Search engine strategies introduction

Search engine strategies for traffic building & page rankings

So we ask ourselves, where do we even begin on our journey to receiving traffic or making sales online.

I will presume you already have a basic website built (3 pages min), it’s filled with lots of lovely pictures and a title that says “Welcome to my great wonderful website”. As we touched on earlier a good domain name (url) and title are of utmost importance, try to create unique and accurate page titles. If your website is called http://www.the diet shop.com, don’t title your pages WELCOME TO THE DIET SHOP or ABOUT THE DIET SHOP think out the box.

The easiest way of doing this is using search engine strategies and keyword research, your website needs a traffic grabbing title and it helps to be search engine friendly. So just how do you decide what keywords you should and should not use.

There is a great free resource from Google for just this kind of research, its called Google Keywords tool and it lets you pick the niche targeted keywords for your url`s and title`s.

When using the Google keyword tools in your search engine strategies, I recommend that you target niche long-tailed keywords of between 3-5 keywords. Aim for 3 targeted keywords as a sentence these will make great page titles, think about what you would type if you were doing a search.

ideally the keywords you choose should have around 10,000 monthly searches on the Google keyword tool, look for low to medium competition words. When your armed with your list of keywords (at least 5), goto the Google home page search bar. Begin typing each long-tailed keyword individually to do a search, place  ” ” quotes around each set of words or sentence this will tell Google to only search for that exact fraze or set of words

Just below the Google search bar it tells you how many searches have been performed on the keywords you’re targeting, discard any keywords with over 300,000 searches per month as these normally have a lot of competition. Using this type of search engine strategies you are almost guaranteed to pick hot domain names and great titles for your web/blog pages.

Here is a quick video by Matt Cutts of google that explains how Google reveal their search results

Search engine strategies

Search engine optimization or seo for short, just what is it?

Well to keep it short and straight to the point, SEO is a vital technique within Internet Marketing to not only help search engines to find your website, but also for your new or regular customers and information gathers to do the same.

There is a lot of debate regarding search engine strategies, which are the right or wrong ways to proceed. I have found over the years the best way to move forward can be to master just one technique, and rely on that for rankings and traffic. The problem with this scenario is that the world of Internet Marketing and search engine strategies/optimization is forever changing, it never stands still so what works today may not work tomorrow.

This is what Google says on its website that it is looking for from our websites and blogs?

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your cont ent.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

In all honesty this list could go on and on use your initiative when planning your search engine strategies, click for more info on what Google expects. In order to use search engine strategies effectivly you need to understand the search engines themselves, the chart below explains the market share of the major search engines

Image via Wikipedia

So with Google holding 62% and yahoo 17% of the search engine market share, you may be right in thinking you only need to use search engine strategies on these 2 major site. But would that be right?