Are your links ready for primetime? Let's look at some places that can snag up your site in a search engine and how you can fix or avoid them. Got a great domain name, right? Pages up and running, now its time to optimize.
Step by step:
1. Decide on your linking method. Will you always use just the domain name, or include the www. It shouldn't make a difference, right? It does. Yes, you can shoot me, those of you I've told that it made no difference. It makes no difference to anyone who types it into a url in a browser: http://coachizer.com takes you to the same place as http://www.coachizer.com. But it does make a difference to a search engine? If half your links are without the www and the others don't have it, you may end up with two different pageranks and a different location in a search results window. So pick one, and be consistent. Too late? Get your web person to check out permanent (301) redirecting.
2. Pick a set of keywords from your list, a small set. Better yet, pick one. Pull out the matching copy that goes with that word. Build a page with a spicy paragraph opener that has that keyword in it a few times.
3. Complete the rest of the copy in the page, make sure to scatter your keyword throughout the content. The standard recommended ratio is 2%-8%. What that means is that 2% to 8% of your words should be keywords.
4. Make a catchy title, be sure the keyword is in it.
5. Include a meta description tag with the keyword in it. A nice description could be the first paragraph you already created.
6. Include a meta keywords tag, the keyword should be first in the listing and any other keywords you've included in the copy. Repeat the keyword in key phrases but not together and no more then 3 times.
7. Put the title of the page in a heading
,
right above the first paragraph.
8. If you include any graphics make sure they have alt tags, and they have the keyword in them.
9. Include at least one call to action. Common ones: Learn More about keyword, Buy keyword now, Subscribe to ezine about keyword, Sign up to learn about keyword. One at the top, one in the middle of the copy and one at the end. Don't just use graphics, use text links as well. Search engines like text links. If you decide to use a graphic for a call to action, give it an alt tag with the call to action text.
10. Give the physical filename a real name, not some obscure number. If you're writing about green tea, radical-green-tea-baskets.html is better then page1.html. Take the title of the document and put dashes or underscores where the spaces are, that's your filename.
11. Anywhere you reference that page, use the same link text. As in the example above, Learn more about Radical Green Tea links to radical-green-tea.html. Stay away from Click here and here.
12. If you have dynamically generated content that uses ? or % or & in the url, get your tech person to give you an alternate way to reach the same files. Its called URL rewriting. I have it on Coachizer, look at this article and you'll see the URL is a filename, not a dynamically generated URL.
13. Track everything. Take a look at your statistics everytime you add content, be systematic about your methods. Search engine spiders take a long time to get you on the list of sites to be crawled. Find out when they show up in your logs. For instance, Google shows up as googlebot. Take a look at how often they stop by and optimize your site accordingly.
14. Don't submit in bulk. You'll have no way of tracking who did what or what method worked best for you. Make a submission, record it in a log. Track your hits to see what it brings you. Once you see a result, or the lack of one, move on to the next engine.
Above all, have fun doing this or hand it off to someone who does. Its absolute drugery or a complete blast, depending on your perspective.
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