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Search
engines can drive a great deal of traffic to your website. This is
something worth paying attention to! You might think the situation is
hopeless--there may be a million websites that come up when you type in
your keywords in Google or other search engines--but with a few simple
steps you can make a HUGE difference in your website’s standings.
First let me say that I strongly recommend against hiring one of those
services that claim they can increase your search engine status to the
top page right away. Many of these companies try to “trick” the search
engines with various illegal tricks, and if the search engines catch
them it could get your website banned. And these companies normally
charge a lot of money, which would be better spent elsewhere.
So it’s best to do the work yourself, the old-fashioned way. If you do
not know how to work on your own website you are at a disadvantage;
you’ll need to hire someone to do the work for you. But it’s not that
complicated, so try finding a college kid or someone to barter with, so
it doesn’t ending up costing you too much money. (Better yet, take a
basic web development class and take charge of your own site. It’s way
worth it!)
The main investment you need to make to improve your standing in the
search engines is time. With a few simple changes (and no cash outlay)
you can be within the top one to two pages of results.
Here’s the steps to accomplish this:
1) Pick your keyword phrase
carefully - this step is crucial. You need
to pick a search term that relates to your website. (It’s best to focus
on just one phrase at first, and then once you’ve perfected that go on
to others.) Target this for your home page, if at all possible, not
some obscure page on your site. The more specific you can be, the
better--in other words, it’s much easier to get results for “holistic
health magazine” than it is for “holistic health” or simply “holistic.”
The more specific your search term is, the easier it will be for you to
achieve results. You also want to choose a phrase that people actually
use in search engines--if you make it too obscure your website might be
listed first for that search term, but if no one types in this term
then it doesn’t matter! Not sure what people are looking for? The free
tool at the link below will show you how many people looked up your
proposed search term: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Sometimes a small change can make a big difference: you might discover
that 10,000 people looked up the phrase “natural diet program” but only
500 people looked up “holistic diet program.” You want to choose a
search term that’s popular and that relates directly to your website,
while being as specific as possible.
2) Make sure you have good
content on your home page (or the page
you’re choosing to optimize for the search engines). The keyword phrase
you decided on in step one should appear several times. (Not a
ridiculous amount of times, or it will be considered spamming by the
search engines.) If you have a “splash page” on your website--in other
words, if your home or “index” page is just a pretty graphic that says
“welcome” or enter”--get rid of it! Splash pages will really hinder
your search engine results.
Here is another tip relating to content: don’t use graphics instead of
text! It’s not worth it, because the search engines can’t read it.
Function wins over style in this case. Make sure all of your key
content appears on your web pages as text. (It can be colored or bold
or italic, large or small, just not converted to an image.) As a matter
of fact, if your search term is in bold or larger text, the search
engines like that, because it shows emphasis.
3) Give your web pages good
titles that include your search term. You
must know how to access the html code for your web pages to do this,
but it’s not hard. There are actually three key items of html code that
you need to pay attention to for each page: the Title name (most
important), the Description, and the Key Words. Different search
engines give these things different importance, so best to do them all
correctly. The title line should be short (no more than 5 words) and
don’t include any uneccesary words like “the.” Make sure what you say
is what they get: in other words, don’t try to cheat with a catchy
title that does not relate to the content of the web page. For the key
words, list 10 to 12 words, and include variations (e.g. health,
healthy, healing).
4) Get your website linked with
other sites that relate to your search
term-- preferably those sites that already have a good search
engine
ranking. The number of websites that link to you is called your
“popularity” and this can affect your website’s standing with the
search engines quite a bit. Want to know how popular your website is?
Go to http://www.linkpopularity.com/ for a free tool to see how many
websites link to you.
Here’s what you do to accomplish step 4: do a search for your search
term. (I recommend using Google.com as it’s the most popular search
engine by far.) Then check out all the websites that come up in the
first two or three pages of results. Put a link to them from your
website, and then send them an email telling them you did this and
requesting a reciprocal link back to your website. They won’t all
answer you, but if you keep at it you will eventually build up a good
list of websites that link to you. This is the time consuming part, by
it’s worth it. Keep a running list so you know who you’ve contacted and
who has responded.
Janice
Hughes and her partner Dennis Hughes publish The Share Guide, a
holistic health magazine & resource directory for Northern
California, and shareguide.com
a resource on holistic health for the online community.
Dennis
and Janice are experts on marketing--after having published the
magazine for 18 years, they have the tools to help you get the word out
about your holistic health business.
To
learn more about advertising in The Share Guide: click here
©
2007 by Janice Hughes, all
rights reserved
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