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Search Engine Marketing 101: What Search Engines See When They Visit Your Web Site
by Robin Nobles

If you have a Web site, have you ever wondered what a search engine sees when it visits your site to add the site to its index? Do you know that it doesn’t see the beautiful graphics or the fancy Web design? Do you know that it only sees the source code, or the "skeleton" of your Web site?

Do you realize that knowing this little tidbit of information and doing something about it can make a huge difference in your search engine rankings and, ultimately, the success of your online business?

One very important thing that you need to remember is: the search engines like simplicity. The simpler your Web site is, the easier it is for the engines to determine what your Web site is about. And, if the search engines can determine exactly what your Web site is about, you have a better chance at top rankings under the keyword phrases that are important for your online business.

Let’s look at this concept in action with a page I recently created for one of my online businesses: Search Engine Workshops.

http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/search-engine-seminars.html

As you can see, it’s a very plain, simple page that was not created to be the "main" or "home" page of a Web site. Rather, it was created to pull in traffic through the keyword phrase, "search engine seminars."

What I really want you to see is the source code of the page. So, when viewing the page, click on View on the top menu bar, then Source or Source Code.

The most important part of a Web page is what appears at the very top of the page.

So, what appears in the <head> section of your Web page is very important, because the <head> section is at the top of the page.

Let’s look at the <head> section of the source code:


                    <HEAD> 

                      <TITLE>search engine seminars--are you ready to have 
                      a successful Website?</TITLE>
                    <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="search 
                      engine seminars, conferences, workshops, CONFERENCES, WORKSHOPS, 
                      Conferences, Workshops">
                    <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Consider 
                      attending a search engine seminar to learn how to take a 
                      struggling Web site and bring it to the top of the rankings!">

                      

                      </HEAD>

There are only three tags in the <head> section of this Web page: the title tag, the keyword META tag, and the description META tag. Because the title tag is in the <head> section, and because of the importance that most engines place on the tag, it is considered one of the most important tags on your page, so it should always be the first tag in the <head> section.

Notice that in the title and keyword META tag, the important keyword phrase (search engine seminars) appears as the first words in the tag. In the description META tag, the keyword phrase is still toward the beginning of the tag, as opposed to the end.

In other words, where you place your keyword phrase in the tags and content of your page is important. If you place your keyword phrase toward the beginning of all of your important tags and toward the beginning of the contents, you’re "proving" to the engines that the page is really about that particular topic.

I’ve mentioned one reason why the title tag is important, but there’s another reason too. The title tag is important because it almost always appears as the title of the site in the search engine results. Your description META tag may appear in the search engine results as well and is considered important by some of the engines. So, when you create your title and description tags, remember two things: put your keyword phrase toward the beginning of the tags, and make the tags captivating and designed to pull in traffic.

Think of it this way. If your site is #10 in the search engine rankings, but if the sites above yours haven’t gone to the trouble to create appealing titles and descriptions, a search engine user may skip over those sites to visit yours.

Now, let’s go back to the source code. Look for this tag, which isn’t far from the <body> tag:

<IMG SRC="images/banner3.jpg" ALT="search engine seminars, search engine conferences, search engine workshops" WIDTH="220" HEIGHT="100">

This is the image, or graphics, tag for the Search Engine Workshops banner that appears at the very top of the page. Notice that the engine doesn’t "see" the graphic itself. It sees the name of the graphic (banner3.jpg), and it sees the ALT text that describes the image. It sees the width and height of the graphic. But, it doesn’t see the graphic itself. So, the engine doesn’t know that the graphic says, "Search Engine Workshops."

Next, look for this tag, which directly follows the image tag:

<H1 ALIGN="center"><FONT FACE="Arial">Search Engine Seminars</FONT></H1>

An <H1> tag is a heading tag, and heading tags are very important to a Web page. Try to put a heading tag at the very top of your page, if at all possible, and use your important keyword phrase in that heading tag. When you look back at my actual Web page, do you see the words "Search Engine Seminars" right under the graphic? That’s the heading tag.

Now, look for this tag in the source code:

<P><FONT FACE="Arial">Is your Web site achieving the success that . . .

This is where the contents of the Web page begin. Look on the actual Web page and find the text: "Is your Web site achieving the success that..." Notice that the keyword phrase (search engine seminars) appears in the first paragraph.

In other words, with all of these tags and the placement of our keyword phrase in the page’s contents, we’re proving to the engines that the page is really about "search engine seminars."

So, let’s visit your site on the Web. View the source code. What’s in the <head> section? Are your title and description tags using the keyword phrase that’s important for that particular page? Are your title and description tags captivating and designed to pull in traffic? Each page of your site should have different title and description tags, and those tags should be based on the focus of that page... what that page is really about: in other words, its keyword phrase.

How many graphics do you have before the actual contents of your site? If you have a lot of graphics, navigation bars, or buttons before the contents of your page, the engine has to sort through all of that source code before it gets to the actual keyword-containing content.

Does your page contain lengthy Javascript or other code that pushes the important contents toward the bottom of the page? If so, it could be hindering your chances at top rankings.

Are you using a heading tag that contains your important keyword phrase toward the very top of your page? Is your keyword phrase used in the first paragraph of the page? Is it used in several places throughout the page?

Look back at my page. Notice that the keyword phrase, search engine seminars, is used as link text to describe several links. Are you using your keyword phrase to describe links that are leaving the page? If not, try to do so.

Study your own site carefully, and apply these guidelines to your pages.

Doing whatever you can to push your important keyword phrase toward the top of the page and toward the beginning of your tags is the first step toward having a successful Web site that’s ranked in the top of the search engine rankings.

In Summary:

Achieving top rankings for your Web site does not have to be an impossible goal as Robin Nobles has outlined above. The tips she's given will certainly help move you in the right direction.

Unfortunately, most keywords are competitive enough to require additional page refinements in order to break into the top 10 listings. Moving your page from position #936 to position #48 may be a remarkable improvement, but unless you are in those top 10 to 30 positions, you'll receive little to no search engine traffic.

Fortunately, WebPosition Gold 2 gives you the extra competitive edge required to push your rankings to the top. Its Page Critic module analyzes your page and gives you specific advice custom-tailored to your keyword, page, and targeted search engine. It eliminates the guess-work and the need to remember all the many "rules" and "to do's" of search engine optimization.

Please visit our web site to learn more about WebPosition Gold.

Robin Nobles is the Director of Training of the Academy of Web Specialists, which teaches online training in search engine marketing. She is also a trainer with Search Engine Workshops, which presents on location workshops in search engine marketing at various locations across the country. Please visit our site for more information about online training and other resources.

Advanced Tip: Improving Rankings via Server Side Includes (SSI)

Recent changes in Google's algorithm have caused sites to disappear or to shift in rankings this month. Many searchers have complained that Google's relevancy has declined from the changes. Therefore, don't be surprised if they continue to tweak their formula causing ranking to bounce up and down for awhile.

One observation regarding the new formula appears to be a greater preference for pages that change often. "Fresh" pages are thought to be more valuable than old, "stale" pages. The question is how do you make your page appear "fresh" every time a search engine chooses to spider it?

You could try to update all your pages in some small way everyday, but who has time for that? Luckily, you could take advantage of a feature of many Web servers called Server Side Includes (SSI). SSI's are simply statements in your HTML that tells your Web server to include a certain block of text when the page is served to a Web browser or even a search engine's spider. There are other ways to dynamically generate content on your Web site such as using JavaScript or VBScript. However, these require the search engine spider to execute the script in order to see the new content. Most search engines will not do this since they take a more simplistic approach when reading a Web page.

With SSI's, the content is transparently merged into your page by your Web server before the search engine's spider ever sees it. Therefore, the spider does not have to even know you used a server side include. Using this method, you can merge in today's date on your page giving your Web site an up to date look not only to your visitors, but to an engine checking for new content since its last visit. To merge in a date on a Unix server, you'd simply insert this command into your HTML:

The above will display the default date format of your server on the location of the page that you place the tag. To specify an alternate date format, include something like this near the top of your page:

where the above would display the date in month, day, and year order.

Changing the date alone may not be enough for a spider to consider the page as being "new." Therefore, you should create a text file with various sentences or paragraphs appropriate to your page and then use a script to randomly merge in a different block of text each time the page is served. For example, you could have a "news" box on your page that displays various news clippings about your industry. You can find one such random text script by visiting this script archive resource page.

Most servers by default will only support SSI on pages ending in .shtml. However, some search engines may not give you the "freshness" bonus if they see the .shtml extension. Ideally, you should use SSI on pages with regular .html or .htm extensions. You can do this by creating an .htaccess file in your site's root directory (or edit the existing text file) and add the following line:

AddHandler server-parsed.html

The above will tell your server to support SSI on all files ending in .html, assuming your Web host supports it. The drawback with SSI is that not all Web hosts support it because it exacts a performance penalty on their servers. That's because the server must read each page and look for include statements. Before getting too far into SSI, contact your Web host (or your system administrator if you host your own site) and ask them if they support SSI for your domain or whether they can activate it. Also inquire about what level of SSI they support.

Unfortunately, I don't have the space here to take your through all the in's and out's of SSI, but there are many good reference guides on the Web. If you're a novice user still struggling with HTML, then you may want to focus on the optimization basics for now. However, if you're ready to move onto something more advanced, SSI is an excellent way to gain a competitive edge while enhancing the value of your site.

SSI Resources:

Planet Ocean has one of the best SSI tutorials I've seen for the search engine optimizer, taking the user through many relevant topics in a non-intimidating manner. However, they do require a subscription for $97. This entitles you to their vast library of SEO articles plus their monthly newsletter for six months. They offer some of the best optimization advice on the Web, so if you are not already a current subscriber, I would highly recommend becoming one.

Other SSI Resources:

http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/includes.html
http://www.oltronics.net/ssifaq.html

FAST Searches for an Edge With Upgrades

Fast announced several new features this month to its AllTheWeb search engine that supplies results to Lycos and other major Web sites. Most notably, filters by region have been added similar to the way Google and AltaVista filter data for various countries and regions of the world. Mimicking Google, summary descriptions for each page are now taken from a small section of the page's text rather than from the meta description tag.

Also following Google's lead, Fast plans to move toward text-based advertisings on its site rather than banner ads. It even plans to use a simpler, more streamlined look on its home page as Google does. It would seem that Fast suffers from a serious case of Google-envy. However, with Google's run-away success over the past four years, you can hardly blame them.

For more information, please see the complete ComputerWire article

How To Justify A Search Engine Optimization Budget

Many readers of MarketPosition may already be sold on the search engine optimization concept. However, perhaps you haven't been able to convince your VP of Marketing to give you the budget to pursue it. Others of you may simply be sitting on the sidelines wondering if it's worth the effort. If one of these scenarios describes you, consider reading an article written by Michael Wong this month entitled "How to Justify a Search Engine Optimization Budget."

In the article he mentions many interesting statistics commonly cited. However, most interesting is his recount of his work at www.iBoost.com. Michael talks about how he worked on SEO for a month and achieved over 2,000 top 30 rankings. He grew the site's traffic by 400,000 unique visitors per month, and 8 million page views!

Considering the one-month campaign was undertaken way back in October 2000, that's pretty impressive when you consider iBoost still commands over 1,800 top 30 rankings today.

For more information, please read Mr. Wong's entire article

For more facts, check out the recent WallStreet Journal article regarding SEO that I mentioned last month:

Advertise in MarketPosition and Reach Over 500,000 People

If you're interested in advertising in MarketPosition™, the most popular search engine marketing newsletter in the world e-mail jim@firstplacesoftware.com for current competitive rates and information or see:

http://www.marketposition.com/advertising.htm

Webmasters, marketers, and business owners around the globe read this high quality newsletter and depend on its advice for promoting their businesses online. Whereas many low quality newsletters tend to get deleted as soon as they arrive in a person's inbox, MarketPosition subscribers look forward to reading the in-depth and invaluable content offered each month.

Last Month:

Last month we talked about several important topics including:

The Wall Street Journal Reports: "Search Engine
Marketing Will Boost your Business"
MarketPosition Celebrates 5-Year Anniversary
Inktomi Fights Back Against Fast and Google
Practical Tips for Using WebPosition Gold 2:
E-Mailing Reports Directly to Yourself or to Clients
WebPosition Gold 2 Book Released on Amazon and
in Bookstores
Reader Reports Success with About.com Tip

If you missed these or other key discussions, you can find the back issues at:

http://www.marketposition.com/newsletters.htm

Other Resources:

FirstPlace Software, Inc. produces several products, including WebPosition, the first software program to report your search positions on the major search engines and to help you improve those positions.

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