Who Wants Free Search Engine Traffic?
(I know, that's a stupid question :))
Watch This Video And I'll Explain:
...Babbling and Hugging My Wife...
One of the most exciting days of my Internet marketing career was when CactusCanyon.com received it’s first order…and I had no idea how the buyer even found the site! That is until I went to Google and typed in the product’s keyword I had optimized for!
My wife must have thought I’d lost my mind as I was hugging her and babbling on and on about Google rankings, SEO and getting rich!
You see, I had been studying search engine optimization; I wanted that all-important free advertising the engines had to offer. I created about 10 pages for our new site using the best SEO techniques I knew at the time. Fortunately, the niche was small enough and about 2 weeks later there we were…right smack dab on Google’s page 1 for that keyword! ....and we had just earned our first sale to boot!
Now I don’t care who you are or what you have achieved in life; THAT experience is an exciting moment in anyone’s book!
It was then and there I knew I was on the right track. If I could do it once with that keyword, I could do it over and over with others!
I was right and the rest is history. The search engines soon became our very best friends!
Once you can create search engine friendly sites, the entire rest of the process becomes all but a piece of cake. From a business and marketing standpoint, nothing beats the free and targeted traffic search engines have to offer!
Learn to make sites the search engines love and THE SKY IS YOUR LIMIT!
Generally I get contacted by site owners after their site is finished and already published to the web. The owner seeks out my advice after the site has been live for a while and still has no sales and/or traffic. I have put together a list of the most common problems I see when evaluating sites.
One of the most common mistakes I see is duplicate title tags. (The title tag is what appears at the top of the browser when the page is displayed and is what the search engines display for the first line of the site link in their results.) In other words most, if not all of the site’s pages have the same title tag. Usually it is the name of the business. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on title tags. When multiple pages have the same title tag, the search engines discount those pages’ importance.
It is extremely important to title the page with the keyword phrase the page is optimized for. It is best if the keyword only is listed in the title. If that is not possible, at least the keyword should be first. For example: “Small Dog Collars” or “Small Dog Collars – MySite.com”
Although meta tags are given little importance now days by the larger search engines, it is possible to misuse them and actually hurt the site. The biggest mistake I see with meta tags is for the meta description to be the same for every page.Pages with duplicate meta descriptions will suffer greatly in the rankings. The same goes for the meta keywords tag. The keyword tag must contain ONLY those keywords found on that page. Also, it is important not to put the same word in the meta tag descriptions more than 3 times. Don’t make a list of meta keywords like this: large collars, red collars, small collars, leather collars, nylon collars. Search engines could see this as stuffing keywords. Search engines consider this spamming. It is much better to omit meta tags altogether than to misuse them. I do suggest you use a meta description tag. Many engines will use this tag as the description they use in their listing of your site in the results.
Internal linking is very important. For SEO purposes, links should always be made with content of each page besides just in the navigation system. Many designers create images for their linking. This is very counter productive for optimization purposes since the anchor text place a large part in the importance the search engines place on the link. Along these lines, the navigation system should never be in any form of java script, Flash, or image map. A plain link with anchor text “leather dog collars” which points to a page optimized for “leather dog collars” is the best method of linking for SEO purposes.
However, do not end up stuffing keywords by having too many links on the same page with the same word or words. For example, don’t have half of a page’s links like this: large collars, leather collars, small collars, etc. Instead, have “collars” for the heading of the group and then have the links “large”, “leather”, “small”, etc. below. This is not perfectly optimized, but it is better to be cautious than to risk being seen as stuffing keywords by the search engines.
It is important that every page on your site has links to it from the other pages of your site (not counting the navigation system).
Links to other sites are often a problem too. The days of linking to your friend’s hobby site are over. Spamming has become such a problem that the search engines have really changed their algorithms with respect to linking. A dog site simply cannot have links to a totally unrelated site such as a pottery site. I am not saying one single link to a non-related page will get your site bad rankings, but just be aware this can be a problem. Keep links to other sites limited to sites with a similar theme as yours.
To make it a little easier to tell your friend you can’t link to his site, inform your friend that a link from your dog site to their pottery site will do their pottery sight no good whatsoever. Although incoming links are extremely important to a site, the incoming links MUST come from sites with a similar theme in order to have any value. It is great for your dog page to get a link from dog training, dog breeding, dog nutrition, and dog house sites. A link on a computer website to your dog site won’t benefit your site at all.
Many new site owners may also fall prey to scams which promise “thousands” of incoming links for $29.99. There is a good chance these scammers will use what are called link farms. The search engines consider link farms to be spam. Always remember, there is no free lunch!
Another scam which new site owners often waste money on is paying money for submissions to “hundreds” of search engines. There is simply no purpose in submitting to even dozens of search engines. When I create a new site, I simply submit the site to the group of directories I have listed on my site. Within weeks, sometimes days, my new site will be indexed by the top search engines. I never even bother submitting directly to any search engines…not even Google or Yahoo. It doesn’t hurt to submit to them, but it works just as well to get links with the directories and by posting some articles with your site’s link to article directories.
Additionally, offers of “Guaranteed Inclusion” in search engines are complete scams. Anyone can get a site included in all the top search engines. But getting listed on their first or second pages is going to cost you more than $29.99. It is going to require work!
There are two ways to get great listings in the search engines. One way is to learn basic SEO skills, do the work yourself, keep learning about SEO, and keep tweaking your site as it works its way higher and higher in the search engines. The other way is to spend enough money to hire a professional Search Engine Marketer. For a small site, be prepared to spend $500 dollars or more.
There really is no in between. Do the work yourself or pay a professional. Any money spend in between will generally be wasted.
Lastly, one of the biggest mistakes I see occurs when people pay someone else to design their site. The majority of site designers simply don’t understand SEO. The designer may have created an awesome looking site, but the fancy scripts and Flash they used will keep the site on page 100 of the search engine results! Before you start the site, or pay someone else to start it, make sure SEO is considered before the first line of code is written.
Black Hat Techniques Will Get Your Site Banned!
It is amazing to me how many ebay auctions there are for Internet marketing schemes which could get the buyer's site BANNED from Google. Techniques or software which are designed to "fool or trick" Google is called Black Hat SEO (search engine optimization). Google can and will ban your site if you practice anything they consider Black Hat. You NEED Google for your online business success!
As I write this, there is an auction on eBay for cloaking software. This software is designed to trick the search engines into ranking the site higher than normal. Never mind exactly how it works, just do not do it! In Google's guidelines for webmasters they specifically say that cloaking is not allowed. Yet the seller of the software on eBay advertises it as the best thing since sliced bread!
Another auction on eBay offers to get your site thousands of incoming links. Those kinds of links will not help, and they could harm your site. They are using what is called "link farming". And Google can penalize sites significantly for this practice.
The moral of this story is that a new site owner has to be VERY careful not to accidentally do something which Google forbids. Educate yourself about search engine marketing or spend your time and money marketing in some other ways.
Here is a short list of things Google will penalize or ban sites for:
* No hidden text! You must not use the same (or close) color for text as you do for the background. Do not try to hide ANYTHING from Google.
* No keyword stuffing! Write your content and page titles normally. If your keyword is "dog collars" do not title your page "red dog collars, large dog collars, small dog collars, leather dog collars." This is called keyword stuffing. For your content, do not have a keyword term show up more than 7 to 10% of the time. I rarely go over 5 or 6%.
* Make your alt tags relevant to the image. Do not just stuff keywords in them.
* NO CLOAKING! Cloaking scripts show the search engines one thing and show humans something else. GOOGLE WILL BAN YOU FOR THIS...no questions asked!
* Link Farms are bad. VERY BAD! Never participate in anything which promises you hundreds of incoming links to your site. By the way, some scammers will offer you "10,000 hits for $19.99". These are produced by scripts. They may not get your site banned but they are worthless traffic. You will not get one sale from them...ever.
* Educate yourself and be honest in your Internet Marketing, and you will have no problems.
