Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Methods Tutorial
By: Eric Koger - Updated July 7th, 2003

Websites designed by Biznesshosting, Inc. Designers are optimized for good search engine placement. Our sites rank especially well on Google, Yahoo, and AOL because of our advanced web design techniques that create “Search Engine Friendly” web pages.

· No Tricks
· No Doorway Pages
· No Miracles
· Just sound results, and lots of direct, targeted traffic

For websites developed by Biznesshosting, Inc. all setup fees are included in the Web Design Cost. For all other websites, setup fees are determined by website size, and estimated workload.

We will undertake the following steps in the optimization of your website.

Step 1: Keyword Research
We use multiple tools to determine the high traffic terms relevant to your website. We then compare the “popularity” of each term to the competitiveness for that term among the websites listed in the top 10 results. We then develop a strategy to achieve the greatest number of high traffic top 10 listings.

Step 2: On Page Optimization
Search engines look at websites like people do. Anything visible on the webpage is important to the search engine. Very few factors on a website that are not immediately visible with the normal human eye are ever considered by search engine ranking algorithms.

We choose 2-3 keyword phrases to target for each page on the site, sometimes more (one good phrase might encompass 3 phrases and you can go after more, for example "free online insurance quotes" encompasses "insurance quotes", "online insurance quotes", and "free online insurance quotes", to a lesser extent it also covers "free insurance quotes") and incorporate them into the site.

Where do we put the keywords?
We will utilize the keywords as many times as possible on your website without making it incoherent, or otherwise affecting the natural flow of the language on the site. We place them in the following tags, listed in order of importance.

1. Title    (<Title>)
2. Header Tags    (<H1>, <H2>, <H3>...)
3. Links    (<a href="http://www.volico.com")
4. Main Content   (Any visible text on the web page, bold tags and italics help this)
5. Alt Text   (Text used to describe images <img src="image.gif" alt="Man Fishing on Boat">)
6. Meta Description
7. Meta Keywords

Step 3: Internal-linking Strategies
Can the search engines find every page on your website? The more pages the search engines index of your website, the more possibilities you have to rank well, and the better your link popularity scores will be. We create a well outlined, keyword-rich linking structure for your website which allows search engines to find every page easily through text links. We create the structure in such a way that it makes sense hierarchically, and so that people and search engines can find what they’re looking for in the order that they should find it. In addition we create a Sitemap page with links to every page on the website, which we use when submitting to search engines.

Step 4: Submission and Directory Listings
We hand submit your website to all of the major search engines that allow free submissions, such as Google, FAST (Lycos/AllTheWeb), and Inktomi (MSN). We also submit your site, carefully and with a well-worded description to the major directories such as www.DMOZ.org , www.JoeAnt.com , and www.goguides.org . There are many other good viable directories out there, but these three are a good start and are among the best of the free ones. If your website is non-commercial, then we will also try to submit your website to the www.zeal.com directory also.

If your budget will allow it, we may also submit your website to the paid directories such as the Yahoo Directory, and Business.com. Yahoo is a sound directory and helps boost your Link Popularity Score with the search engines significantly, especially for the first 2 months. Business.com is also a solid paid directory listing and can net you up to 6 links for only $99/Year.

Note: “SEO Campaign” refers to the above 4 steps anywhere/anytime this phrase is used by Biznesshosting, Inc.. And “Link Campaign” refers to step 5 below.

Step 5: Link Campaigning
In the long run, this is the second best thing you can do for your site besides optimize the pages themselves. Links from other websites not only give you visits from those websites (almost 10% in good cases) but will dramatically boost your ranking in the search engines. Search engines consider the number of links a site has from other websites as a sign of importance, and they base their Link Popularity Score accordingly. This is then used as part of the equation that determines your rank in the search engines. Google calls it Page Rank, and if you can build a high page rank, you will be able to compete for the high traffic keywords!

The process for obtaining a link is non-trivial. We research each site thoroughly to identify the individual page where we would like the link, write the text for the link as we would like it and as fits within the context of the target site, and then issue a well written professional plea for a link. On occasion there will be two or more requests needed before there is a reply from the site. The process can clearly take a lot of time and effort, and is best accomplished by personnel who know the web and how to design web sites.

As a result, EACH link request submission takes an average of 15 minutes. There are a great many sites on the web that would be appropriate for a link. We would need to pick these sites in groups of 60 and request links one group at a time. At 4 per hour, each group of 60 would require 15 hours. Properly done, we would want to be listed on as many sites as possible. This would be billed as link request groups are begun, and thus this is a flat rate task. Contact us for a specific quote. We recommend a 60-link/month campaign that will steadily build your site’s Link Popularity Score and visits from linking websites.

Of course, you could also petition for links independently. The easiest way is to find the email address of the Webmaster of a related site and ask for a link. You should usually add a link to their site first, to encourage them to add one to yours (this is called link exchanging, or a reciprocal link). Adding outgoing links from your site doesn't hurt your Link Popularity Score unless you add large numbers of non-reciprocal links to outside sites. Try requesting links from websites in blocks of 20, 30, or 60 at a time, but don't try to do more than that at once. You have to keep track of which sites return your link and which ones do not, because you don’t want to link to and drive traffic to sites that aren't doing the same for your website. As you can imagine, this can be quite involved, which is why we recommend our customers to use our link campaign.

 

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