The Winners` Search Engine Strategy
By Willie Crawford

For most websites, the only way you`ll gain any significant
long-term traffic is through the search engines. How else
will the world discover and decide to investigate your
otherwise-unknown website? There are many other ways to
attract traffic but the search engines are one of the most
efficient! If you agree with that assertion, then the
question becomes how do you attract enough long-term search
engine traffic to your website to make it viable? I say
long-term because many strategies such as pay-per-click and
traffic exchanges are short-term and resource intensive. We
won`t to focus on something we can do once and forget it!

The solution is that you build your website to meet the
search engines` criteria and your potential customers`
needs at the same time. Right from the very start you
build with your ultimate objective in mind. You build
webpages that when listed in search engines will attract the
right prospects to your site for a long time.

You begin this process by deciding what your business really
is. What is your website really about? Who do you really
want to attract? What topics will people coming to your
website be looking for more information on? What problems
will these people be trying to solve?

By clearly defining what your website is all about, you can
come up with a list of keywords and phrases people would use
in searching for sites similar to yours at the search
engines. You want to build a very comprehensive list of the
terms your ideal prospects would use. Brainstorm all of the
terms that you think they might use. Then go to a site such
as Overture and use their suggestion tool. See what terms
people using your search terms also searched on in recent
searches. The Overture tool that I use for this is at:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
I also subscribe to services that tell me what the most
common terms are that people are searching on.

Next go to the search engines and do some actual searches on
your top keyword phrases. Visit the top ten sites and see
what other keywords these sites target. Look at their
metatags to determine this. You`ll eventually end up with
a very comprehensive list.

You want a very comprehensive list because you want to weave
these keyword phrases that are searched on into your
webpages as you write them. You want to use them in your
web copy (use them in sentences or headings that sound
logical when read). The search engines, in reading webpages
and ranking them, look at what the page is all about. Make
your page about whatever keywords you are targeting. Each
webpage looks at factors such as keyword density and
placement. I find that articles on a given topic have just
about the ideal keyword density so I don`t spend too much
time over-analyzing this.

Next, make it very easy for the search engines to recognize
what your pages are all about. The formulas used by the
search engines give a lot of weight to a webpages "title"
metatag. Make sure that your title tag contains your most
important keywords. Next, make sure that your page
"description" metatag contains your most important keywords.
If your page is structured with sub-heading, make sure these
also contain your most important keyword phrases. Use the
"heading" fonts to tell the search engines that this text
on your webpage is a heading and therefore important.

+++++++++++++++++

Side note: The keyword metatag is decreasing in importance
... primarily because so many people have abused it. I
still use it on many of my pages though. As a second side
note, make the title and descriptions metatags of each of
your webpages different (unless they contain identical
material). This causes different pages to be returned for
differing searches.

++++++++++++++++++

While weaving your important keywords into your webpages,
keep in mind that your target audience will be reading
these. Make sure that your title and description yells to
your prospect that this is just what he is looking for.
What you ultimately want to do is attract people who are
interested in exactly what you have to offer. When you
attract the right traffic, you need to attract much less
traffic to make the same number of conversions.

One of the big difficulties you face is designing pages
that appeal to both the search engines and to your visitors.
The search engines index word and give the most relevance
to words near the top of your page. They don`t index images
although they catalog them! The very highest ranking pages
I have ever written contained no images - they were just
my articles pasted into webpages. People really interested
in the topic may notice that the page has no images but if
the article gives them just what they need they are still
likely to react positively to the page.

Your html coding and the location of page elements affect
how your search engine listing reads. The code that makes
your page look great and easy to navigate to the human is
often the thing that those stupid search engine spiders
index. That`s why you often see elements of your forms or
cryptic descriptions in search engine returns. The search
engine could not locate a good page description metatag or
ignored it and just grabbed the html near the top of the
page. Naturally, the way to defeat this is to have
relevant text near the top of your html code. You can even
go as far as to create special pages for certain search
engines that tend to do well with a given search engine
and then use coding to tell other search engines not to
index these pages. That`s beyond the scope of this
particular article though.

After your pages are "ready" for the search engines, you
need to help them find your webpages. You can do this by
submitting your webpages directly to the engines. However,
some search engines only allow you to submit a few of your
pages, so you want to make sure that there are links on your
submitted pages that point to all of your other important
pages. If you have a lot of these important pages you might
need to use a site map or a similar tool. You want something
within the first 2 or 3 pages of your website pointing to
all of your important pages.


You want to submit to all of the important search engines.
Unfortunately, many of them have started charging for
indexing your webpages. If you are short on funds and/or
want others ways to get indexed, you need to think of how
you can get your webpages into a "path" where the search
engines will naturally find them. Search engines index the
pages submitted but they also index significant pages they
find. Your job is to place as many optimized pages as
you can into paths where the search engines will find them.

You do this by:

- Placing highly optimized pages on mini-sites. These pages
can be an article or information page targeting your keyword
phrase. Only target two or three keywords on each page.
The pages can even be on mini-sites on free web hosts. They
tend to do better if they are on sites with domain names
relevant to your topic but pages on free sites can serve as
great pointers to your site. Be careful not to place
identical pages on many different sites. The search engines
will recognize the duplicate content and may simply ignore
all of your pages.

- Submitting your articles to article directories. These
directories are indexed and the links point back to your
site. People who read these articles filled with solid
information want to learn more and visit your site. These
articles serve to not only get more links pointing to your
site, they also serve to position you as an expert. If
people see article that decisively demonstrate your
expertise, you become someone your prospects naturally think
of when your target topic comes up.

- Submitting your articles to article lists. Many of the
lists cataloging articles which are available free to
publishers are archived on websites. These archives are
crawled by search engine spiders. Get your articles in
these directories to gain more to search engine visibility.


- Submitting your articles to ebook authors. Ebooks that
are passed around pass your url directly to your target
prospects. Ebooks that are place on sites and in
directories are also indexed by the search engines. I
frequently come across returns in my research that end
up being pdf formatted ebooks. The search engine
technology allows many different types of media to be
indexed.

- Submitting your articles to ezines. Many ezines are
archived online and your material is archived along with
them. This creates more links helping the search engines
find your site and your pages. Again, you are not only
building search engine pointers to your website you are
establishing your expertise on that topic in the mind of
your potential visitors.


- Get links at larger sites pointing back to your site.
The search engines will give your site some relevance
because of this, and may also follow these links to your
site. This makes creating an about me webpage at Ebay
worthwhile. It makes posts in Yahoo! groups worthwhile.
Be constantly on the lookout for ways to ethically get
your links visible on those high traffic sites!


Getting top search engine listings can be expensive, time
consuming, and frustrating. Without good listing, your
site may get very little traffic. The easiest way to get
these listings is to design your pages to rank well from
the very start. Feed the search engines a lot of very
relevant pages and then concentrate on other traffic
generation methods.


There are tons of tricks and tools that search engine
optimization specialists use. Used improperly, they can get
your site banned. I`m speaking of tools such as cloaking
or "IP delivery." For many marketers, these tools and
techniques are not a very good investment of your resources.
They require constant monitoring and constant study of what
the search engines are looking for TODAY. The simple methods
listed above work long-term and will deliver a steady stream
of highly targeted traffic. Adopt a mindset that thinks get
your keyword rich content into as many search engine paths
as possible.
-----------------------------

Willie Crawford is an internet marketing consultant who has
taught thousands the "how-to" of building successful on-line
businesses through his free, 20-lesson Internet Business
Success Course. Grab the course that reveals it ALL at:
<a href="http://www.williecrawford.com">
AOL Click Here </a>

==========================================================


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My email address is willie@williecrawford.com



Thank you,
Willie Crawford

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