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How To Attain Top 20 Search Engine Placement

First of all, this is NOT a search engine placement tutorial. I can not tell you how to "do it". I'm only telling you our basic procedures for getting our clients top 20 search engine placement. The major search engines are constantly changing the way they work, and the only "real" answer to consistently placing in the top 20 is caring enough about it to test, study, submit, monitor and then do it all over again until you finally have it figured out. Of course, then they'll change again and you get to start all over.

I don't mean to sound too negative, because Top 20 search engine placement on the major engines can certainly make a huge difference to your web site and your on-line marketing efforts. It takes a lot of focus and work but it IS worth it.

The procedures I'm going to out line here are effective. There are a lot of variables, but in general, we have a great deal of success following these basic guidelines. First let me give up a few tips in regards to the philosophy of top 20 search engine placement.

  1. Be honest - If you set out to spam or "trick" the search engines, you will eventually lose. You're best bet by far is to simply design your page to actually be relevant to the keywords you want your page to come up under. Even if you're successful at getting your page at the top by spamming, your competitors will turn you in, the engines will penalize you or delete you, or ban your entire domain. And your reputation and image as a responsible, reputable on-line marketer will be tarnished.
  2. Only pick key words/phrases that actually pertain to your web page. Putting something like "sex" on your arts and crafts page will NOT get your page to come up under sex if someone types that in for a search. Also, a lot of people know enough about HTML to know how to look at your document source. Now what kind of impression are you making on people when they see you've selected "sex" as a keyword for your crafts page? All right, lets get started.

SELECT YOUR KEYWORDS: This is the first step to successful website promotion through top search engine placement. By selecting your keywords, you can identify your market and develop a strategy. For example, if you're wanting to sell arts and craft supplies, then you can assume that most of your customer base will be women. If women are your target market, then design your page to be "women friendly". Design your page to make women feel comfortable there. If it were me, I would want to have links to fashion sites as opposed to football scores.
Once you decide what product or service you're going to offer, select about 5 to 10 keyword/phrases that you think most people would be typing in if they were looking for a product or service such as yours. Write them down, then list them in the order of importance, the most important being first.

CREATE YOUR MAIN PAGE: It's best if the title of this page corresponds with the domain name. I strongly urge you to get your own domain name. This page is the most important. This one is the page you need to spend the most time on. I recommend about 200-500 words of text with at least a couple of graphics including your logo. Remember to stay focused and make sure that 200-500 words of text is actually ABOUT the targeted keywords.

OK, we're ready to start doing the code. I'm terrible at html, so if anything here is "over your head" then you better stop and learn basic html or hire someone to do it for you and just have them follow these guidelines.

  • TITLE: Title your page using a breif description with 5-15 words using as many keywords as possible, with the most important being first. One thing to remember, the title is the first thing people will see, so don't trade off an effective, professional sounding title just so you can squeeze in more keywords.
  • DESCRIPTION: Put a short 25 word description of your page in meta tags. Make sure your most important keywords are in your description but remember it's like the title, it's more important for the description to sound right and "sell" than to just have it stuffed with keywords. It won't do any good to achieve a number 1 search engine placement, if no one clicks on your link because your title and description sound unprofessional or just plain stupid.
  • KEYWORDS: List your keywords/phrases in meta tags separated by commas or spaces not using more than 150. Do not repeat the same word more than 3 times. Let's say I'm going to do a page about beer making and my keywords/phrases are: beer-beer making-beer bottles-beer cans-beer distributorship and home-made beer. Your meta tags keywords should look something like this:
    beer,cans,bottles,home-made,distributorships,beer making
  • ALT IMAGE TAGS: The whole idea of alt tags is so that people browsing with the graphics turned off can see what the blank box is about. Insert your keywords (don't spam there is no need to repeat them over and over) inside your alt image tags on all your graphics.
  • TEXT: Make sure all your text looks good. Check your spelling and punctuation. Keep your keyword density at about 7% - 15%. Remember, for search engine placement, that Excite and Yahoo don't read meta tags so they will select something (very randomly) from somewhere in your text to display as a description so you want to feel fairly confident that whatever they select won't embarrass you.
  • LINKS: You are going to be writing at least 3 other pages. It is very important that your main page links to all these pages and that all your other pages link back to the main page and all of the other pages. It really doesn't matter much where they are, most people just put them all at the bottom, but personally, I like them sprinkled through out the text when the text is making a reference to one of the keywords/phrases.
  • CREATING YOUR INTERIOR PAGES: The purpose of an interior page in search engine placement, is to be more relevant to a specific keyword/phrase. Follow the same basic guidelines except use no more than two keyword/phrases in your "meta keyword tag". Put your 2 keyword/phrases in all lower case and then again in upper and lower case. Make sure you keyword/phrase is at the beginning of your title and descriptions. Put the description in comment tags once. Keep your text short at 2 - 4 paragraphs. Use one image (logo) with keywords/phrases in the alt image tag. Make sure your keyword density is between 7% - 15%. Make sure all these pages are linked to each other but especially the main pages. Create as many pages like this as you feel you need for every one or two keyword/phrase you would like to get in the top 20 with.

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