Some Search Engine Tips
Posted On: 2006-12-27
Yesterday I talked about the importance of developing a traffic flow from the search engines. Even in the dry times when people don't have money to spend, or during the seasonal downturns that affect our income, search engine traffic continues to produce sales. That's why any adult Webmaster who really wants to make money in this industry needs to be working hard to get that search engine traffic happening.
But if you're new to the industry ... or even if you've not bothered with search engine traffic before ... you may be wondering where you should go to gather the information you need to get started. Obviously some of the search engine boards out there are going to look like great places to start but you really do need to beware.
Something a very experienced Webmaster once told me needs to be repeated here. He took great delight in telling newbies that the truth about search engines is out there but we wouldn't find it on those search engine boards that looked so inviting. Instead you need to go out in search of some of the individuals who write regularly about search engine optimization.
Those are the guys who really do know what they're talking about and you can trust what they say. They're the ones who are prepared to experiment and test everything before they open their mouths and let the wind blow their tongues around.
There are perhaps five or six of these guys that I read regularly and if you're serious about developing your search engine traffic then three that I would suggest you start with are Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin and Michael Martinez. A search on Google will quickly turn up the sites where you will find these guys sharing their search engine thoughts and experience. When you find them be sure to bookmark the sites and keep going back to them.
While you're looking for these guys on Google here are a couple of random things that have popped into my head that you need to think about.
Optimizing Internal Links
Optimizing your sites and pages for search engines is more than just making sure that the text on your page has a few keywords in it. It's all about carefully crafting every part of your page from the title right down to the words used in the internal links.
For example, if your building an average free site that consists of four pages what words are you using to link to your two gallery pages? Do you use the same words that everyone else does or do you use some text that includes a keyword or keyword phrase that you're targeting?
Every Webmaster and his dog use the good old standard Gallery One and Gallery Two for these links. But you should change those words to something that includes your keyword or keyword phrases in the anchor text - those words that you use for links within your site and to other sites too - because Google will use the anchor text it finds in a link to assess the importance of the target page for the keyword or phrase that you're targeting on that page.
Google would see no relevance in a link that used the anchor text of Gallery One to link to a mature gallery for example. But if you were targeting 'hot mature women' on the gallery page - and used that term in your anchor text ' then that's going to show Google that the gallery page could be relevant for that term.
Oh no! I've been banned!
As you wander through the world of search engine optimization you will often come across posts on boards bewailing the fact that someone's site has been banned from Google. Yesterday their site was one page one but when they got up this morning their site had disappeared. Instantly they think they've been banned and they immediately go into panic mode.
They don't stop to consider that listings on Google are relatively fluid. Sure there was a time when Google only updated every couple of months and a site would hold it's position for that time without any changes. Sadly those days are gone and Google updates happen so frequently that one day you can be on top and the next you're site has disappeared ... but that doesn't mean your site has been banned.
No matter how good you might be at optimizing your pages for Google, Yahoo or any of the other search engines there is always going to be someone better and their pages are going to rank above you sooner or later. You will also find that search engines are constantly updating their algorithms and what looked good to the algorithm yesterday may not look so good today.
So if your page disappears from the search engine results pages overnight don't panic and don't presume you have been banned. Instead, be prepared to do some research to find out why someone else has taken your coveted top spot and then work to get your sites back to the top once more.
And if you're really sure that you have been banned and that's the only possible explanation then, before you run to the boards crying for help, type you URL into the search engine search box. If that fails to produce a listing for your site then you really have been banned and instead of running to the boards take a deep breath and start reviewing what you have done to the banned site in the last week or so.
Reviewing what you have done to your site is the best way of finding out why you may have been banned ... unless of course you already know why you've been banned.
So there are a few things to think about and a few hints on further reading you need to do as you set about conquering the search engine world.