Parks www.skin.com / www.myskin.com / skin.com /
myskin.com
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If you have unhappy URLs

• Subdirectories are nice
• Hyphens for spaces, 25 chars
• 301 redirects on domains
• Map old pages to new pages with
• Symbolic links
• URL rewriting (mod_rewrite)
• XML / RSS feeds
• GoogleBase / Product data feeds
• One more thing to cultivate

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Inbound Links

• Keyword-rich
• Textual
• To authorized domain
• Deep-Linking OK
• Accompanying description
• Reciprocate
• Only from respected sites
• Check originating domain

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When To Change?

• Change What?
• Change The King!
• Do You Know The King?

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When To - Be The King

• The C Word
• (and linking is Queen)
• Nothing rankshigher at Search Enginesthan a
  lot of contentabout a term thatsomeone
  issearching for

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With Content, Just Like With

• Health
• Wealth
• Happiness
• Hedonism
• Time
• Brains
• Brawn

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More (and more often) Is Always Better
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When Writing, who are you writing for?

• Primarily Humans, not search engines
• Who are the search engines working for?
• Use keywords (more to come)
• Keep pages a minimum length
• Use tools to make it readable
• Lists, columns, headers
• Write about what you do
• Related terms will come up naturally, and in
  context

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Unhappy Content

• Petrogroup?

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Happy Content

• Joan?

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OK, So back to the Question

• Q When To Change (content)?
• A As often as you can
• Frequent new content additions
• Create visitor stickiness
• Make search engines happy
• Creates valuable depth of content

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Deep Content

• KF articles?

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Frequent Content

• BB nls

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And Now

• For the slide youve all been waiting for

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But First

• A word from our sponsor?
• A dance break?
• Cowgirl ribs?
• More caffeine?

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Make It Easy with CMS

• A Content Management System (CMS)
• Lets you add, edit and delete pages without
  special knowledge
• Can automatically create META tags
• Can automatically update site maps
• Is built to be fool-proof
• Can auto-create SEO friendly URLs
• Auto-adjusts site-wide navigation

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CMS

• SFB t3

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And Now, Really

• For the slide youve all been waiting for

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Where Does It All Go? 3 Rules of 3

• Choose about 6-8 main, friendly-URL pages
• Choose 3 unique keywords/phrases to use on each
  page
• Use each phrase 3 times in the page
• Have at least 250 (normal HTML text) words on
  each page
• Use the 3 terms in TITLE and META tags
• Link from footer and site map

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Example Optimized Content

• HG 3 terms are

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Example - Content
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Example - Tags

• HG Title META

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Keep In Mind

• Use reasonably-natural language
• You will enjoy our unique, authentic Adobe homes
  and the finest in vacation rentals, especially
  southwestern homes, in New Mexico.
• Real Estate New Mexico vacation rentals Santa Fe
  shown on website with villas for rent. Santa Fe
  New Mexico rental properties and New Mexico Real
  Estate.

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Also Keep In Mind

• Human usability and readability are still the
  most important
• Bulleted lists
• Fixed width text columns
• Section headers
• Easily readable paragraphs

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Why No No-Nos?

• What Not To Do
• or
• How to quickly and easily get blacklisted by
  search engines

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Black Hat SEO

• Keyword Stuffing
• Invisible Text
• Doorway Pages
• Non-linked Pages
• Cloaking (Browser detection)
• Scraping
• META REFRESH or off-site Redirects

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How Is Your House Built?

• No-No Tools Technology(if you want to be found
  in search engines or linked to from anywhere)
• Flash Animation (Intros or Whole Site)
• Alternative Use Flash as an accent
• Frames or iFrames
• Alternative Use CSS
• Non-text Text (Flash or images)
• Javascript or DHTML drop-down menus
• Alternative Use CSS nested list drop-downs

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CSS Frame Function

• KF FF page

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CSS Nested List Drop Down

• SFB screenshot

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Good Tools For House Building

• Use URL Rewriting for important or content-rich
  pages of database generated sites
• Also use XML / RSS Feeds
• For ecommerce sites, send product datafeeds to
  GoogleBase
• And consider Amazon merchant or your own
  affiliate program but thats another show

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Example XML / RSS feed

• NMCN Calendar

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GoogleBase Example

• KFM screenshot and GoogleBase Listing

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In addition to 3 keywords

• Title Tag Guidelines
• Use a short page title (in addition to keywords)
• Limit to 65 characters
• META Description Tag Guidelines (Honest 90s)
• some search engines display in results
• Limit to 25 words
• META Keyword Tag Guidelines (why not)
• Do not repeat words
• Limit to 10-12 words

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Titles and Tags Example

• Keli E B-B one page

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Footer and Site Map

• Replicate page titles as linked pages in
  site-wide footer (Server Side Includes)
• Link to a Site Map page in Footer
• Do not use Googles Site Map creator
• The Site Map page should replicate the titles,
  linked to pages, with the META descriptions next
  to the titles

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Footer Example

• HG screenshot

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Site Map Example

• HG

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Bonus Points

• Beyond plain content, title and META tags, you
  should also use these techniques within site
  content
• Use HTML header (h1, h2, h3) tags
• In-page cross-linked text (link to other site
  pages, especially where descriptive text appears)
• Bold (b, strong) may be given some extra weight
  when used judiciously

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Bonus Points Example

• A new KF page

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In Review

• PREPARE
• Research Keyword Rankings Relevancy. Choose
  15-20 of the best
• Assign 3 keywords to each of 6 pages, then write
  250 words each page
• Use the copy for title and meta tags for a
  persistent footer and site map

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In Review

• BUILD
• Cultivate inbound textual links, preferably using
  your chosen keywords
• Content is King. More, better, often, CMS
• TITLE and META tags, linked text throughout,
  maybe bold/strong

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In Review

• CHECK
• No Flash. No non-HTML text. No Frames. No
  Javascript or DHTML menus
• Friendly URLs, URL rewriting and no lost and
  found visitors
• XML / RSS / GoogleBase / Data Feeds (and
  podcasts, video and Web 2.0 but thats also
  another show)

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Search Engine Secrets Build a Search-Engine
Friendly Web SiteSamsunshine Levy
www.thenetcave.com