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How to Improve Your Site's Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization can raise your website's profile, delivering more

traffic, more customers, and bigger revenues. Here's how to make the most of

this essential marketing tool.

Trying to improve your website's search engine ranking can seem a bit like the

quest for romance. Like people looking for love, websites looking for a high

search ranking can find it many different ways and with varying degrees of

success. As with romance, you don't need to spend a lot of money; your

intrinsic appeal matters more than the size of your investment. And, as with

love, you can't achieve a high search engine ranking once and then never worry

about it again. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing effort, and the

more you work at it, the better it will be.

There are many things that any small business even one with no budget for SEO

can do to improve its search rankings. Here's a look at some of the most

effective ways to raise your profile in search.

SEO Tips: Finding "Link Love"

The most effective and long-lasting way to improve your ranking in a search

engine is to increase the number of "inbound" links to your site from other

websites. Inbound links represent an endorsement of your site. If these other

site owners find your site useful, the logic goes, then Internet searchers are

likely to find your site useful too.

Building a search engine based on inbound links (instead of simply reviewing

keywords in hidden "meta tags" or website text) is what propelled Google from a

late entrant to the search field to its current position as undisputed leader.

Google currently has more than 65 percent of searches, and shows little sign of

relinquishing this dominance, despite Microsoft and Yahoo's combined effort to

unseat it.

This link-based approach (called "link analysis") proved so effective that

other major search engines followed Google's example. "Link analysis is at the

core of almost all major search engines," says Aaron Wall, author of SEO

Book.com, a search engine optimization education service that, incidentally, is

the first website result in a Google search of "SEO."

Dig Deeper: How Google's Universal Search Format Impacts SEO

SEO Tips: Five Ways to Get Linked

1. Give stuff away. Does your company offer free samples of its product? Do you

have any handy applications or an ebook you can let site visitors download for

free? There are few more effective ways to get people to link to your site than

to offer something for nothing.

2. Share useful information. Links are commonly used to share information, so

putting useful information on your site, such as articles or how-to guides will

help draw links.

3. Connect with your community. This can be either your geographic community or

a community based on your industry. Sponsoring an event at a local charity,

interviewing an industry expert and posting the interview on your site or

writing articles and blog entries for others to post can all bring inbound

links.

4. Reach out to the blogosphere. Bloggers are always looking for new ideas, new

websites to link to, and new products to write about, and they can be a great

source of link love.

5. Use good old-fashioned PR. Getting mentioned in the press is good for your

company in many different ways, and one of them is that online publications may

include links to your site or your information if your company is mentioned in

an article.

WARNING: Whatever you do, don't join a "link farm" a website consisting only of

links whose only goal is to raise rankings. Search companies are liable to

punish sites listed in link farms by lowering their rankings instead.

Dig Deeper: Using "Link Bait" To Increase Site Traffic

SEO Tips: Finding Search Terms

Words are the cornerstone of an effective SEO strategy, so one of your first

tasks is to determine exactly what word or phrase searches bring customers to

your site. If your business sells umbrellas and galoshes, do you get the most

benefit from searches of "umbrella" or "rain gear?"

1. Think phrase, not word. Search "batik shower curtains" in Google (at press

time) and the top result is the site for Saffron Marigold, an online retailer

of fair trade, hand-printed linens from India. Searches on various products

account for some 60 percent of the company's business, according to Sandip

Sarwate, co-founder. "It would be extremely difficult for us to rank with the

search terms 'shower curtains," he says. "The key instead is to have 'long

tail' terms that are very specific to you."

2. Think buyers, not just browsers. "You should focus on conversions, not just

traffic to the site," Sarwate says. He uses Google Analytics reports to break

down keywords and phrases by revenue, so he can concentrate on optimizing for

words that lead directly to revenues.

3. Look for suggestions. Several online tools, such as the Google Keyword Tool,

can help you come up with terms your customers are searching that you may not

have thought of. Starting from "rain gear," the tool comes up with hundreds of

suggestions, including "nylon rain gear," "golf rain gear," and "breathable

rain gear." A quick way to get just a few ideas is to start filling in a search

text box and see what your search engine suggests. Typing "rain" into Google

elicited the suggestion "rain boots," for instance.

3. Don't forget to ask. Asking customers how they found you and what made them

choose you over your competitors should give you come clues to what your most

effective search terms will be.

WARNING: Don't get so obsessed with keywords that your page becomes a mass of

search terms with just a few other words stringing them together. Your main

objective is to appeal to human visitors, so you should limit yourself to a few

very effective keywords per page. Remember that each page has a different

focus, and each should be optimized accordingly: Optimize for "raincoat" on the

raincoats page, "rain boots and galoshes" on the footwear page, etc. Needless

to say, trickery such as white-on-white text to fool search engines is a bad

idea. It will only serve to get your page downgraded.

Dig Deeper: 9 Places to Put Your Keywords to Increase Density

SEO Tips: Using Search Terms

Once you've done your research, you should wind up with a manageable number of

search terms that dependably generate revenue. Use these terms in the titles

and headings of your pages. (Titles show up on browser tabs, but don't appear

on the page itself, as headings do.) You may be able to gain benefit by varying

them. For instance, in our rainwear example above, the title of the page could

be "Rain gear and waterproof apparel," while the heading on the page itself

might read "Umbrellas, galoshes, rain coats and wet weather clothing."

You may have heard a lot about meta tags and search engines. Meta tags are

invisible text incorporated into web pages to describe what the page contains

and list relevant keywords. Meta tags are read by "spiders," software

applications that search the Web and rank pages for search. Before Google and

link analysis, meta tags were an important SEO tool, and unfortunately one that

was subject to manipulation. Today, meta tags have lost their luster. You

should still use them, but don't expect them to help your search ranking.

Dig Deeper: How to Optimize Targeted Search

SEO Tips: Making the Most of Search Technology

With a good keyword and link strategy in place, you can use some features of

search engine technology to help your search rankings.

1. Refresh content often. Search engine spiders return most often to websites

that are most frequently updated. This is one reason blogging is a popular

activity among small business sites. "Creating a blog is the one thing that

definitely changed our search engine presence," says David Lewis, president of

OperationsInc, a human resources outsourcing company. The OperationsInc blog is

updated daily Monday through Friday, he says, and contains information from a

newsletter the company also sends to about 1,500 subscribers.

2. Consider a content management system. Created to support blogging, content

management systems are versatile website platforms that can allow you and your

staff to add content to your site easily, encouraging the frequent updates that

can boost rankings. OperationsInc's website is currently being transferred into

Drupal, an open-source content management system.

"Drupal and WordPress are the two most popular content management systems, with

Drupal having both a steeper learning curve and more features," Wall says.

Either way, he adds, content management systems make it easy to post material

and easy for users to comment on posts, all of which can be good for search

ranking.

3. Eliminate underused pages. If pages on your site are out of date or

generating little interest, remove them, Wall advises. This will help your

search ranking, since the number of links or "link equity" you have can be

diluted by a large number of pages. "If a page isn't generating any real

traffic and no one is linking to it, the content probably isn't useful and you

should get rid of it," he says. Not only will this help your ranking, it will

also help keep your site relevant and fresh.

Dig Deeper: Your 10-Step Guide to Blogging, Twitter and WordPress

SEO Resources

To learn more about SEO:

Aaron Wall's site SEO Book.com (seobook.com) offers a vast array of articles,

tutorials, and tools such as a free tool to determine your site's search engine

ranks.

Google's Webmaster Central SEO, part of (google.com/support/webmasters)

offers a lot of information from Google on how to improve search ranking,

including a video tutorial, PDF starter guide and discussion forums. Keep in

mind, though, that no search company will share too many secrets about how to

manipulate its rankings.

For finding your best keywords:

Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) is a very popular keyword finding tool that

costs $59 per month but comes with a free trial.

A free alternative is Keyword Tracker (digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords)

And Google also offers its own (google.com/sktool)

Google provides the Google Keyword Tool to suggest search words

(adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)