Clarence's Search Engine Optimization Tips and TechniquesClarence's Cajun radio programs in Baton Rouge are Sat 7pm-8 on 90.3 FM & Sun noon-2 on 1260 AM. |
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Bienvenue to Clarence's Search Engine Optimization Tips and Techniques! This is located at www.cajunradio.org/searchengineoptimizationranking.html People often ask me how I get such good rankings in the search engines, so I typed this up in less than an hour to give people a crash course in how to optimize your website so you get more visitors. As a computer programmer as my day job, I have done a lot of research into getting good search engine ratings. I get over 40,000 visitors per month to my main hobby web site at www.cajunradio.org Since I am cheap, I have NEVER paid for search engine placement, so I must be doing something right. This web site is just my hobby and I don't make any money from this. But, since I have gained some knowledge, I figured that I would share it with you. I typed this in pretty fast, so if there are any grammatical errors please just overlook it. One day if I get some free time I will come back and make this "pretty". C'est la vie! In the meantime, I think that you will really like the content of helpful advice on search engines. :) Clarence 1) Figure out what key words that you want to have the search engines look at. 2) Include a meta tag at the top of your code that contains those key words. 3) About 60 percent of all people using search engines use google, 40 percent use yahoo, and the other 10 percent is scattered among other less popular search engines. So, you should optimize your site for Google. If it ranks good in Google, then it will rank good in Yahoo also. Monitor it by typing in the keywords that you chose in google and note how far down your site is. Notice how it moves up as you make changes. 4) See what the sites above yours is doing and use their techniques. After you type a keyword in Google, click on the first site that comes up. When the site comes up, right click on your mouse and select "View Source". Review their source code to see what they did to get a good rating and use the methods that they used. 5) Search engines have a hard time indexing images, so if you use less images and more text then you will rate better. 6) The very top of each page should have a paragraph describing what information is available on that page. This paragraph should contain about 4 sentences that is loaded with your keywords. Make use of the verbs "is" and "are". ex: This is the Cajun and Zydeco music website. Cajun music is the french music of South Louisiana. Zydeco and Swamp Pop are styles of music that you will find here. Note the use of my choice of keywords "Cajun" and "Zydeco". They are included in several sentences at the very top of the page. So, the keywords are a) repeated in several sentences b) those sentences are at the very top of the page, c) the keywords are as physically close to the verbs "is" and "are". 7) The use of "Frame" technology (as in Frontpage web authoring tool) is tricky. On one hand, it is easier to maintain your website with the use of frames, but on the other hand, the search engines do not tend to like it and will usually result in a lower search engine rating. 8) If you have multiple pages to your website, have a table with the left column as your index and navigation part of your site. Search engines don't have any problem with sectioning off your web site into partitions using tables (just don't use frames). 9) For your left side table that is your navigation part, you should have a text label saying "Site Index" followed by links to other parts of your site. Make sure that these links are to other parts of your site and NOT to other sites. The search engine goes from top to bottom and reading the left table before the right table. Why is this important? Well, the search engine will store the first 2-3 links that it finds on your page and subsequently 2-3 days later then those web pages are also "indexed" by the search engine. You want the search engines to index your site every few days instead of every 1-2 months. So, make those first 2-3 links on each page count. Point those links to other parts of your site. 10) Notice that I am spending a lot of discussion on that navigation aspect of your site. That is because a lot of people really mess up their search engine ratings with this. Here is another main aspect of the navigation: Say you divide your page up into 2 tables or columns. The left column contains the navigation and the right contains the main body of your web page. Remember earlier how I stated that you need a paragraph at the top of your web page that is filled with the keywords that you chose? Well, you can either put this paragraph "inside" your right hand table OR you can take the paragraph out of your right hand table all-together. You should take it out of the table completely and put it ABOVE the table. That way, the search engine will look at that paragraph before it starts looking at your navigation and you get rated higher. EX: your code should be in this order: (headers)(metatags)(paragraph mentioned)(TABLE)(left part of table)(right part of table)(END TABLE) ... (note that I put the paragraph before the table and not inside the table. 11) Keywords - you should emphasize those keywords so that the search thinks that you think that they are important. So, above your paragraph include your main keywords as the title to your site and make that font size big. Hence the top of your site would say (font size = 5) CAJUN ZYDECO GUIDE (end font size) (br) (followed by the paragraph mentioned). In that paragraph at the top of your page, you included your keywords several times. On one occurrence, bold the keyword. On the next occurrence of the keyword, italicize it. So, in the top few sentences you have the keyword with a large font size, another with bold, and another with italics. The search engines realize that you think that those keywords are important and you rank well. 12) Don't take shortcuts with naming your URL and your URL subpage. If the search engines see your keywords in the URL, it gives you bonus points. Thus, with my URL of www.cajunradio.org, note that I have the keyword "cajun" and the keyword "radio" right there in my URL. Say I want to add another page to my website on cajun stuff in Baton Rouge. I could name it www.cajunradio.org/brcz.html or I could name it www.cajunradio.org/batonrougecajunzydeco.html You guessed it, the 2nd way rates higher in the search engines. So, don't abbreviate the names of your URL pages. 13) Links: The more that other sites link to your site that higher a rating that you get. So email other websites and ask them to trade links. A site with 100 links to it will rate better than the site with 2 links to you. Now here is a little trick. Say I have a lot of links to my site and so does my competition. Say we even have the exact same number of sites linking to us. Which one will rate higher according to links. Well if the sites that link to you are "relavent for that keyword" then it count a lot higher than links that are non-relevent. In simple terms, what this means is that you should type your keywords in to google and see which sites are rated above yours. Then specifically email each of those sites asking them to trade links with you. If any sites above yours puts a link to your site, you get bonus points. I typed in "zydeco" in google, found that there were 20 sites above mine. I email each of those sites asking for links and every time one of those site put a link to me I moved up. So, I went from 20th to 5th just from that. 14) There are 2 issues with search engine optimization. Most of what I have talked about so far has been how to rate higher in the index. The other issue is actually getting the search engine to "find" your web site in the first place. After it "finds" you the first time, it will generally come back to re-rate you in about 60 days. That is too long to wait to move up in the search engine, so help it out. (explained later) 15) Get it to index you the first time: go to www.google.com , click on "about google", find "add your URL" and submit your site. Now go to www.yahoo.com , click on "advanced" , look for the very small print at the very bottom of the page that says "submit URL" and submit your site. Note that search engines alway has large paragraphs encouraging you to pay for site submission. Always bypass that and look for very small print usually at the bottom of the page where it is hard to find where it say "free submission" 16) Get it to come back and rate your site more often than 60 day from now. You can do this by having good links. Say you were indexed (rated) a couple of weeks ago. You still have a long time until the 60 days comes around again. But in the meantime (last night) google indexed your competitions site. Well if your competition had a link to your site and google came across that link, then it stores it in a special little area that says lets put your site in the queue to be index 2-3 days later. As I mentioned earlier, if your competition buried your link in an obscure part of their site, it won't follow it as well as if it was one of the first links listed. Here is a little hint: I know that my main web site www.cajunradio.org gets index every 2-3 days because I have a great "rating" and because so many other relevant sites link to mine. So, today I am going to add a sub-page to my web site and I am going to name it www.cajunradio.org/searchengineoptimizationranking.html This is a new page so I don't want to wait 60 days for google to "find" it. So I am going to help it along by putting a link to it in the 1st sentence of the main page of my web site. Thus, on www.cajunradio.org I type: View my new page on Search engine optimization and ranking. 17) Install google's "Toolbar". People who are good at search engine ratings use google's little helper call the google "Toolbar". You find it at the google website and click on download it and a little menu will show up on the top or bottom of your screen when you are using google. That toolbar can do several things, but you are only interested in the little graphic (green bar) that is called the "pagerank tool". So to get it, go to google, click on "more" and find the icon that says "google toolbar". After you say yes to install it on your PC, you can start taking advantage of it. For example, type into the google search engine your keyword (in my case, I type "zydeco"). Select the first web site that comes up. Once that website is displaying on your screen, look at that little tool bar at the top of your screen that has a little green horizontal bar. Place your mouse on top of the green bar and it will say a number such as 6/10. This is your page rank. The higher the better. www.cajunradio.org has a rating of 6/10 so generally I will be listed above any web sites that are rated 5/10. Use this tool to monitor how your web site raises in the search engine rankings. 18) Back to that pesky navigation table on the left side of your web page. If your web site gets large with a whole lot of pages on the site then you will probably find it quite a hassle to maintain. Every time you add a page, then you have to go and update the left part of the table on every page that you have. The alternative is to use "frames" so that you only type it once and it "propages" to every subpage. But remember that you won't get as good of a ranking using frames. Thus, you start making compromises between page rank and ease of maintaining your web site. I used an alternative to "frames" so that I could somewhat keep my ranking high. I used a little bit of "Java script" that I called "www.cajunradio.org/autonav.js" Thus, I make the change to my left menu in autonav.js and it is propogated to the hundred or so pages of my website. The main thing when you are using frames or javascript or any other dynamic type of menu or site index, you want to make sure that you have the links to the subpages of your site hard coded somewhere on one of the pages of your site so that the search engines can follow the links to all of the pages of your site. Thus, on my main page at www.cajunradio.org , I have a link to every subpage of my site. Then, on each subpage of my site, I do not hardcode the site index, but instead use my autonav.js javascript to dynamically populate my menu items. The search engine can get to the subpages by following the links on the main page since it can not follow the links in my javascript code. 19)Submit your site to the "Directory" of Yahoo for free if your site is a hobby or non-profit site. Last I looked they called this submiting to the "Zeal" directory. Also submit your site for free to an even better directory called www.dmoz.org After summitting to these directories, it will take months (maybe many months) before you get listed, but if you do, you get bonus points (big bonus points) in the rankings. Since these tend to be run by volunteers, choose a category that has an editor listed at the bottom of the page instead of the generic message saying "editor needed". Better yet, read the guidelines for becoming a volunteer editor for the directory service and add your own site to the directory yourself. (This is for the more serious webmaster) Please listen to Clarence's Cajun radio programs in Baton Rouge. Saturdays 7pm-8pm on WBRH 90.3 FM Sundays noon-2pm on KBRH 1260 AM Clarence needs your help - read a message from Clarence here. Home Site index |