IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding how search engines operate

Convincing other businesses to link back to your website

Updating your web pages with the right keywords

Arranging your web pages strategically

Telling search engines about your website

Moving up in the search engine rankings

If you earn prominent placement for your business where traffic is flowing, customers are more likely to stop by, look around, and buy something before they leave. Now, with the ever-growing and ever-changing nature of the Internet, many people are using search engines as their on ramp, or premier starting point for web browsing. After all, if potential customers think that they are going to end up at a search engine to find something, why wouldn’t they start there? As a consequence, search results are becoming the gateway to the Web, which is exactly where you want to be, offering your products.

In Chapter 3 of this minibook, we talk about marketing yourself in the sponsored ads that are part of the standard search results page. In this chapter, we put the more valuable real estate — the search results themselves — front and center and show you how to improve the quality of your search engine placements.

We also discuss the inner workings of the biggest search engines and then show you how you can influence those engines in your favor. Nothing about these tricks is illegal — you’re just increasing your presence in the right areas to get noticed more easily. We also show you how to stay near the top and describe more direct ways to “wave people down” in those search engine results.

Navigating the Ins and Outs of Major Search Engines

When you open a search engine web page and type some words in the search box, do you ever wonder how the search engine produces your search results? Do you imagine a blindfolded person tossing darts at newspapers spread over a wall? Maybe a chicken is let loose to peck its way to a few sites that are then transmitted to you. Although the true answer isn’t as comical, search engines use different procedures and methods to compare information against similar sites to come up with the all-important rankings.

Companies that figure out these procedures are the ones that continually find themselves near the top of the rankings. Other businesses, which might have well-designed websites that are chock-full of information, could get buried on page 10 or page 20 of the results. A few years ago, human intervention could elevate worthy sites to the top and give them featured placement. Now, however, the placement process is almost all computerized — and because computers follow rules, logic dictates that if you follow the rules, the computers will follow you.

The full set of rules that search engines use to order all their results are tightly guarded secrets because those rules, known as algorithms, set companies apart in this area. Google, in particular, uses complex rules.

These rules do change, but there’s a core set of rules we focus on in this chapter that will help you the most as you work to improve your search engine results position:

• You need to make sure the important keywords (for your website) are found on the pages within your website, with importance assigned to their placement, frequency, and association with web links.
• You want as many incoming links to your website as possible. Your ranking is assessed by both the quantity and quality (Google PageRank or equivalent “trusted website” gauge) of those incoming links.
• The more useful content found within your website, the better. Sometimes, there is a favorable bonus given to frequently updated content such as a blog or social media.
• In the end, your content needs to be “human-friendly,” which means it should be readable to a human being and not engineered to impress a search engine computer, easy to find within your website, and marked with the correct HTML tags to tell the search engine what the content represents.

We cover each of these points throughout the chapter, so let’s start with keywords. The words you enter into a search engine typically aren’t ordinary words. They’re keywords, or specific words tied to a particular subject you’re interested in. When you go to a search engine, you should give that engine the keywords, or most targeted words, that describe your search.

Search engines work like this:

1. You go to your favorite search engine, type a search term (a keyword) in the text box, and click Search to see the results.

2. Your search engine matches your search term against its database to look for relevant mentions of that keyword and relevant pages that are interpreted as the best “answers” for your search terms.

   The database is made up of countless entries of different web pages that were gathered by either computer programs (known as bots or spiders in the technical world) or human editors.

The search engine doesn’t analyze entire web pages by scanning every word in a page against the keyword you specified. Instead, the search engine looks through notes, or a shorthand representation of that page. These notes (which summarize the page) are taken from such elements as

• The name of the website and particular web page
• Words used in the title (or head) of the web page
• Words used in the name of the web page (keyword.html for example)
• The first paragraph or two of the web page
• Words assigned by the web page to represent the title and description (by using the <META> tag, which we discuss in the section “Creating <META> tags,” later in this chapter)
• Internet web links present on the web page
• Words used by other web pages that offer a link to the web page

In fact, the first page of the search results lists web pages that contain your search term. We discuss how to insert your keywords into these various places on your web pages later in this chapter, in the section “Placing Keywords in Key Spots on Your Website.”

You’re not limited to a single keyword. You can have multiple keywords or even phrases of keywords. However, you have a better chance of promoting a handful of keywords or phrases than trying to be the website that offers everything to everyone. Think about the most important or valuable phrases that your customers will use when they search for the products you sell.

Getting Your Website Noticed by Search Engines

Whether people are waving their hands in front of a crowd or smiling for TV cameras, they like to be noticed. To succeed in business, you’re always told, “Stand out from the rest and be noticed.” As business owners struggle with the notion of getting noticed on a finite budget, creative measures come into play.

As we discuss in the preceding section, increasing your website’s visibility on search engines involves knowing the rules they use and ensuring that your site follows those rules. Search engines don’t solely base their rankings on keywords. If they did, a web page that mentions the same word a thousand times would be at the top of their rankings. Instead, search engines look primarily at incoming links and amount of content.

Incoming links, or references, are simply how many other websites offer a link to a given web page on your website. The more links that point to a particular page, the higher that page appears on the search engine rankings, especially on Google. The generic reasoning by the search engine algorithms is that, if other websites are pointing their visitors to a particular page, that page must have more relevant content than other, nonlinked pages. Think of an incoming link as some other website “vouching” for the usefulness of your website.

Having other websites link to your web page is the next step in search engine optimization (SEO). Greater weight is given to a web page whose referring links use the main keywords for that page in the text for that link. Suppose that you’re trying to promote a web page for Arctic Technology Solutions. You have the best URL you can get for the keywords in your company name, www.arctictechnologysolutions.com, and leading IT consultants link to your website. Now, tell these consultants to build the link this way:

<a href=http://www.arctictechnologysolutions.com> Talk to Arctic Technology Solutions! </a>

Notice that the clickable text that points to your website contains the same keywords as your URL. The search engines receive a double message that your website contains the text Arctic Technology Solutions because its computer programs read the keywords in both the HTML command and the clickable words.

Search engines look not just at the link itself but also at the website from where the incoming link is originating. Therefore, here are a few additional issues to keep in mind:

• The more reputable the website, the higher value the link brings you. Search engines typically assign a higher value to links from websites that are highly respected. Therefore, an incoming link from Google, Yahoo!, or one of the top 10 sites on the Internet helps your search engine rankings much more than a link from your friend’s toy review website. Aim for known websites, educational institutions, if possible, or even government agencies when applicable.
• Make sure that the referring website is relevant to your business. Getting reputable websites to link to you is important, but search engines also look for relevance. Does it make sense for them to link to you? Do your sites have something in common or something complementary? For example, having a technology review site link to your organic garden business may not be relevant, but having Better Homes and Gardens magazine link to your garden business is relevant.
• The age of the website name may be a factor. Search engines check for a website’s age by looking at the date the domain name was created in the main domain name database. For example, a website created in the late 1990s has obviously been in the database longer than a website whose domain name was first registered two weeks ago. Therefore, aim for incoming links from websites with some history. Check WHOIS (www.whois.com) to find the age of a website.
• The best links are incoming only, not reciprocal. When two websites link to each other in the hope of raising each other’s search engine ranking, the links are reciprocal. However, reciprocal links carry a lower ranking weight than incoming only links. If several websites create a looping chain of links, where Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site X, and Site X links back to Site A, Google will lower the weight of all those links. If a website links to you without a link back to it, that incoming link helps your ranking a lot more.

More and more, search engines are evaluating your search engine ranking by the amount of useful content, or how much quality information, you offer on your website. Websites with more content — articles, blog entries, calculators, reviews and guides, or plain text — are more useful to someone searching for information and are typically given higher search result rankings than sites with little content. That content, however, should be unique to your website, not just reprinted from other sites.

Some people have a goal of writing an article a day for their sites. In a year, you can turn 10 or 15 minutes of writing into 365 articles! Or you could hire someone to create content for you. Just make sure the content is readable and not simply packed with the keywords you think you need on your site. Search engines penalize sites that are overloaded with keywords, also known as keyword stuffing.

As mentioned before, search engines look for “fresh” or recently added content to your website, and one of the best ways to ensure a steady stream of new content is by linking your social media channels and blogs (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and others) to your website, so that information will count toward your website’s overall standing in search engine rankings. As an example, if you search for a specific person (instead of a product or service), many times the first page of search engine results will contain the person’s profile on social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Placing Keywords in Key Spots on Your Website

Content is important, but people also search the Internet with words, so understanding and using keywords is still an important part of preparing your website for search engine traffic, especially the placement of those words and information that makes it useful to search engines but also readable by human beings. You can use different methods to incorporate on your web pages the keywords that will be viewed as the most relevant and important words that represent your page and still preserve the “readability” and usefulness of the content. The keywords must appear in multiple locations so that the search engine bots know that those keywords represent the content of your page.

The most important factor is, as they say in real estate, location, location, location. Sure, you can write a web page about the hundred greatest uses for a ball-peen hammer and use the words ball-peen hammer repeatedly in the body of the web page. But you can find better locations than the body of the web page to attract the attention of search engine bots more reliably and consistently. Some locations are invisible to the web browser, and others are hiding in plain sight.

Keywords that are invisible

Web pages are built in HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. Commands aplenty identify the information contained in a web page. For keyword purposes, the most important tag to use in your web page is <META>. It defines the name, purpose, author, and date of a web page. Search engines read this tag to catalog web pages more efficiently.

Because of this command’s purpose, search engine bots are interested in knowing what information is assigned to <META> tags. They take that information with a grain of salt, however, because they know that the <META> tag info is being written by a biased source — the author of the page. Nevertheless, the <META> tag information is added to the formula for reading and interpreting web pages.

If you’re having someone design your web pages, be sure to ask specifically whether he’s defining <META> tags for every single web page on your site. These optional tags are commonly forgotten because they don’t affect the performance of the web page on the server.

The <META> tag is specific to only the individual web page where the tag resides. Therefore, the information in the <META> tag for your home page is (and should be) completely or significantly different from an interior web page that focuses on one product line.

Creating META tags

For each web page, insert at least two <META> tags into the HTML for the page. More options are available, such as defining the author of the page or the last revision date of the web page. Although you might want to define these fields for other reasons, they’re not as helpful for targeting search engines.

Include these <META> tags as part of the head of each web page, not the body section.

The syntax of a <META> tag works in two parts: You define which type of <META> tag you want to use by assigning a name to it, and then you assign the content for that <META> tag. For example, if you want to assign the keywords Arctic, Technology, and Solutions, your <META> tag would look like this:

<META name="keywords" content="Arctic, Technology, Solutions">

Unlike in other HTML commands, a closing tag isn’t necessary. This line of code is sufficient. You need a separate <META> tag, however, for each type of information you want to define. Figure 6-1 shows how to separate the definition from the keywords by using two <META> tags.

The two <META> tags you need to include are keywords and description. For added effect, some people repeat their keywords as part of their descriptions. The search engines, though, are reading the <META> description and looking for context. A laundry list of keywords in the <META> description tag, therefore, doesn’t improve your results. A creative integration can help your efforts, though.

If you’re selling gourmet artichoke sauces, your <META> tags might look like this:

<META name="keywords" content="Gourmet, Artichoke, Sauces">
<META name="description" content="Our gourmet chefs have picked the freshest artichokes to create gourmet artichoke sauces sure to liven up any artichoke recipe!">

Note the repeated use of the targeted keywords as part of the context of a readable, legible sentence. Although the <META> description tag doesn’t have a hard limit, using more than one or two sentences dilutes any meaning you hope to get from using the tag in the first place. Simply put, if you overload the description tag, you water down your results to the point that the search engines don’t know any more what’s particularly meaningful. Moreover, search engines can lower your search ranking result if they think that you are keyword stuffing, or putting too many instances of the keywords on your web page.

Adding ALT attributes

A valuable addition to the HTML image tag is the ALT attribute. This attribute is assigned to image files loaded onto a web page. The ALT attribute is a description of the graphical image that’s displayed on the web page if the web browser cannot load the image properly on the screen. Additionally, in web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Mozilla, a user can hover the cursor over the image to see the information assigned to the ALT attribute.

If you’re using the basic Firefox web browser, don’t expect to see any ALT text when you hover your cursor over the image. This program treats the ALT information as originally intended, and it’s displayed only if the image doesn’t load properly.

Because search engines cannot read text that’s part of a graphical image, they read the ALT attribute, if it’s defined, and give it some weight. Like the <META> tag, the optional ALT attribute is easily forgotten when a website is being designed. You should always take the opportunity to define your ALT attributes for your images; otherwise, you’re missing an opportunity to promote your keywords.

The ALT attribute is added to the <IMG> tag that includes an image on the web page. If you’re using a big logo image of your business that represents gourmet artichoke sauces, the command to insert the image looks like this:

<IMG SRC="logo.jpg" ALT="Gourmet Artichoke Sauces Logo">

Keywords that are visible

Although search engines rely on HTML commands such as the <META> tag to gain an understanding of the purpose of a web page, their computer programs are more interested in divining the “natural” meaning of a web page, by interpreting the text visible on the page and understanding what the page itself is trying to convey to users. Therefore, make sure that the keywords that best identify your web page are clearly used in some visible — but not obvious — locations:

• Page name: Every web page is simply a file containing HTML commands and text, and each file has to have a name. The last three or four letters of the filename after the period must be htm or html because of web standards. Everything in front of the period in the filename is up to you. If you set up a page to sell tennis equipment, for example, don’t use an abstract name, such as order.html. Instead, name this special page tennis.html or tennis-equipment.html.

  If you’re designing your website for optimal search engine recognition and one web page offers two or more categories of products, divide the product line and dedicate a single page for each one. This way, you can gear everything on each page toward the specific product the page represents.

• Page title: Every web page on your website should have a title, regardless of the purpose of the page. Search engines pick up this valuable space.

  The worst thing you can do is leave an empty title. The second-worst thing you can do is use a vague or meaningless title, such as “Welcome to my website!” or “Stuff for you.” Make sure that each title has the important keywords for that page.

• Page headings: Human eyes pick up headlines quicker than any other text on the page. Computer programs read headlines and assign a greater weight to them than to the text on the page. You can be more specific in the headings than in the title — just focus the headings on the page content, not on your overall site.
• First sentence: The first sentence on the page is typically a summary or an overview of what the page offers. Because some search engines don’t index an entire page of text, make sure that the first sentence draws a clear picture of your intentions for the page.
• Text inside links: Search engine bots are hungry for web links, so make sure that any clickable text contains the right keywords for that link. The bots assign weight to those keywords because they’re being referenced by the link.

In addition to adding keywords in these locations, you should still fine-tune your pages to mention your keywords throughout the text, as shown in Figure 6-2. Work these keywords into the flow of the text in a way that isn’t jarring to readers. Don’t just offer strings of keywords that don’t form complete sentences. Search engine bots pick up on context, so they flag as nonessential any out-of-place lists of keywords they find.

Don’t display any valuable keywords as graphics files on your web page. Search engine bots can scan only the text in the HTML file (or the ALT attribute for an image) — not the contents of a graphics file. If you have to use graphics, for a navigation menu or header, for example, complement that menu with a text menu at the bottom of the page. This way, you’re using the keywords as text and the keywords are clickable text, which improves your site’s ranking.

Arranging Your Pages Strategically

Your website is simply the collection of various web pages that make up your overall business. Therefore, you want every web page in your business to be well defined and serve a specific purpose. You don’t want to create web pages whose only goal is to attract search engines with keywords and defined tags. Instead, you want pages that make sense to users and search engine bots.

Keep the following rules in mind when you’re constructing the web pages in your business:

• One page, one focus. If one web page contains two or more product lines, consider breaking up that page so that each line has its own page. You can still have a category index page, which you can optimize with your overall business mission, and each product page can then be a launching pad for that subset of your business. The web page shown in Figure 6-3 concentrates on one product — a special edition variant comic book.
• Define your page. Make sure that all your definitions, tags, and keyword mentions are at the top of your HTML source code for your web page. Some search engines limit the number of characters per page they take, and you don’t want to lose out because you added a lot of comments or JavaScript code first.
• Think about keyword density. Focus each web page to target a select group of keywords and phrases. This technique increases the weight of each of these phrases more than when you try to use every keyword in every page (a practice known as keyword density). When the same words are used repeatedly, search engines see this density of words and assign greater weight to the few words that are used than does an average website that tries to be popular for every popular keyword.
• Put away the bells and whistles. If your web page excessively uses elements such as graphics, animation, and video or audio files on the same page as valuable product information, separate the extra features into their own section of the website or create two versions — one with just text and basic graphics and one with all the extras. The search engine bots give up on loading a page if it takes too long, and so will your customers.

Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

Don’t wait for other people to reference your website. The most straightforward way to make search engines notice your site is for you to tell them directly. Years ago, in the search engine submission process, website owners could file reports containing information about their sites and the URLs and content used on their sites. Although most of this information gathering is now done by the search engines’ automatic programs, called spiders (because they crawl around the Internet looking for information), some search engines still allow you to submit your site.

Signing up with Google

Google sends its own programs, known as Googlebots, around the Web looking for new sites to add to its index. There’s no reason, however, that you should wait around and hope that a Googlebot will magically land on your website, especially when you’re just starting out. Google maintains a simple, one-page web form that you can fill out to identify your site for its software programs to analyze.

You can identify yourself to Google by following these steps:

1. Go to www.google.com/addurl.

   Google asks you to log in and redirects you to the Search Console page shown in Figure 6-4.

2. In the URL text box, enter the full address of your website’s home page.

   Don’t forget to add the http://. You don’t need to include the home page name unless it’s not index.html, index.htm, or default.html.

3. Click the check box “I’m not a robot” within the reCAPTCHA big box.

   Google adds a special “human detector” on this form to distinguish between humans filling out the form and special software programs that do it automatically. Software programs can’t analyze this box because all they see is the generic name for the graphical image. Only human eyes can interpret the check box that is shown.

4. Click the Submit Request button.

   Google gets all the information you provided. Eventually, it may send a Googlebot to your website’s home page to follow the links, read every page it can find, and store the results.

Signing up with Yahoo!

The roots of Yahoo! are in its category search, not just a general search. Every category has an index page that contains lists of websites that belong to that category. Each index page also points to subcategories, each of which has its own index page. Even though the Microsoft Bing network has some deals with this website, Yahoo! has maintained the category approach to organization and also accepts submissions for its general search.

The submission process is still in human hands. Editors scan these submissions and decide what to include and where to include it. The human involvement in the inclusion process is one aspect that sets Yahoo! Bing apart from other search engines.

To sign up with the Yahoo! Bing network, follow these steps:

1. Go to http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.

   You see the page shown in Figure 6-5.

2. Click the Submit Your Site for Free link.

   Bing and Yahoo! don’t guarantee that they will look at your site or include it in their search engine. When you click the link, you will be taken to the Bing Webmaster Tools page. If you don’t have an account, create one and then you can proceed.

3. Enter the URL of the website you’re submitting.

   Regardless of the type of content you’re submitting, follow the steps presented and enter in the appropriate box the URL of the website you want to submit. After you enter the URL and click Submit, the address is sent to Bing and Yahoo! for inclusion in the next Yahoo! robot search of the Internet. (Although Bing owns the Yahoo! search engine, it has kept the Yahoo! directory distinct from the Bing directory.)

Don’t forget about Yahoo! Local, especially if your business has a retail or local outlet that sells products. If you want to use this paid service, go to http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local-listings and select your area to begin. Inclusion in the local index ensures a higher visibility by potential customers who live in your specific area.

Watching Your Rankings

Although website pages might last forever in a search engine’s database, the website’s importance or relevancy doesn’t carry over. As website owners try to figure out ways to improve their positions in search engine results, search engines update their systems and algorithms to reduce the effect of specific popular tricks.

One such practice is keyword spamming. Website owners hide paragraphs of targeted keywords by matching the color of the keyword’s text with the color of the web page background. For example, the owner of a website using a white background might put in a block of keywords using white text. These keywords are invisible to customers browsing the website because the white text doesn’t show up on a white background. The spiders that download the information from the web page can see the keywords, however, and they assign weight to those keywords regardless of whether they’re relevant. Search engines now compare the colors being used and eliminate those keywords, even if the colors being used are slight variations of each other.

As a business owner, you need to stay informed of the changes the search engines make to their programs, and then update your website accordingly to take advantage of whatever the new rules enforce. The last thing you want is to optimize your website based on one set of rules and then have your website ignored because the rules changed and you didn’t update your site.

A variety of websites provide news, updates, columns, and information about major and secondary search engines. If you want to stay up to date with search engine techniques, follow some of these sites:

• Search Engine Watch: This site, shown in Figure 6-6, calls itself the “Source for Search Engine Marketing,” and many users agree. The company uses a variety of mechanisms — such as news articles, blogs, discussion boards, and a marketplace for vendors of search engine optimization (SEO) products — to spread the word about search engine marketing. It offers a wide variety of free content and a reserved Members section (which has premium articles written by experts), an extensive archive of information, and a private newsletter. It even sponsors the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo, in different cities around the world, to promote the same concepts as the site. Visit www.searchenginewatch.com.
• Seochat: If you’re looking for a particular discussion area that covers either a general search engine (such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN) or a discussion about a particular topic (such as link building), Seochat (www.seochat.com) is the place for you. It has a number of discussion boards — including a section dedicated to e-commerce development — that provide help and discussion for online-store professionals or the graphic design or database work that your website requires.
• Search Engine Journal: What better way to find out what search engine optimization professionals are thinking than to keep up with their journal? Search Engine Journal provides in-depth guides by subject, reports breaking news, and has expert guest contributors review and comment on the newest and most popular events in the SEO space. They even provide perspectives targeted to entrepreneurs, ad agency professionals, content marketing professionals, and more. Visit their site or subscribe to their newsletter at www.searchenginejournal.com.

Moving Up in the Rankings

The key isn’t always to be in the top spot. Considering the enormous amount of new information that becomes indexed every day — not to mention the continual updating of search engine algorithms — you can waste a lot of time trying to stay on top by retaining the top search engine result for your important keywords.

You should have two goals for your ranking in the search engine results:

• A position that’s high enough on the list before a potential customer sees your competitors.
• A position among the first page or two. (Keep in mind that a person using a smartphone to conduct a search will have fewer results per page, making a high placement even more important.)

Most people who are presented with multiple pages of search engine results typically skim the first page and try a few links. A few of them then go to the second page and try more links. After the second or even third page of results, however, if the destination sites aren’t close to what the user is looking for, that person typically enters a new string of keywords, sees a different set of results, and tries again.

You can earn a prominent spot by using keywords in the right spots or partnering with a business to link to your website. If you’re interested in staying ahead of your competition, though, read these next few sections. We show you how to find your rankings and then how to keep an eye on your competition.

Knowing where you stand

You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you are. Your first job is to understand what the search engines know about your website. Search engines provide a growing number of tools that can open a window into their databases and show you what they know about you.

Internet company Moz offers the Open Site Explorer tool, which shows you all the information it can find about a specific website. Some information this tool provides is free, but you can get more information by subscribing to Moz’s services, such as its Moz Pro program. Follow these steps to use Open Site Explorer:

1. Go to http://opensiteexplorer.org.

   The opening page for Open Site Explorer appears.

2. In the text box, enter the URL of the website you want to analyze, and then click the Search button.

   You don’t need to enter the http:// part of the URL.

   After you enter the domain and click the button, the results screen is displayed.

3. View all the inbound links for that website, displayed in their natural search order.

   The default section for the Open Site Explorer results lists all inbound website links that redirect people to the domain you specified. After we entered www.dummies.com in Step 2, we saw a page similar to the one shown in Figure 6-7. (The website adds the http:// part when the screen is displayed.) The results include the first 50 links of the 66,519 links from 879 root domains (or unique websites) that link to Dummies.com. You can click the title and URL of the linking page to see the page where the link exists.

4. Click the Top Pages menu item from the top-left list of options to see which pages on your site are the highest-ranked pages for your specified domain.

   The Top Pages view shows you which web pages in the specified domain have the highest ranking, based on a combination of factors, including inbound links, the amount of linking domains, and content on that page.