6 basic steps for your website rank

It seems to me that the most frequent question about online marketing is always the most complicated to asnwer it.

- How to guarantee top placement in any search engines (google, yahoo, ask, etc)?

Everybody wants to be included in the relevant results. But how to do it?

There’s no simple answer because this is a long term program and not just some gimmicks and tricks that can be placed to ranking you better.

All search Engine technologies are constantly evolving, rendering only month-old tricks to deceive their methods useless.

The best way to keep your website at a proper place of search results is keeping it refreshed and relevant (I wish all managers could understand how clear and efficient it is).

The Search Engines are nothing more than tools that gathers, stores and analyses information and it shows the way they understand is relevant for determined query.

Example:
If you google for “Marketing“, google understands that wikipedia (nr.1 result) is more relevant in information than marketing.org (nr.2 result).

Even that relevance is still the best tool there are numerous other tools indispensable to turn your website sexy for SE (search engine). Those tools are basically the way you set the html up.

Let’s break it in 6 basics, starting with the keywords:

Remember it’s all about tags. It’s all about what you want to the Search Engines to link to you.

Example: you can be page 1 for the tag “Marketing in New York“, but you’ll be page 3 for “Marketing in USA“.

Define in advance what’s your business, and after done it you can start your online plan.

Research your competitors, direct and indirect competitors. Ask yourself what can make the diffecnce from your website and their. Build a databse with all the keyword they’ve been using and think how to use it better.

To visualize the keywords at the websites just proceed as:

- Open the website

- Click on View -> Source

Let’s start it:

1. Choosing the Keywords

• A research by Entireweb has shown that 31% of the people enter 2 word phrases into search engines, 25% of all users look for 3 word combinations and only about 19% of them try their luck with only a single word
• DO NOT choose a keyword to optimize your site for that you don’t have the slightest chance of ranking good because of the fierce competition
• DO NOT choose a keyword that nobody looks for
• DO NOT choose a keyword that does not relate strongly enough to your content
• Only use generally popular keywords if you do not need targeted traffic
• DO NOT use keyword that may get your site filtered or banned from SE
• DO NOT use images with filenames or ALT Tags (Alt attributes of IMG tag) that may get your site filtered or banned from search engines.
• Only use dynamic pages when the functionality demands it (you always can build a second version - static)
• Use relevant content, well laid out in to separate pages
• Why do not optimize one page for one keyword?
• DO NOT, please!, post half-finished sites
• Don’t get tempted to lead Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc on mistake. Remember they are people specialized , they are programmers, mathematicians, engineers, talented professional with more experience than the average. They will know and you’ll be penalized if you try do make them fools.

2. HTML Content - Here is where you define the website soul, it’s where you give the information about who you are and what do you do. Here it is where all the SEs look to categorize your website.

2.1.: The “TITLE” tag

• The title should not be any longer than 70-100 characters, including spaces
• The title should not begin with the domains name. It is often considered spam.
• The domain name shouldn’t be repeated in the title. Is is often considered spam
• Do not use the same filename as the title tag, or the same filename as the domain name, is is also considered spam.

2.2.: The “META Description” tag

• Shouldn’t be any longer than 2530 words, not longer than 100 characters

2.3.: The “META Keywords” tag

• Shouldn’t be any longer than 378 characters (searchenginewatch.com referring to Google)
• Don’t use words that are not presented in the body of the page.
• Redundant characters will not hurt overall results, however words after the first 300 characters rarely do any good.
• Start all keywords with Capital letters (relevant only on alphabetical listings)
• Separate keywords with the format Keyword, Keyword (comma and space).
• Don’t use any word, even within phrases more than 3 times, it can be considered spam.

Tomorrow I’ll write about content , HTML Code, Search Basics and Don’ts.

Cheers

Lucio Dias Ribeiro