Give the search engine spiders a map

Create a site map for your site. Setup a page and take some time and link to each and every page on your website, including a short description for each page.

This may take some time to initially setup, but if you add this to your list of to do items whenever you add a new page to your site, it won’t be so bad.

Link to this page from your home page and from each of the pages on your website. Most spider based search engines (like Google) really love to find pages through other links.

A site map makes their job easier, and it ensures that each page of your site will eventually get indexed.

Fill it with keywords

Make sure to include keywords describing each page listed on your site map. This will also help in the ranking for the pages your site map points to.

The keywords you use here will help set the initial theme for the spiders as the reach that page. If you’ve done your job well and followed the advice in the previous article properly, you’ll make it so much easier for the search engines to index your pages the way you want them to be indexed.

They’re good for people too

The main purpose for your site map will be to make it easier for search engine spiders to find all the pages on your site.

But they can also be useful navigation tools for your visitors. Keep this in mind when creating your site map and you’ll be adding more value for your visitors.

Having good navigation for your website is essential for getting your visitors to stay longer and browse around on your site.

If they get confused and can’t find their way around, they’ll head straight for the nearest exit.

The search engines love content!

Another important strategy in creating a site the search engines will love is adding new content on a regular basis.

The more keyword rich pages you have on your site, the more for the search engines to feed on.

As I mentioned earlier, each page on your website is one more way that surfers can find your site. Basically you want to have as many different ways to get into your site as possible.

Get busy and write some articles

As mentioned in the previous article “Prepare The Pages”, the best way to add new, fresh content to your website is to write articles.

When you write an article, use the steps in the previous article, “Choose Your Keywords Wisely” to prepare the page, and then submit that page to the search engines.

Each time you do this you are adding more content, and more ways for searchers to find your website.

If you do this on a frequent basis, you’ll have plenty of content on your site in no time at all.

If you feel that you just can’t write articles, then consider using other author’s articles and put them on your site.

Make sure you include the information that the author requests, then optimize the page using the steps in the previous article, and post them on your site.

Do this for 10 - 15 articles and you’ve just added some great search engine bait to your site!

Publish a newsletter

Another great way to add content to your site is through publishing a newsletter.

Not only do you get to reuse the articles you write for your newsletter, but you can also create a Newsletter Archives section of your website.

For example, let’s say you write 2 articles for each issue of your newsletter.

After you send out your newsletter you put that issue in the Archives section of your website, then separate the 2 articles out into their own pages and put them in the Articles section of your site.

You’ve now added 3 additional pages to your website by simply reusing your newsletter content.

Don’t forget to submit each of these pages to the search engines after you have them on your website.

For even more exposure, you will then take each article and submit it to the various article submission services and article directories.

After you have a dozen or so articles, put them into an ebook and give it away to your visitors, and let them give it away to their visitors.

This will get you some viral exposure and get even more mileage out of your time.

I won’t go into the power of viral exposure for your website, but basically this means that you are able to get others to spread the word about your site.

They tell 10 people, then those 10 people tell another 10, etc. If done properly, this can snowball and create a ton of free exposure for your website.

Multiply your efforts

Try to use methods that enable you to multiply your efforts. I’ve given you some great examples of this in the last section on using your articles and working on viral strategies.

You can also take audio products such as interviews and seminar recordings and have them transcribed. Add the finished product to your website, use it in your newsletter, create an email course or ebook, etc.

A very powerful example of multiplying your efforts in website promotion is creating an affiliate program. Affiliate programs can very quickly build large numbers of quality links to your site, in addition to the tremendous traffic sent in by your affiliates.

This requires you to have your own product, but the massive rewards offered by affiliate programs should give you the incentive required to create your own product.

Make it easy for your website visitors and partners to tell others about your site and your products and let them lend a hand in promoting your site.

There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many hours that you’ll be able to dedicate to promoting your site. Finding ways to multiply your efforts makes it so you don’t have to be glued to your computer so often.

Slowly but surely, links are where the traffic is!

Link popularity and link relevancy, have become the most important factors in determining whether you show up on page 1 or page 1,000 of the search results.

Requesting links is tedious, boring, and too closely resembles work! But you have to do it… if you want to get any traffic from the search engines, that is.

Stay away from the shortcuts on this one because they’ll cause you more harm than good. Spend the time finding sites that have a lot of links pointing to them and that get a great deal of traffic.

Each time you convince a decent site to link to your website, you stand to gain more visitors to your site, as well as a nice boost in the ranking of your site on the search engines.

As more and more sites link to you, you’ll see your search engine traffic start to increase because they will view your site as being more important.

Think about it: What if every site that links to you sends you 10 visitors per day. Find just 10 of those and you’ve picked up another 100 visitors per day…FREE!

Burn a little midnight oil and get that number up to 100 sites, and you now have 1,000 visitors a day sifting through your site!

Keep in mind that some links won’t bring you any traffic at all, and others will send one here, and one there. But these add up over time, so don’t dismiss a site because you don’t think you’ll get thousands of visitors from it.

Another reason I stress finding your own link partners rather than using some of the “5,000 links a day” programs is that the latest search engine trends are to rank the sites that link to you.

It’s not the quantity, but the quality that counts!

This means that 10 sites that have 100 sites linking to each of them is better than 100 sites with only 10 sites linking to them.

Basically, the search engines give a higher weighting to sites that link to you that are also popular themselves. There are many more factors in determining the popularity of a site, but you can typically use this as a good rule of thumb when searching out partners.

This makes sense because if an important site likes your site enough to link to it, then the search engines will like it too.

This is called Link Relevance, or Link Importance. Where Link Popularity merely counts the number of incoming links to your website, Link Relevance attempts to actually rank each of those sites that are linking to you.

By the way, the best tool I’ve seen out there for finding important sites to request links from (those that have many incoming links to them), is called Internet Success Spider by Neil Shearing.

You can either choose to enter in the URL of a popular site, or enter in search keywords that your target audience would search for. When the Spider is finished crunching, it will give you a list of sites, sorted by number of incoming links, that you can then contact and request a link from.

This can save you many, many hours of wasted time requesting links from lesser important sites, and allows you to focus on only the ones that will increase your website’s link relevance. You’ll also stand a good chance of getting a quite a bit of traffic through from these sites.

Internet Success Spider can save you a ton of time and allow you to build partnerships that can be worth many, many thousands of dollars.

I’ve used it to find a number of great affiliates for my affiliate program. In fact, one wonderful lady I discovered using the Spider software jumped onto my top 10 affiliates list in less than a week after I contacted her!

Use it to find out what sites are linking to your competitors, or that link to high ranking sites, and then contact them to see if they will link to yours as well.

Create some mini sites

An inexpensive and not-too-time-consuming option is to create several mini sites, and link them to your main site.

Mini sites are great at getting top rankings on the search engines because they are typically very focused on a particular topic, which the search engines like.

If you spend some time learning the steps to creating successful mini sites, you can get a quite a bit of traffic from them, while also increasing the link popularity of your main site.

The best resource by far on this subject is Phil Wiley’s “Mini Site Profits” ebook. If you understand the profit potential of mini sites, you’ll make sure you have Phil’s ebook in your library!

Setup a few of these sites and you can quickly start to see a large increase in traffic to your website, as well as more sales from the targeted visitors. (The extra sales should easily cover the small expense of Phil’s ebook)

A little creativity goes a long way

There are many different strategies that you can use to get more links to your website. In fact, i can recommend one of the ebooks named Website Traffic System with the topic “131 Link Building Strategies”.

I highly recommend that you put some effort into this because nothing else you do will give you as much long term rewards for your time.

One thing that I learned (another one of those “Why didn’t I do this earlier!”) is that for some sites it works better if you create a graphic of some sort for others to link to you with. I had always offered up a text link to people that added their affiliate program to my directory.

I rarely received links this way! I know that you would think people wouldn’t want a graphic on their site, but I found that when I created a few graphics and then told them they could use the graphic to link to me, the number of sites linking to me increased very quickly!

This may not work for your type of site, but I give this as an example to show you that you need to keep an open mind and be willing to try different methods.

I can’t stress enough the importance of getting lots of links!

Every page on your website needs

Every single page on your website must be optimized for the search engines. This means every page needs:

1) Page Title
2) Meta Tags
3) Keywords in Header tags
4) ALT tags on all images
5) Keyword-filled content
6) Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible
7) Keywords in links to other pages
8) Keywords in outbound links

Page Title

Most search engines will use this as part of the information that is displayed when your site shows up in search results.

It is also important in the determination of what a particular page is about. For this reason you should make sure to put keywords in your page title, and preferably at the beginning of the title.

For example, for my AffiliateMatch.com website, my page title is:

Affiliate Programs Directory - AffiliateMatch.com

This helps my site to rank well for searches on “affiliate” or “affiliate programs” or “affiliate programs directory.”

Make sure you put in your most important keywords that you found in the previous article, and try to position them at the beginning.

It is not always possible to put them at the beginning and still be readable, but will definitely help if you are able to do this.

Meta Tags

These things become less and less important as time goes by.

At this point I don’t believe very many search engines even look at Meta Tags anymore, but since they are easy enough to setup, and because some engines do use them, it can’t hurt.

For the search engines that no longer use them, they just ignore them, so it won’t hurt you to have them on your pages.

You can find a Meta Tag Generator easily on the Internet. Just do a search in Google or Yahoo for that keyword. Simply enter your keywords and description and it will create them for you. Just copy and paste that into your page and you are set.

Keywords in Header tags

This means creating a heading for each page that contains the keywords you are targeting on that specific page. For example, if you want to target “search engines”, create a heading with the following code:

<h1>Search Engines</h1>

To your visitors, this would look like:

Search Engines

If that is too large for your particular page, you can also go with <h2> and <h3> tags instead.

To the search engines, this would be considered an important keyword phrase for that page.

The search engine would then compare that to the rest of the text found on the page and use all of this to determine the most important keywords for that particular page.

Make sure you do this on every page of your website!

ALT tags on all images

Another tip is to make sure every image on each page of your website has the ALT attribute. You want to put keywords in these. Don’t overdo this, but use them as an additional place to plug in a few keywords.

The way this looks is:

<img src=”/images/someimage.gif” alt=”search engines”>

In this example, I’d be adding a little more weighting for the phrase: “search engines”.

The actual purpose for this tag is to display text for those that surf with images turned off, or when you move your mouse over an image this text is what will popup.

Somebody along the line figured out you could stuff keywords in there because some search engines use the information in the alt tags for keyword relevancy calculations as well.

Keyword-filled content

You really can’t get away from this one. The more content-filled pages your website has, the better.

The fact is that they like lots of relevant, keyword-filled content. The more they can find, the happier they (and you) will be.

The best way that I have found to do this is with articles.

Articles can be reused in so many different ways, and they add excellent search engine bait for your website.

In later articles I’ll give you some great ideas for using articles as an important part of your traffic-building strategy.

Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible

This is my favorite, and I only wish I would have figured it out sooner! What this entails is very simply making sure you have the keywords you are targeting with a particular page as high up in the code for that page as possible.

To see this, open your web page with Notepad and look through all the gibberish … Title, Meta Tags, all that junk and look for the very first words that would be visible to someone reading your page.

The absolute first words need to be keywords!

As an example, take a look at my AffiliateMatch website by clicking here. Once that window opens up, go to the View Menu in your browser, and then Source. This is the actual code that makes up this page, and is also what the search engines see.

After you wade through all the gobbledygook, you’ll get to the text that visitors will actually see. In this graphic I’ve highlighted the first two words:

Even though there is a ton of junk above that, the search engines know that these are the first ‘visible’ words on this page.

The very first words for this page are affiliate programs. That’s the phrase I’m targeting.

Go to Google.com and type in affiliate programs and see what site is number one, and you’ll see how well this works.

When I first discovered this I actually redesigned this particular website to make sure I put those words at the top like that.

Before this I had a menu on the left that actually was higher up in the code of the page.

The problem was that I had text in there too, like: “Signup for my newsletter!” and things like that. This greatly affected my rankings.

After redesigning my site to allow me to put keywords higher up in the code, I quickly started seeing it rise in the rankings.

If your present design doesn’t allow for this, you might want to give some thought to either having only graphics in the menu, or redesigning it.

The idea for having more graphics is that these will be overlooked by the search engines as they search for the first ‘visible’ text on the page.

Keywords in links to other pages

Make sure when you have links to other pages on your site, or to other websites, that you use your keywords in the link.

For example, if you are targeting “search engines” on a particular page, create a link to a page on your site, and in the link call it: search engine listings.

The page the link points to can simply be a list of the most popular search engines.

Here is the same screen shot of the source code from my AffiliateMatch website so you can see an example of this, but this time I’ve highlighted it so you can see that the first two words that I showed you above are also part of a link:

Search engines will use the text from your links as another determining factor as to what your page is about, and also what the page you are linking to is about.

In this example you’ll notice that I’ve also bolded these words to give even more emphasis to them and make them look more important to the search engines.

I highly recommend that you combine the methods mentioned on this page whenever possible. For example, the first words on your page could be included in a header tag and be a link pointing to another page on your site.

Combining them in this manner can greatly increase your chances of getting great rankings.

Keywords in outbound links

This is the same as the last one, except this refers to using keywords in the links to other sites.

Again, if you are talking about search engines on a page, and link to someone else’s site for an article on search engine positioning, put “search engine positioning” in the actual link so it looks like:

search engine positioning

The alternative that many people use, but that doesn’t help their search engine ranking any, is to just show the website address like:

www.joeshomepages.com/~redy4u/search.htm

This doesn’t help either of you very much … at least not as far as search engines are concerned.

Whenever you are putting together a page to add to your website, fire up this page and incorporate as many of these steps as possible.

How do I know which keywords to target?

The most important task you will have is determining which keywords you should target on any given page of your website.

I say “any given page of your website” because you should optimize each page individually. Each page on your site needs to be able to stand on its own as far as ranking for keywords on that particular page.

This enables you to bring in visitors on many different keywords and keyword phrases instead of just the few that your home page will be optimized for.

I don’t recommend simply copying and pasting each page and then modifying the content. You should take the time and start each page from scratch.

This enables you to better optimize each page for the keywords you are hoping to target. You want to try and take full advantage of the potential traffic you can get by having many ‘doorways’ into your site.

The more doors you have, the more traffic you can get. View each page as a new ‘doorway’ into your site through which Web surfers can enter.

Although your first instinct will be to go with more popular terms such as music, marketing, or cars, you should narrow the scope quite a bit.

Some reasons for not optimizing your pages for these types of keywords are:

1) They are too broad - If your website is about Rap music, would you want to attract thousands of Country music or Gospel music fans? Even if you are tempted to answer ‘yes’ to that question, you should say ‘no’. These visitors won’t be interested in your music, and will quickly leave in search of a site that fits their interests.

2) Too much competition - You will have a much more difficult time getting a high ranking on the search engines when you use these more general and more popular terms because you will have literally millions of websites all trying to get the same spot you are.

3) Too much time and effort involved - If you decide to try and compete with the other millions of webmasters out there trying to get into the top 25 or so listings, you’ll spend an awful lot of time trying to get there, and spend even more trying to keep your position!

I’m sure your next thought will be: “Okay, I’ll go for Internet Marketing, or Rap Music, or Used Cars!”

Well, that does narrow things down a bit, but these phrases will still have a ton of competition.

The better (and more profitable) approach is to search for keywords and keyword phrases that meet both of the following:

1) Popular - They are searched for by a lot of people

2) Have little competition - It is so much easier to get a high ranking (and stay there!) when you target keywords that have little competition.

The key to success with the search engines is to find keywords that many of your potential customers are searching for, but that few of your competitors are optimizing for.

How in the World do I do that?

The absolute best resource you’re going to find online for finding keywords that fit the above criteria is: WordTracker

They offer a free trial, and if you need to have access to the more advanced reporting features, or would like to research other search engines not offered in the trial, you can subscribe to their service for a small fee.

The trial will work just fine, but if you decide to get serious, this will be the best money you spend. Each time you add a new page to your website you should research the best keyword phrases and optimize that page for them.

Since this is such a valuable resource, and because this part of your search engine strategy is so important , I’m going to give you a quick tutorial (complete with screen shots!) of how to use WordTracker to find the best keywords.

Obviously you’ll need to have a general idea of what the subject of your website is, or is going to be, and then click here to go to the WordTracker website.

Once there, find and click on the Trial link. You will then be asked to enter your name and email address to start your trial. (They will send the results to this email address, so make sure you enter a valid address.)

Make sure you check the box to get the weekly Top 500 Keywords report! This is a very useful email that you’ll get once a week that will show you the most popular keywords for that week.

Then you’ll see the following:

For this example I’ll enter in “marketing” and click Proceed, which will then bring up a list of related keywords and phrases:

You will have a left window and a right window, and when you click a keyword it will display the results in the right window.

By clicking on marketing, I get this result in the right window:

This list gives various keyword phrases with the word “marketing” in them, and sorts them by number of searches.

What you will then do is click on a few of these keywords to add them to your basket (don’t worry, this will make more sense after you’ve gone through it once.)

After you’ve added a few of these keywords to your basket, click the link to move to Step 3.

This step gives you some choices that are only available in the full version, so just click the link to go to Step 4.

Step 4 is where you’ll find the good stuff!

The important information on this page is the KEI Analysis. This gives each keyword a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.

A low score means that either not many people search for the keyword, or that there is too much competition for it.

The amount of competition is determined by searching for each keyword on the selected search engine, and finding out how many sites come up in the results.

What you want is a good mixture of popularity and competition … or lots of popularity and little competition!

If you look at the scale just above the table in this graphic you will see what KEI numbers will mean you have found a good keyword or keyword phrase.

In this example it appears that I didn’t find any good keyword choices.

But, another search I ran found these:

As you can see in that list, there are a few terms that have a very high KEI ranking. This means that these would be good keywords to target because they have a good ratio of popularity to competition.

This is exactly what you are looking for when trying to find the best keywords to target for your website or for individual pages on your website.

When you choose keywords that are popular and that have little competition, you’ll be able to quickly get your site into the top results for that keyword.

The following articles will show you what you must do to make sure you take the right steps to take advantage of the great keywords you discovered during the above process.

Edit : These is a new upgrade from Wordtracker that gives more accurate results. If you find that you liked Wordtracker, you should try KeywordSpy.

KeywordSpy - keyword research technology

The question that I’m asked most often by my customers and subscribers is:

“How do I get more traffic to my website?”

And whenever the subject of search engines comes up, it’s quickly followed by:

“But how can I get a good listing in the search engines when they keep changing the way they rank sites?”

Well, there are many ways to get traffic, and the good news about search engines is that they don’t change the way they rank sites that often.

What changes is that they put in better ways of catching those that try to trick and spam them.

For example, if you have an illegal adult site and you’re trying to get it to show up when people search for “mortgage information”, the search engines will figure this out and will probably ban your site.

As long as you play by their rules, you don’t have to worry about this happening to you. I know there are some horror stories out there on this, but for the most part if you play your cards right you can expect to get traffic from the search engines for a long time.

Some examples I’m sure you may have heard about are:

1) Put popular search terms in your Meta Tags (even if it has nothing to do with your site.)
2) Place many, many keywords at the bottom of your page and change the font color so that visitors don’t see them.
3) Purchase software that will greatly inflate the number of links to your site.

This is just a small sample, and I’m sure at one point these tricks actually worked, but the search engines eventually figure this out and put in special exclusions for sites using these methods.

Because so many people subscribe to these theories, many will have you believe that search engines are really not even worth your time and effort when promoting your website.

To put it simply: Yes they are!

The long-term, targeted, and in most cases FREE traffic generated by the search engines just cannot be overlooked.

It does take time to get listed, and even longer to get listed well. But once your site is listed and is listed well, you can expect a steady stream of targeted visitors for many months to come.

What may really shock you is that it is not that difficult to get a great listing in the search engines … and to even get listed well for great keywords.

It doesn’t happen overnight, and you can’t just push a button and expect to magically appear at the top of the listings, but it can be done.