* Turning your home page into a secret weapon
I'm going to blow away any idea, any concept at all, of what you think a home page should be about. Your home page must be about one thing, attracting a major search engine technology. Period.
Its like a beauty pageant, you want your home page to win the highest mark from the panel of judges. We achieve this by "tuning" the home page to a set of keywords.
If you only have one web site, tune your home page specifically for Google or Inktomi. I give Inktomi a slight edge because several big search sites use Inktomi as their default search engine. It's also the most easy to manipulate to your advantage. Or if you choose to tune your home page for Google, either way, your site will get enormous amounts of traffic.
Let me explain how it's done. The home page should not be a traditional index page, an "about the company" page or table of contents page. So get that notion out of your head right away.
Think of the home page as a book cover. You wouldn't put your index on the cover would you? Of course not. The index, table of contents, and all the fancy navigational tools are inside the book.
The home page should be one thing, a search engine beauty containing keyword rich text, with only one or two links on it. These links lead to your real "home page" or "table of contents" style page. The home page is like a dummy, a trap door that does well in the search engines and funnels people into your web site.
Once inside your web site, people come to a table of contents page, this is your real home page or hub. It contains all the navigational features you need to get around the site. All the other pages within your site link back to this hub. People can never get back to the actual "index.html" file or
"real" home page except through the search engine.
To put it another way, the home page, is a very simple page with a link that goes inside to the directory or site map, that links to all the product pages. This directory is the conceptual home page or hub, that has links to the whole site.
The only purpose of the home page, is to help boost the directory page in the search engines and get you into the site. And it does that, very, very, well.
Turning the home page into a one way valve is one of the easiest, yet most effective tactics for a top ten page. That means traffic, leads, sales and lifetime customers.
Now if you take this concept and apply it to more than one web site, you could keep each home page tuned for a different major search engine. One each for AltaVista, the Inktomi family, Google, Lycos, Yahoo... are you getting the idea yet? Multiple sites, each tuned to a different search engine. Jump up! Shout yes! Thrust those arms into the air. Spike that ball. Run around the room five times shouting woo hoo! But don't celebrate too long, there's still lots of work to be done. ;-)
* The art of writing doorway, splash, hook, gateway, entry pages
I call 'em hook pages. The secret weapon that drives qualified, motivated prospects straight to your web site. They have been called doorway pages, portal pages, entry pages, splash pages and more, but they all boil down to the same thing. Hook pages are single web pages, full page ads for your web site, that are fine tuned to rank high in the search engines.
The hook pages contain links back to your home page and internal web pages. Like the secret weapon home pages we examined in the last section, they act as a one way valve, a doorway to get users into your site using the most popular tools on the internet, the major search engines.
Although not as effective as they once were, hook pages are still a formidable weapon, and one of the easiest to produce. For example, in one month, the cell-west.com home page got 15,543 visitors from Google, 14,790 visitors from AltaVista and an amazing 14,140 visitors from hook pages.
Search engines have made it a little tougher to score top results with a hook page. They've put in anti spam filters. They've added extra "findability" to home pages or reviewed sites leaving hook pages with less priority.
They've added "trigger" words. Words that when searched will take you into their "reviewed" directory and bury actual search engine results so far down you can't even find them. Plus many of them purge and spit out everything but a handful of pages.
But all that aside there's one place where hook pages still shine. And make a lot of money. Lean a little closer and I'll whisper it in your ear....
Complex searches. Not simple phrases like "cell phone" but power search phrases like "startac cell phone battery", "nokia 5190 faceplates", or "samsung 850 handsfree". Power searches with a makes and model numbers in them.
Here's the strategy. Not everyone searches the web using simple phrases. True many do, but millions of people don't. Specifically shoppers with credit cards in hand, ready to buy.
People who are just browsing tend to use generic phrases. Shoppers are looking for specific items and tend to use more detailed searches. So keep the home pages tuned for generic keyword phrases, but let the hook pages handle complicated search phrases.
If someone is on Yahoo and does a search for "cellular phones", there are plenty of matches. Try searching for something more complicated like "nokia 5190 lithium battery charger" and there are few search results from the directory.
The results you see are coming from a search engine, not the Yahoo directory. These "complex search terms" are where hook pages really shine, often placing in the top 5 results.
If you have and online store carrying 10 major brands, each having 10 different products, that's 100 hook pages. Plus we need to make pages for different keyword densities (that's how many times the keywords appear on the pages). Sometimes a 4.5% keyword density is just perfect, other times its
2.5%.
Then we need hook pages that are search engine specific, designed to do well in one particular engine. Then we have various styles of pages ranging from short, to very long and wordy.
That's a lot of pages. But that's one of the keys to winning the search engine game. Lots of pages working for you, all pointing to the internal pages of your main web site.
I generally focus on two types of hook pages, generic and targeted. Generic hook pages are based on multiple generic keywords, were I try to have each keyword appear a certain percentage of
the time. Targeted hook pages take a particular keyword phrase and are designed with one search engine in mind.
When you have 80 - 100 hook pages, and believe it or not, you eventually will, at least five of them will be doing well in the search engines at any moment in time. Just concentrate on a couple of generic hook pages, gradually work to more targeted pages, and follow the guidelines for creating pages that you found in Chapter 3 of this book..
Just type a two word phrase in any search engine and you'll get the top results. Now fire up OptiLink and type in the domain name you want to analyze. ( http://www.cdzn.com/opl ) Look for repeating patterns in linking structure, keywords in links, keyword densities, phrase densities, where in the html the keywords appear, plus how many words and characters make up the title, meta tags and body.
Now don't go stealing anyone's html code. Just look at the "conditions" that make up a top scoring page. Then create your own original page. Or, if you're having trouble, use WebPosition Gold's page critic as a coach, to help guide you towards better scoring pages.
I personally use a two word phrase unrelated to, and less competitive than cellular when trying to determine what densities are currently effective. That way, I can be sure I'm looking at "real" pages, not pages using search engine tricks or cloaking techniques to achieve top positions.
The concept is simple enough. Look at top scoring pages, analyze their pages using OptiLink, assemble your own page, upload it to your server, announce it to the search engines. You should have a page that comes in the top 20. That is the theory anyway.
I've over simplified for the sake of example, as there are many other things that affect search engine positioning, such as link popularity and cross linking. Your results will vary. At the very least, your hook page can act as a catalyst to artificially boost the ratings of your home page because you're linking back to it.
A key point I need to make here is NOT to tweak the page you just announced, but to use it as a rough template to create a new hook page. Keep adding new hook pages, with slightly different keyword densities and meta tags.
I can't stress this enough! Just leave the old hook pages to mature. You never know when an old page will suddenly be "flavor of the month", nailing just the right title, page length and keyword density.
When I run WebPosition Gold to check the rankings of my current pages in the search engines, I
am often surprised to find hook pages I made over two years ago, suddenly popular once again.
A good tip I can give you, is to replicate whatever is working right now.
Load your keywords into WebPosition Gold. Have it find your top scoring pages and COPY THEM. Use your logs to find out what your best entry pages are and COPY THEM.
If you're really lucky the search engine won't change the parameters of what its looking for over the next month, and you'll have a whole whack of pages in top positions.
WebPosition Gold: Know exactly where your pages are positioned and use the Page Critic to help make better scoring pages:
http://cdzn.com/wpg
* How many pages are needed to properly promote a site
How many pages are required to promote a site? That's like asking how long is a piece of string. My usual answer is as many as you want, or as many as it takes. It depends on what the web site is about.
How many possible combinations of keywords do you have? Each popular keyword combo needs to be in the top 20, the front pages of the search engines.
How many internal pages - within the domain name - do you need? One for each product category at least. Then you'll need at least three doorway or hook pages that link to each internal page.
If it is strictly a lead generation site, or an expensive item, you probably need only a few pages and an online form. You just want to qualify the lead. You'll have your sales representative phone the interested party and do the follow up.
The same goes for a site that sells only one product, or perhaps a small store with a regional focus like a deli, a hair salon, or car repair center. For the deli, maybe a just couple of pages of food shots and a fax-in order form (so you don't need a computer to take the orders).
I strongly caution about spending too much money on the actual site. A lot of fancy bells and whistles are not required at this point. A basic, low technology site will do just fine.
What's important.... is to focus more on marketing and search engine placement, rather than spending money on the site itself. So a five page site, and 10 more hook pages, that lead to it, might be ideal at this point.
When it comes an online retail store, each product category will need its own page. You might also want pages dealing with warranty information, returns, shipping, testimonials, FAQs and so on.
The retail product area might have 10 or so product pages and the service area another 10 or so pages. Then add in 35 hook pages (depending on how many keyword phrases you have) and you're up around 55 pages for a single web site.
Multiply this by 5 or so web sites - virtual locations - all selling the same thing and you're up to
275 pages. Seriously. At last count, Cell-West had over 350 pages working for them in the search engines, stored around the internet on various domain names.
What about a searchable database? Wouldn't it be better to put all those product pages in a searchable database. Yes, except for one problem, most search engines cannot usually find pages inside a database.
They need static html pages. Pages they can find and catalog. No search engine is sophisticated enough to fill out a form on your site and do a search to find out what is inside. (There are developments however, that allow search engines to find dynamically generated pages, also known as active server pages or ASP.)
The solution is to turn your database inside out. Yes, you can still have a searchable web site, but make each one of the product pages a "live" html page as well. This way, you can offer people the convenience of searching your database with keywords, as well as providing search engines with tons of pages they can catalog and index.
If you only have one product, then you'll only need two web pages and five to ten hook pages to promote your site. It's the minisite concept. One home page with a keyword rich sales message, that links to an order form.
One domain, one sales message, one product. The only logical solution is to buy the product or move on. Simple and effective, this model works very well with an email solicitation or paid advertising, that drive people to the sales message, where they buy the product.
There is a full range of needs when it comes to the "right" amount of pages. There are sites with just a few pages and online retailers with hundreds. The best solution is to determine what it is that you're doing online.
Are you selling product or gathering leads? Decide if it's leads or final sales that you're after, and take it from there using the guidelines I've set forth above.
Just don't set up a huge web site and have nothing left over to market it. It's the same mistake we find in the dirt world where a business spends everything on fixed assets and has no money left for advertising. Such a business is doomed to fail. Start with a small site selling a few hot items. Spend two or three times the amount of dollars marketing it, pushing it, making it go. If you push really hard, it will go faster and farther than your wildest dreams.
* A proven strategy for announcing web pages to search engines
Once your web sites are up and running, the next step is to let the search engines know about them. We do that by going to their various page submission areas and typing the URL of the page we want them to index.
Each search engine is different, in how many pages they catalog from your site, how deep they spider and what types of links they will follow. Meaning do they index just the one page you submitted, or do they come and visit your site for more pages. Do they follow just text links, or links embedded in graphics or imagemaps.
If they do come to your site, the engines are different in how many levels deep they go, or how many links they will follow.
For those of you who want detailed information about each search engine, right down to the nitty gritty, it can be found in Planet Ocean's Enginemaster Chart, which you get FREE with a six month subscription to their Winning the Search Engine Wars newsletter.
It is the absolute authority on everything from, how many characters are allowed in the page title, to how many words can be in each meta tag. If you are serious about search engines, this is one of the most important resources on the subject.
Find out more about Planet Ocean here:
http://www.cdzn.com/pob
Most directories - like Yahoo - allow only one page to be submitted, the home page. You'll need to come armed with your site titles, descriptions and lists of keywords, before you even think about submitting to them.
Remember, that even though you have to pay to get your site reviewed, there's no guarantee you'll get listed. If you follow the process, exactly as it was described earlier in this book, you shouldn't have any trouble getting listed in Yahoo and the other directories.
Its a long process to submit to all the directories. Some of them want your complete life history, when all you want to do is announce and run. Is it worth it? As an ongoing project you might want to submit to the more popular directories. But other than Yahoo and the Open Directory Project, most directories will bring little traffic when compared to the big search engines. Where they can help, is with link popularity to your site.
Search engines have a wide variety of submission procedures. Just be sure to read the directions
(even if you don't follow them), on their submission page. If the engine allows multiple submissions you'll want to submit all the internal pages of your web site.
Now I'm going to give you my secret rule for announcing web pages to search engines that allow multiple submissions. Submit only one page - per web site - per day.
So if you have 5 web sites, take one page from the first site and announce it to the top search engines. Then take one page from the second web site and repeat the procedure. Five sites, submitting one page per day to 8 search engines is 40 submissions per day. Just don't submit more than one page from the same domain name in the same day.
You might be thinking this could take a lot of time. Yes it could, except you'll get the best results this way. More of your pages will "stick" in the engines and get indexed this way. Plus many engines ignore more than one submission from the same domain within a 24 hour period.
If you would like a machine to automate the submission procedure for you, there's always
WebPosition Gold.
If you still prefer to submit manually, and have a large amount of pages, you may want to delegate this task. It's quite easy to submit web pages, just time consuming.
I've been asked many times about services that offer to place your web site in 5,000 search engines for $19.95. My opinion is, don't use them, for several reasons.
They are a "throw it at the wall and see if it sticks" approach to something that requires pinpoint accuracy. They are usually only going to submit your home page, not all the pages on your site. There are less than 10 major search engines, another 20 minor ones and 4,470 that no one ever uses.
We also need to know if the search engine is accepting submissions at this time. If they often go off line for maintenance, how will you know for sure that your page was really submitted? We get the best results when we submit manually or use intelligent submission software like WebPosition Gold.
For best results, follow the "one page - per web site - per day" rule of submission. And if you submit your pages manually, be sure to track what page got announced to which search engine on what date.
(I should note here, that in 2003, very few search engines allow submissions and prefer to find pages on their own. The trick is to place a site map on a page that's already in the index. That means, the next time the spider comes, it will find links to all your other pages.)
If you are not familiar with sitemaps, or don't know why you need them, or how to use them, you can download this free 21 page ebook, and put them to work for you immediately.
http://www.cdzn.com/sitemaps.pdf
If you are looking for a tool that automatically generates thematic site maps, ones your visitors will use, and the search engines will love, I suggest the Site Map Creator by Dr. Andy Williams. It eliminates days of manual labor, so you can have more time to run your business. You can get it here:
http://www.cdzn.com/smc
* When not to reannounce a page
If it isn't broken, don't fix it. I know this sounds so obvious, but I read it all the time where so called
"search engine experts" say announce your pages on a regular basis. I'd like to take the opposite approach by saying that "mature" or "older" pages often score better. This does change from time to time but lately the trend has been that search engines like older pages.
A few of the engines like news pages on popular sites and will often shoot them straight to the top, only to have them fall out of favor within a few days. With the better pages, those with good construction and good content, the reverse is true. The page will slowly climb in favor until it reaches the top. It may take a month or even six months to get there. The trick is to be patient, knowing the work you are doing is helping and contributing to your success.
If you use WebPosition Gold you'll be able to determine how well pages are performing in the various search engines. If you have a page that is doing well, there's no need to reannounce it and have it go through the "maturing" process again. Especially if the file date or any information on the page has changed. You may be subject to newer and tougher filters that the search engine has in place. Filters that didn't exist back when your page was originally indexed.
* How to submit your competition to tougher filters
Here's a little trick that can be nasty and useful all at the same time. Of course I've only used it for good instead of evil.
The nasty side is that you might want to do your competition the "favor" of resubmitting their page to the search engine. Huh? If there are several pages ahead of you in the search engine you might want to submit each one to the search engine. Like I mentioned in the previous section, if any information on the page has changed, it will show a different date and time stamp than the page cataloged by the engine.
The engine will come back to "reindex" the page hoping to get the "new" information. The newly submitted page will be subject to all the new filters, sifters and maturing processes the engine may have in place. Ouch! The worst that can happen is nothing, you don't go up, and they don't go down.
I have on rare occasion resubmitted my competition's pages when I know they are using the bait and switch technique. They might have a high scoring page but upon examining their code there's no reason why it should be scoring so highly. Chances are they used a "trick".
They made a page with nothing but keyword phrases in an attempt to spam the search engine. No human could make sense of this or read this page. Then the day it appears in the top 10 of the engine, they switch the page by replacing it on their server. They upload a new page with the same file name, replacing their spam page with a normal web page.
So if you want to clear out the tricksters, who use smoke and mirrors to attract visitors instead of content, you might want to reannounce their pages to the search engines.
The good side is that we can get rid of all the "dead wood" ahead of us in the search engine. All the
404 errors or page not found errors can be cleaned out by resubmitting those pages to the search engines. When the engine comes to spider the page and finds out there's nothing there, it will remove the dead listings from its index.
* How to ensure a search engine can spider your pages
The best way to ensure a search engine can spider all your web sites and all internal pages, is by cross linking them together. Its an old tactic that I've used for years. Word got out about cross linking and although its well publicized, few people have used it, not realizing how powerful and effective it is.
Link each of your web sites and their internal pages to each other by using hypertext links, not graphics or imagemaps. Try to describe what the destination page is about - in the actual link - using two or three keywords.
When the search engine comes to catalog a page, it finds links to your other pages. It then uses
the incoming links to determine what the pages are about and compares them to the content on the page. The two must match.
If the engine is a spider it will crawl and add your other pages to its index. Being cross linked gives your pages a greater chance of being cataloged and having your pages "stick" in the index. Some search engines even prefer this method of "finding" your pages on their own, rather than having you announce them to their submission areas.
Some engines purge their indexes on a regular basis. They toss out everything they've ever found from your site except for the home page and couple of others. The pages that remain in the index will need to be updated with links leading to all your other pages. Then when the spider comes crawling to update its index, all your other pages will be found again.
Another benefit of cross-linking is beating the "link popularity" game used by some search engines. Simply put, the more pages that link to your site, the more they get clicked on. The more they get clicked on, the bigger the boost your site gets in search engine positioning.
So if you have five web sites and they all link to each other, plus 30 or so hook pages linked to those sites, you'll get a remarkable lift in several major search engines.
* Writing letters to search engine and directory editors
Many search engines, yellow page sites, city directories and portals, have several links on their home page. Links like shopping, cars, travel, news, sports and so on. The web sites that appear under these various categories have often been reviewed by human editors and given a ranking like
"two out of three stars" or "best of the web".
Once your site has been added to the directory you will enjoy an artificial boost in your positioning. How much of a boost depends on how much "weight" the engine places on its reviewed sites. I've seen boosts of 10% to 20%.
So you can see that writing a letter to a search engine or directory editor, is the single most powerful thing you can do to improve your rankings. You want to get your web site reviewed and added to the directory or portal that sits on top of their search engine. I've had some success with some search engines and am still writing the others every three months or so.
Trying to get a name or email address of a search engine's editor is almost impossible. What I do is email the search engine using their comment form, contact us address, info address, dirt world address, whatever means they give to contact them. Sometimes you get added right away. Others added me after the third time I mailed them.
Sometimes I email the editor of a different or higher category. I simply state that I am having trouble getting listed in my area of choice. Sometimes it works and you'll find your site listed the next day. Keep on going and don't give up.
What has worked for me in the past was to keep the editor's work down to a minimum. I tell them what category I want to be listed in. Give them a web site title. Give them a generic, spam free description. Then one paragraph justifying how I think my site will benefit their directory. Make it easy for the editor to just copy and paste what you give them.
* Maximize your "findability" with a top meta tag strategy
Do you use meta tags on your web pages? Look at the html code and see. Are they the same on every page? If so, they are not working to your advantage as well as they could be.
If you have only one web site, let the first few words of the keyword tag reflect the product category or content of any given page. On the next page, change the first few words in the tag to reflect the content of the page, while leaving the remainder of the words in the tag, to describe the generic topic of the overall web site.
If you have multiple web sites selling the same products you're in luck. Each page can have its own unique set of titles and tags. You'll be able to maximize keyword coverage in participating search engines, by using a technique I call rotating keyword phrases.
Let's take a look at how I rotate the meta tags for maximum keyword coverage. Here are two very similar web pages on different domains selling cellular phones. The only change other than the ad copy, is the domain name, the title and meta tag keywords.
Page 1 title: phones cellular digital mobile wireless pcs phone
Page 1 keywords: wireless, cellular phones, mobile, digital, cell, phone, pcs, motorola, startac, phones, nokia, ericsson, sony, qualcomm, star tac, fido, nextel, telephones, accessories, batteries, find, where, can, I .
Page 2 title: mobile motorola startac cellular phones
Page 2 keywords: phones, motorola startac, star tac, Motorola Startac, Star Tac, motorola cellular, startac phones, cellular phones, digital, pcs, mobile, vader, v3620, 7760, 7790, 8600, 8500, 6500,
6000, 3000, cell phone, where, find, get, search, for.
The first example is generic in nature containing phrases like "cellular phones". All the various phone brands appear later on toward the end of the meta tag. In the second example there is a focus on a specific manufacturer "motorola" and various models of Motorola phones, especially their popular Startac model.
Take this rotation principle and apply it to each one of your web sites. One site can focus on generic words like cell phones, another on Nokia phones, another on Ericsson phones, another on Motorola phones and so on, until all the major makes and models have been covered. This way we get maximum "findability" in the search engines that use meta tags.
* Avoiding search engine turn offs
Imagine a web site all about "bananas". When the search engines come to index the page they want to find the word "banana" in incoming links, the page title, URL, and meta tags. You'll also get a positioning boost if the word banana is the first and last thing on the visible page. Usually in headline tags for best results.
Imagine the poor engine having to sift through - what to them seems like - all sorts of garbage, trying to find the word "banana". Imagine having to wade through Javascript, frames, imagemap coordinates, big graphics, no headlines, untargeted paragraphs, where on earth a those BANANAS. A page like this won't make it to the top fifty of any search engine.
In order to make the search engines work for you, you have to make it easy for them to index your site. This may sound a bit harsh, especially to those who love the technology but, unless you're selling the technology itself, get rid of it. Remove all the Java, Javascript, Frames and anything else that makes it hard for the search engines to properly index your site.
While you're at it, get rid of anything that requires your customer to leave your site, to go download something, or sit there waiting for something to appear.
Put it this way, if it doesn't ship with the browser software, leave it off your site. Usually you are OK with Acrobat PDF, Flash, Shockwave and Quicktime, as these technologies are installed as browser plug-ins at the time the browser is installed.
But other than those few, don't make your customer "work" to look at your site, or "work" to buy anything from you. Make the browsing and selling processes be as transparent as possible. Let people in and let your sales message do the work.
If you do choose to use scripts or frames on your web pages, just be aware that most sites that use them, are not well positioned in the search engines. When it comes to frames, some search engines will not usually catalog any page past the home page.
Another common but easily remedied problem is with navigation panels or image maps on the left hand side. Simply moving the navigation panel to the right, or using simple text links, will increase search engine positioning.
The engine doesn't have to wade through all sorts of meaningless imagemap coordinates or Javascript rollovers while looking for keyword phrases. Even take out the html tables if possible, or put a headline above the table so the spider encounters meaningful text right from the start.
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