From my experience, I feel each page on a site can and should be optimized for a specific and different target key-phrase, in order to cover a wide range of related key words and phrases. A big mistake that people tend to make is that they concentrate on only optimizing their home page, and also try to cover ever conceivable keyword combination. Unfortunately the website usually then has a problem ranking well for any of the keywords, and doesn’t get much search engine traffic.

If you do a search on Google for a single word and you will see the amount of pages that are listed in the results run into the millions sometimes, because it is usually too broad a search term. Most people tend to use two or three word searches at least, so that they get good, specific results that are useful to them. You should think about this when optimizing your website, what phrase would you like your site to be listed number one for? Get into the head of your customers, what would they search for?

The best thing to do is to decide on the main and ultimate key-phrase that you want to target, then find all the sub-key-phrases that are related to that key-phrase. Now, build your pages with the home page targeting your main key-phrase, and the sub pages targeting the sub-key-phrases, making the content for each page as relevant as possible. Each page should be individually optimized to target a specific key phrase.

The content and information of your pages needs to be good to rank well on Google, especially so if you are targeting highly competitive key-phrases. If you want to out rank your competitors, your pages need to be more relevant than theirs for the same key phrase. Search for your target key phrase on Google, look at the sites of the first 10 results. How do they differ content wise from your site? Is there information on them that should also be on yours?

I am a firm believer that the biggest thing to be concerned about when getting ranked well on Google, Yahoo, or MSN, is RELEVANCE. How relevant is the key-phrase you are targeting to the content on your page? All the big search engines want to deliver the best possible results for each search term, so surely he more relevant your content is, the higher your site will rank, and if your site is the most relevant, you will be number one. I believe it is just that simple.

Things like link popularity and page rank, etc, do help a lot, but can never really beat relevance completely. Take a very extreme example, try and do a search for something stupid like ‘flying pigs’, and look at the results. What you will see is that your site is NOT number one, why, because it is probably not relevant to the search term. Now ask yourself, why are the home pages of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace or the Stumbleupon for example not number one in the same results page? If you think about it, those sites have thousands of inbound links, AND have high page ranks, yet they did not display in position one of the results?! How can this be? You know exactly why, you have always known, its because they are not relevant to the search term, and all the major search engines surely must focus on bringing the best and most relevant pages into the results for your search term, period.

As a website owner, you need to target a specific key phrase for each of your pages, and make that page the most relevant page for that key phrase. Now it has to be said that relevance to a search term is in itself relative, I mean if your site consists of a single paragraph containing your target key phrase, then it might be extremely relevant to the content. This approach though doesn’t sit too well with the big search engines, who are not ’stupid’, and will prefer a site with more relevant information to rank higher, so don’t even try and trick or fool them into giving you a better ranking. Your site needs to have a bit of substance to go with the relevance in order to perform well in the long run. If you are going to do something, why not try and be the best at it? Try to have the best and most relative information, and you will find getting to page one of Google, Yahoo and MSN a breeze.

When I say the ‘fittest’ sites appear at the top of the search engine rankings, I mean the ones that are normally working the hardest at it. How do you excercise your website you might ask, well, here are some things you could do to increase its fitness:

• Edit / add content on your website regularly – search engines as well as real people will visit more regularly if the content is fresh.
• Refine your coding, make it clean, fast loading, and web standards compliant – nobody likes a slow clunky website
• Keep your site design and coding up-to-date with the website trends and ideas – again, keep it fresh
• Target specific key words and phrases with each new page, and tweak it on pages that are not ranking too well
• Run a newsletter that can be sent out to a subscriber base, publish it on your website as a new page too, combine it with an RSS feed if you can.
• Market the website on social networks, forums, blogs, newsgroups etc – flat out tell people about the site
• Run competitions, polls etc on your site, get the visitors involved and interacting with the site
• Build the brand, associate your website with speed, service, prices, value, whatever you can, so visitors return to your site and tell their friends about it.

It is way easier to get and keep an ‘active’ website in a good ranking position on search engines because like people, fitter is better. Just as in the human body, if you neglect your website, it will suffer, slow down, and generally fade into a sad soggy, floppy mess that nobody finds attractive! The top sites normally have been designed in a way that is appealing to the visitor as well as search engines. These days your design needs to be done twice, once on the visual side of the site, the part that the visitor sees, and again in the coding of the site. Both of these need to be maintained, toned, and updated, so that they dont become boring, obsolete, and uninteresting.

Just like there are those horrible people who never have to excercise, and still look great, there are horrible websites that seem to do well on search engines even though they just dont deserve to be there. It all comes down to conversion of visitor to customer, sometimes a site may rank well, but not convert anywhere near as many visitors to customers as a competitor website that ranks further down on search engine results. This is why your site must focus on the visitor and their experience on your website, just as much as the search engines, and their perception of your website.

The bottom line is that you will find it much easier to rank high in search engines if your site is well toned and excersised regularly. Like with most excercise, quick fixes are short lived and not worth it in the long run. Often you will end up in a worse position than when you started, and in the case of your website, may have to outlay large amounts to get your website and its reputation ‘fixed’.

It makes far more sense to set a goal and steadily work toward it, continuously making improvements with the end result in mind. In the long run, your site will rank better, and you will find it easier and easier to outrank competitor websites.

Those of you who suddenly feel the urge to tone your bodies and get fitter, visit hot body training for some tips

Most of our clients are SMME, we deal directly with the owners of the company, and get to know them on a personal level. Unfortunately, every time I talk to clients about website maketing, they all ask about getting listed on so called ‘thousands’ of search engines. It seems that almost all of them have at some point in time received some spam email promising their site on thousands of search engines within 24 hours or a similar type offer. Worse still are the ones who have been ‘educated’ by friends and / or family, who think they know what they are talking about. Most of these guys have all been brainwashed by people and companies wanting to make a quick buck.

The reality is that people do use search engines to find things on the web, that much is true. What they DON’T do, is use all these thousands of search engines as much as people would have you believe. The fact is that almost all good search engine traffic woldwide comes from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the most popular search engines on the web. These engines being the most popular engines, leads you to believe that the others are NOT all that popular, and therefore dont get as much traffic, let alone traffic that uses their services. Of the web traffic these engines do get, you have to ask yourself, what is the percentage of their visitors that will be trying to find YOUR website or services / products? Why would a visitor to these other engines websites use them to search and NOT use Google, Yahoo, or MSN?

Dont get me wrong, there are some other engines that do have satisfied and loyal customers, and most of the time they keep their place in the market by being language, region, theme or subject specific, in order to hold onto their loyal users, but not many.

Some of these engines supliment some or all of their search results, by re-branding the results from the big 3 under their own name. Many times you will find that you can get identical results when searching for something in Google, and other search engine X. One such website that gets results from multiple locations, and has a great following of loyal users, is the site www.Dogpile.com, which lists the top results of each of the engines in its results.

So definately the big 3, Google, Yahoo and MSN are the most important engines to be listed. The next place your website MUST be listed in, is the DMOZ directory. Thousands of other websites get directory results from DMOZ, the most important web directory on the web. Get your website listed in those four locations, and the chances are that your site will be ‘findable’ in most of these thousands of other search engines already anyway.

If you get listed in all these thousands of small independant engines, your link is not listed for any given length of time on a specific page, and is only able to be found via a search. So the only traffic you will receive from that engine, is as with any engine, from visitors using the search facililty. So you once again need to ask yourself, what sort of visitor traffic is the engine getting? Of that traffic, how many people will be looking for my site/products/services? I am not saying it wont hurt to submit your site there, but would you get a good return on investment (ROI) from paying some company to list your site in all of these ‘thousands of engines’, when the big 3 are clearly dominating in traffic and searches? Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am concerned, the short answer, is a huge NO!

So what happens if you dont care, and are willing to spend the money with one of these companies to get listed on ‘thousands of engines’?

Are you sitting pretty, making so much money through your website that you dont know what to do with all of it? Well, not necissarily! You might have just paid to be listed on tons of these ‘engines’, but that doesnt mean you are going to get any more traffic than you are already getting. Just because your site is indexed, does NOT mean you will be listed on the first page of results on that engine. There are NO guarantees to where your site will be placed in the regular search results on any given search engine, by any web marketing company on the web.

The fact is that your website still needs to be optimized for search phrases that you would like to be ranked high for, before you see the results of being indexed in any search engine, and that goes for the big 3 too. With each real search engine having its own unique formula that it uses to judge where your site should be listed in search results for a key word or phrase, its going to be hard to optimize a website to be number one for all of the big 3 engines at the same time.

So you have ask yourself again, why pay to have your site submitted to thousands of search engines, with no guarantee of placement, and no guarantee of traffic? I don’t get it, maybe I am missing something?

till next time – F