Entries from February 2010 ↓

The basic principle:

1. Keywords you choose should reflect the page you have used them on.
2. These keywords should be used as much as possible in the following locations:
   • URL – yes, a domain that contains your top keyword is going to score you points with Google for that keyword;
   • Page title;
   • Meta tags in your document head:
     • <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2″ />
     • <meta name=”description” content=”(page description)” />
   • Throughout normal page text, including headings, paragraphs, and alt tags on photos.

If you have a chance to buy a url with your main keyword in it (without making the url ungodly long), do it. I have a url containing a keyword that loads of people use in long lists. But I bought the url and I’m on top.

So a lot of you are probably thinking, “That seems like a lot of trouble. I don’t really want to pin myself down like that. I’ll put a long list that I found someplace in the keywords instead.”

Nope. The fewer keywords, the better. Your page isn’t about hundreds of different topics. It’s about one or two, which can each be described in a few keywords. The Google spider will look at your keywords and see how many times they were used in a natural manner on a page. If not at all, they won’t count at all.

If you’ve really got 100 specialties, your main page should have keywords that are generally about that. Then you should dedicate a page to each specialty to give it a good chance at getting rated well. Subcategory pages are good, too. Just make sure you have clear navigation for both the spider and your customers.

Still seems like a lot of trouble? Perhaps you should narrow down what you’re all about. You really can’t be everything to everybody.

The principles behind SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are as follows:

1. You get essentially free traffic from being highly placed in a Google search;
2. There are things you can do to improve your position on a search page.

I will probably post something about what you can do in the future. What I’m talking about today is making the kind of SEO mistakes that can get you in trouble with Google. In fact, if Google looks at your page and thinks you tried to pull a fast one, you can get banned by Google, and you won’t come up in a search at all for maybe 6 months until it expires – if it does.

Doing something to fake out Google has a name: it’s called Black Hat SEO. Shady companies do it to take the chance that they will shoot up to the top and not get caught. Or more frequently, companies that hire shady SEO consultants. The company trying to improve its placement is the one that gets caught, not the shady consultant. The shady consultant just drops the sandboxed company’s name from his list of clients and goes on to work for more unwitting clients.

Here’s one big issue: keywords. You pick your keywords, which are the words or phrases you are hoping that google will pick you up in a search on, and you put them into the header in a meta tag:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword #1, keyword #2″ />

Google will look at the keywords you have chosen, then look at your entire page (as well as the site) to determine whether your keywords represent your content. If the only time you use a keyword is in the meta tag, the spider that is indexing your page will decide it really isn’t very important to your site at all. The more keywords you use, the less important each one will look. So if you have an enormous list of keywords, hardly any of which appear in the page content, Google will think at best that only the ones that are repeated on the page count. At worst, you may be tagged as a cheater and your domain sandboxed.

Other ways to cheat badly: using the same keyword over and over again in the meta tag.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex” />

Cheating!

Another way to get yourself sandboxed is to put a huge list of words and phrases in tiny or invisible font the same color as the page background. They can tell you are doing that. Really. You’re out of there. I see this all over Niteflirt, and half the time the keywords include at least one tos violation. So you are taking the risk of hurting Niteflirt on Google while getting yourself suspended. Not smart. Read up on SEO. There are tons of tutorials out there.

So you’ve got a website. What’s it doing for you? How do you know?

There are 2 different kinds of optimization I’m going to write about here and in upcoming articles.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO), making your site friendly to search engines, so they will present it to searchers;
2. User optimization, or making your site as easy for your user to find what he’s looking for as possible.

There’s a ton of stuff out there to read about search engine optimization. Getting your site seen on Page 1 of search engines is better than advertising in a lot of ways. While companies do pay good money for specialists to perform this service for them, it is possible for someone with a small site to learn to do it themselves. If you do it yourself, that is free advertising.

There is less information out there about user optimization. The deal is, if you pay for advertising or put a lot of work into getting searchers to visit your site, do you know what to do to maximize the chances of them finding what they were looking for?

So right now I want to talk a bit about making your site user-friendly.

The most important rule in designing a website is that your users should be able to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. They should be able to see immediately what the purpose of the page they have landed on is, and they should be able to see where they can go from there without scrolling around or clicking. Then, when they click the link that looks like it is going to take them where they want to go, they should end up exactly where they expected to be.

If surfers don’t see what they are looking for within a few seconds, they will click away and find some other site to look at.

Example: If you have a phone sex site, you may have a warning page the surfer will have to click past before getting to your main page. Is there any content on it that gives the surfer a reason to keep going, or is there a scroll box with legalistic mumbo-jumbo? Look at it critically. Does your main page have XXX rated photos on it? No? Then get rid of that warning page. Make the photos on the entry page R-rated and provide enough information on it so that anyone landing on it will know what they have found, so they can either leave or continue.

Making the user click past a pointless entry page is causing your site to lose customers before they even find your content.

Now, open your main page. Close your eyes. Now open them again. What is the most noticeable element on your main page? Is it clear without reading anything that it is probably a phone sex website they have landed on and are about to enter?

Is there anything that has been added to the page that distracts from that idea? Is there a big block of dense text talking about…something? Move it to its own page.

Presumably you have links to other pages. There might be a “gallery” page, “about me”, “blog”, “news”, “links”. How easy is it for the visitor to find the links to navigate to those other pages? Is there an obvious navigation bar, or are there some links or buttons here or there?

Once there, how easy is it for the visitor to get back or visit another page?

Is anything cluttered? There are sitebuilders out there that make it easy for users to randomly jam odds and ends into their pages. Resist the temptation. Don’t do it.

Where do you have a “call to action”, telling the visitor what to do, ie, “call me!”? On every page?

You need to think about all these things, because your visitor does not intend to spend any time thinking at all. Think about it.

If you need to clean up your website, get to it!