Search Engine optimization HELP

[KD1]

Hi folks

Still in the process of designing my site, NOW the big big question how do i get my site listed highly in top search engines. I have read many articles of companies offering this service but does it really work ??

I am not over technical so plain explanation appreciated. After all its no good having a shop on a mountain top in the alps if no one can find it. I understand getting your site linked with other companies helps, also having a site map which is created in Actinic automatically. Should i be doing anything else using actinic software to help. I dont quite understand metatags as i believe these are also important so perhaps someone could explain. Is there a simple solution to answer this million dollar question in simple terms please ?

The more i read into search optimization the more i loose the plot as it does get a bit technical. Is there any software you can recommend that will do this for you 100% and give your site the maximum help to get your site on pages one two or three of search engines.

Thanks
Keith

[leehack]

Keith a search of the forum on this subject will yield help which will be 100% more complete and helpful than brief answers in this thread. This really is a subject done to death in the forum and there is some fantastic help already written.

[KD1]

Thanks Lee

I do some searching

PS any joy on the layout question from a previous thread ???

[Duncan Rounding]

There's no easy way out for SEO. Actinic does the job reasonbly well out of the box so long as you describe your sections and products well.

You best bet is to search the forum for SEO and read through lots of the posts.

No one can guarantee your site will get into the top ten - if they say they can then don't believe them. You can optimise your site descriptions etc for search keywords/phrases and after some time those words/phrases may do well in the SE listings but that will mainly depend how competitive that keyword/phrase is and the rating of your site (quantitity of incoming links etc)

It's a massive and constantly changing subject - the sooner you start chipping away at understanding it the better. Optimization takes many months and is never ending - just do little by little and monitor the results.

[KD1]

thanks Duncan

[RuralWeb]

Is there a simple solution to answer this million dollar question in simple terms please ?

NO is the simple answer you are looking for

[Tickle]

Keith,

as mentioned, the forums have lots on this. You can't just put in SEO as the search term though so add something else or put in "search engine" for instance.

If you go to Google and hunt around their site you find they have a good webmaster guide advising on best practise for your site. You'll want to register your site with them and look into the site verfication and sitemap submission process. They also have useful tools there to assess how you're doing. Doing a search on "google sandbox" in these forums will show you what to expect for the first couple of months or so.

Also look into technical tools like keyword/keyphrase assessors, e.g. kwmap to help determine how the words you might choose will perform against other sites. Tool like webceo do a good job on this as well.

However, other than using pay per click, you can expect your site to be completely invisible for many weeks from initial launch.

[fatoftheland]

KD1

There really is no easy way to get to the top of the search engines. We have had a store running for a year now and for the 1st 6 months not a single sale came from organic search engine listings. (Organic are those natural listings in google which cost nothing, underneath the blue featured listing at the top). All our orders came from google adwords campaigns, which I am afraid to say if your site is new you will more than likely have to invest in if you stand a chance of selling online.

You are probably going to find your site in the "Sandbox" which is the theoretical name for the place new sites go when google 1st finds them. You may have already read about this, but it is basically a holding pen and you may find that your site barely appears in google's SERPS for 3-18 months. This varies depending on your site. The only quick way out of this (by quick I mean 3-6 months) is by updating your content daily if possible, increasing one-way inbound links to your site, highly relevant content consisting of mostly text on your site and a little bit of luck!

I cannot stress enough that their is not easy way with SEO. Do not waste your money on any software which promises 100% top ten google listing, these usually make use of Black Hat SEO techniques and will get you banned before you've even started. Also steer clear of SEO companies who gurantee and top 10 google listing. These SEO companies are liars as nobody can guarantee this. They will just sell you crap backlinks from pages which have more outbound links than content on the page. These are worthless.

Google is a very clever beast which nobody can tame. It constantly changes to make it harder for you to get to the top. The following will however get you started and help you reach that elusive top ten listing:

1. Create a google sitemap and yahoo sitemap - Their are lots of tools online for this www.auditmypc.com have a great one. Create in XML and submit it to to google and yahoo.

2. Work on building backlinks. Start by contacting companies who have relevant content to your own. Email them and ask if they would be willing to link to your site. It may need to be a reciprocal link but these are better than nothing. If there are any organisations of governing bodies which operate in your sector, approach them as these links are valued by google much more.

3. Build relevant pages which have oodles and oodles of text about your products and drop a few links into these pages which go to your products. Build these outside of Actinic if you can in pure CSS, using paragraph tags and heading tags so google can read these easily. Do not put them in a sub folder like the acatalog folder as these will then be viewed by google as more important than actinic pages. Pages like this rank better, but make sure the content is readable by a person and not just by search engines. It is important to build content for people as this also pleases the search engines

4. Create a google adwords account and research into which keywords your competitors are bidding on. If you need help on getting started with adwords then google the name "Perry Marshall" he has some great e-books on Google Adwords which will help you beat your competitors when it comes to top performing adwords campaigns.

When it comes to adwords even if you have great organic google listings you still need campaigns. Adwords and other PPC generate guaranteed traffic and are far more predictable than organic listings.


I hope this helps you to get started. Good luck, you're gonna need it!

[KD1]

Thanks Guys

Great advice

I see i have a lot of work still to do and learn

[chris ashdown]

Put you main keywords into the main search engines say for instance "walking stick" into Google the answer is 3,080,000 is the number of sites relating to that keyword, If you reduce it to just UK then the number is still 1,020,000 sites

To get to Number 10 or up you have to be better than all the other 1 million, so look what the top 20 have done and try to improve on it

Everyone has their own idea of what gets you up to the top like inward links and half a dozen other idea's but normally you can find a site near the top that does not follow that specific idea. so try a bit of everything, make the site clean, quick and simple to use and if you can afford it try adwords with a small budget at the start which most people would agree helps you get onto most other search engines

DONT FORGET THERE IS LIFE OUTSIDE GOOGLE LIKE Yahoo, MSN,BBC ASK and many more With my own sites Google is only 45% of referalls "Big" yes but what of the other 55%

[KD1]

Put you main keywords into the main search engines say for instance "walking stick" into Google the answer is 3,080,000 is the number of sites relating to that keyword, If you reduce it to just UK then the number is still 1,020,000 sites

To get to Number 10 or up you have to be better than all the other 1 million, so look what the top 20 have done and try to improve on it

Everyone has their own idea of what gets you up to the top like inward links and half a dozen other idea's but normally you can find a site near the top that does not follow that specific idea. so try a bit of everything, make the site clean, quick and simple to use and if you can afford it try adwords with a small budget at the start which most people would agree helps you get onto most other search engines

DONT FORGET THERE IS LIFE OUTSIDE GOOGLE LIKE Yahoo, MSN,BBC ASK and many more With my own sites Google is only 45% of referalls "Big" yes but what of the other 55%

What you have said makes real sense. There are few things though i am trying to grasp. For example i typed in cheap cartridges in google and one of the sites listed on page one was a company called Refresh Cartridges. So i downloaded this first page opened it in a html editor to look at there meta keywords etc.. shown below

Using actinic i have read somewhere to put only 2 keywords in related to the product for example if i where selling sony 42 inch plasma tv would i need to put in say Plasma,tv as my two keywords surely this would not bring search engines to my site. All i really need to know is what to put in the Meta description and Meta Keywords.

This is what that sites html meta key words showed : Dont know if its to technical for you but you might be able to explain

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<!-- saved from url=(0035)http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ -->
<HTML lang=en dir=ltr><HEAD><TITLE>Refresh Cartridges - Ink Cartridges, Toner Cartridges, Inkjet and Printer Ink UK</TITLE>
<META
content=" Refresh Cartridges; we sell Cheap Canon, Epson and Hewlett Packard inkjet cartridges for printers. Compatible cartridges, online ordering with FREE 1st class delivery"
name=Description>
<META
content="inkjet, epson, canon, hewlett, packard, hp, lexmark, compaq, cartridges, cartridge, refill, printer, printers, ink, inks, refresh, systems, quality, uk, united kingdom, printer ink, color, compatible ink cartridges, epson compatible ink cartridges, "
name=Keywords>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content=http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ name=URL>
<META content=English name=Language>
<META content="Refresh Cartridges Ltd." name=Author>
<META content="Refresh Cartridges Ltd." name=Copyright>
<META content=All name=Robots>
<META content="7 days" name=Revisit-After>
<META content=Published name=Document-Class>
<META content=Commercial name=Document-Classification>
<META content="Copywritten Work" name=Document-Rights>
<META content=Public name=Document-Type>
<META content=General name=Document-Rating>
<META content=Global name=Document-Distribution>
<META content=Dynamic name=Document-State>
<META content=Public name=Cache-Control><!-- EOF: Generated Meta Tags --><LINK
href="Refresh Cartridges - Ink Cartridges, Toner Cartridges, Inkjet and Printer Ink UK_files/stylesheet.css"
type=text/css rel=stylesheet>
<META content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>


Cheers Keith

[pinbrook]

All i really need to know is what to put in the Meta description and Meta Keywords.

Very few SEs take any notice of meta keywords.

You need you incorporate your keyword phrases in to the body text ie product descriptions and page title.

ie optimise for "sony plasma TV"

not "sony"
not "TV"
nor "plasma" single keywords are difficuly to optimse for and they are too generic.

who is to know what someone is looking for when they use "TV" as a searchterm... are they looking for TV listings, used TVs, sony TV,toshiba TV and so on

[fatoftheland]

As pinbrook says don't worry about meta tag keywords concentrate on getting the keywords into the content of your pages and the title.

The only meta tag I would worry about is the Meta Description. This is very important as it is used by many search engines to display the summary of a page when that page is listed in the search results.

If you do not fill out the meta description you may find that your pages all have the same summary. This will more than likely just be the first few lines of text google finds. Probably the text on the horizontal menu and the view cart and checkout text, and perhaps also the breadcrumb. It depends how your layout is displayed when just shown as plain text as google sees it.

This is why it is important to complete the meta description field in actinic for every page before your site is live and gets indexed. I made this fatal mistake and google has many pages from my site indexed with the same summary in SERPS!

The easiest way to do this is by exporting your catalog to CSV and then using a forumula to combine the product names listed on each section page. Then re-import your csv.

[chris ashdown]

Dont forget to name your jpg's something like sony_plasma_tv.jpg and not sptv001.jpg

Some people advise using _ and others - but the choice is up to you

Not sure how much this helps but seems woth doing as it gives you another mention on each page

[fatoftheland]

KDI

I would highly recommend the following ebook as a decent guide to many of the things you should consider when trying to improve your google ranking. I've only recently come across this book and can honestly say that everything mentioned is worth doing. It's a great resource and well worth 20 quid:

http://www.johnston.co.uk/google-ebook/index.php