How to Improve Search Engine Rankings
How to Improve Search Engine Rankings
Copyright 2002 Herman Drost
You finally got your web site listed in the major search
engines, however it is buried amongst millions of others and you
still have not seen an increase in traffic to your web site. Why
not? You need to improve your search engine rankings.
Here are the steps to increase your search engine rankings:
1. Check your listings
If you are going to see an increase in traffic to your web site,
you need to be listed in the top 20-30 sites.
Go to http://www.marketleap.com to see if you are listed
in the top 30 sites on the major search engines. If you are not
listed in them, you should at least submit your site to the
major search engines.
(read "How to get listed in the major search engines").
If you are already in the top 10, then keep monitoring your
site's rankings to maintain your position. If you are not in the
top 30, continue with the next step.
2. Select the right keywords and phrases
Go to www.wordtracker.com or the overture suggestion tool
to find the most popular words and phrases that suit the theme
of your web site.
Weave these words and phrases into your meta tags (title,
description and keyword tags), web copy (particularly the first
200 words of your web page) and links (i.e. if your site is
called camping.com and you have a page for camping tools, name
the link www.camping.com/campingtools.htm, instead of
www.camping.com/generic.htm).
Optimize each web page with different keywords. Visitors can
then enter your site from different pages, depending on what
keyword they entered in the search engines.
3. Exchange reciprocal links
Search for other sites that compliment your own site and ask for
a link back to your site. Ideally the site should have the same
keyword phrase as yours and already have a high search engine
ranking. These are quality links.
Having many sites linked to yours, will increase the popularity
of your site in the search engines, resulting in a higher
How to Get Your Site Listed in the Major Search Engines
How to Use Meta Tags for Search Engine Optimization
How to Use Keywords to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines
4. Write articles
Choose your best keywords and weave them into
the theme of your articles. Include a link to your web site in
the resource box at the end of your articles. Submit your
articles to ezine publishers and article announcement lists.
This gives your article the potential to be read by thousands of
ezine subscribers. Your article will become linked to many web
sites, resulting in higher rankings.
5. Participate in forums
Find a forum that is related to the theme of your web site.
People visit these forums to look for content that answers
their questions. Once you have provided helpful information,
you can leave a link to your site in your signature file.
If this is a highly trafficked forum, leaving your link there,
will increase your site's popularity.
6. Monitor your rankings
The best way to check how your site is doing in the search
engines is to check your web site statistics.
A high quality web hosting service will show you which
pages receive the most traffic (hits and visits) and where
it is coming from (which search engines).
7. Exercise patience
Search engines typically take one to three months to spider
your web site, so your changes will not be seen immediately.
Think of the steps outlined above, as a long-term marketing
strategy for your web site.
Tip
Generating a massive amount of traffic to your web site,
doesn't guarantee sales. Here is a short list of factors that
will also help convert your visitors into sales:
Professional site design
Well-written web copy
Fast loading times
Simple navigation
No broken links
Optimizing for different screen resolutions
Optimizing for the main browsers
As you can see, improving search engine rankings that result in
sales means the continuous monitoring and refinement of your web
site. Since 85% of your sites traffic (this is very targeted
traffic) comes from the search engines, it is well worth the
investment.
How to Increase Link Popularity and Improve
How to Increase Link Popularity and Improve
Search Engine Ranking
© 2003 Herman Drost
If you want to improve search engine ranking of your web site,
you need to find a large number of high quality links from other
web sites. These are called inbound links. Gaining links from
high ranking sites that point to yours will increase your link
popularity in the search engines.
The most popular search engine Google, places great significance
on the link popularity of your web site. In fact, you can even
get listed in Google without submitting your site to them, by
getting other sites to link to yours. Finding many high ranking
sites that link to yours, will improve the search engine ranking
of your own web site.
Four effective ways to increase link popularity
1. Get your site listed in the search engine directories - first
submit your site to the human edited directories of ODP (Open
Directory Project - dmoz.org) and Yahoo (yahoo.com). Getting
listed in these directories will give your site a boost in link
popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search
engines.
However, this may take some time.
You can get listed much faster by getting links from niche
specific directories. Find these directories by doing a search
on the major search engines with the primary keywords of your
web site.
2. Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to
your site if you have what they want (i.e. articles, software,
etc). This will save you a lot of time searching for quality
links yourself.
Optimizing your content with well placed keywords, will improve
your search engine ranking dramatically. Search engines love
focused content.
Don't you love it when you immediately find what you are
searching for?
One way of achieving this is by writing and publishing articles.
You can include a link at the end of your article. When your
article gets published, you will automatically have gained a
link to your site.
3. Requesting links from other sites - request links from sites
that ideally have a high search engine ranking. Start by
including a link from your site to theirs. Include a paragraph
describing what your link is about. This helps achieve a greater
number of clickthroughs to your site.
Request that they do the same when linking to your web site. If
you provide this for them (with some of your primary keywords
included of course), and provide quality information, you will
have a greater chance of gaining a high quality link.
4. Write a testimonial - write a favorable review of someone's
product or web site. Include the benefits you received through
visiting their site. If that person wishes to use your testimony
on their site, make sure they include a link back to your web
site.
These are some of the best strategies you should implement to
increase link popularity of your web site. It will improve
search engine ranking and also boost your web site traffic.
How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic
How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic
Copyright 2002 Herman Drost
Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like
being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don't
know which direction they are coming from or who they are.
Without analyzing your web site traffic, it's difficult to
improve your web site marketing.
Know Your Traffic Language
You should be aware of the different terms used to describe
web site traffic, so as not to be confused about your web site
visitors. Here are the main terms used:
Visit – these are all requests made by a specific user to the
site during a set period of time. The visit is ended if a set
period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further
accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or
hostnames/ip addresses
Hit – this is a request to the server for a file not a page.
Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic
files, audio files or css and javascript files, resulting in a
number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a
hit.
Counting hits is not the same as tracking pageviews. It takes
multiple hits to view a page.
Pageview/Impression – this is the number of times a page is
accessed as a whole.
Unique View - A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour
period.
Referrer - A page that links to your site. By looking at your
referrers will tell you who's linked to your site. This can be
particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine
User Agent - This refers to the software used to access your
site. Sometimes known as a "browser" or "client", the term user
agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet
Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can
identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll
be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when the search
engines last crawled your pages.
Ways to Track Your Visitors
1. Counters – these are heavily used on web sites by newbies but
appear unprofessional. It is very common to go to a page and see
something like "You are visitor number 12345 to this page".
These numbers cannot be trusted as the page designer has the
ability to seed the base number or to alter the counter such
that it adds more than 1 each time.
2. Trackers – tracking software details the path a visitor takes
through your Website, so they do more than just count your
traffic: they track it. Tracking software tells you more than
just the number of visitors -- it can break visitor statistics
down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and
countless other values.
Examples:
Sitemeter
Extreme-DM
Counters and Trackers often require you to place a button or
graphic on your site in exchange for the free use of their service,
which is not ideal for most site owners. So try to avoid using
these services unless you don't have the ability or expertise to
execute tracking scripts of any kind on your own server.
3. Using Your ISP's Statistical Package
Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) keeps log files which record
every single "hit" (request for a Web page or graphic) on your Web site.
Analyzing log data can give you a good idea of where your site
visitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how
long they stay, and which browsers they are using. Before
signing on with a hosting company, make sure they offer access
to raw log files. Even if you don't need them immediately,
sooner or later you'll be glad to have them.
There are also different types of log files - access, referrer,
error, and agent are the primary ones.
Here is a sample of a raw access log file entry:
Access log
Analyzing the access log will give you information
about who visited your site, which pages they visited, and how
long they stayed on the site. This is useful information in
determining whether or not your site is working as you intend.
The record below shows the visitor's IP number or hostname, date
and time of the request, the command received from the client,
the status code returned, the size of the document transferred,
and the browser and operating system the visitor was using.
nas-112-52.slc.navinet.net - - [29/Jan/2000:17:17:12 -0500] "GET
page.html HTTP/1.1" 200 23443
"http://www.mydomain.com/page.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;
MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)"
Referrer Log
The referrer log contains referral information - the source that
referred the visitor to your site. If the referrer was a search engine,
you will also find the keywords that were entered to find your
site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record
below shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.com
to the index page of the site.
http://www.somedomain.com/page.html -> /
This record shows that the visitor came to my site from a search
engine link. Notice the keyword data is included in the record.
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=design+tips -> /
Agent Log
This log provides information on which browser and operating
system was used to access your site.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)
Error Log
The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated
by the server and sent back to the client. The record below shows
the type of server, date and time of the error, client identification,
explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to the
file that caused the error.
apache: [Sun Jan 30 10:09:57 2000][error] [client 195.238.2.162]
File does not exist:/u/web/mydomain/favicon.ico
As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about
how your visitors are using your site. Now we will talk about how
you get the relevant data extracted from the log files and compiled
into a useable format.
4. Web Traffic Analysis Software
These are programs that analyze your server logs and then create
traffic reports accordingly. The quality of the reports generated will
depend on what software you actually use. Some log analyzers are
free and come preinstalled on many hosting accounts, while others
can cost a good deal of money.
Examples:
Webalizer
WebTrends
Webalizer (free)
The Webalizer is a fast, FREE, web server log file analysis
program which produces usage statistics in HTML format
for viewing with a standard web browser. The results are
presented in both columnar and graphical format, which
facilitates interpretation. Yearly, monthly, daily and hourly
usage statistics are presented, along with the ability to
display usage by site, URL, referrer, user agent (browser),
search string, entry/exit page, username and country.
Here's an example of the Web Usage Statistics:
http://www.webalizer.com/sample/index.html
WebTrends ($495)
The Web Trends Analyzer produces essential reports on
web site visitor patterns, referring sites, visitor paths and
demographics. You can learn, for example, which sites
and keyword searches have referred the largest number of
visitors to your site.
It presents data, detailed and in-depth, in an organized and
concise tabular format with full-color graphs.
This Log Analyzer is priced at $495 and is licensed for a single
web server hosting content with a maximum of 50 domains.
Conclusion
Web traffic statistics provide very valuable information about your
web site. You can make better marketing decisions through them
telling you:
Which Web pages are most popular and which are least used.
Who is visiting your Web site.
Which Web browsers to optimize your Web pages for.
Which Web search engines are most useful to you, and which are the least useful.
Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages.
Web traffic analysis allows you to determine what marketing
strategies are successful, then to change them accordingly, to
boost your web traffic and sales.
