The short answer is a resounding YES! You’re probably thinking, “Come on Mike, does this really make a difference in the world of millions of websites?”. Here again, the answer is YES! You have to remember when I started this portion of our discussion about a week ago, there are a number of little things that you have to pay attention to that together, provide the results you want. Although these things may seem insiginificant in the scheme of things, they all add up to a proven and winning combination. Having said that, let’s move on to discussing the subject at hand.

Meta Tags

There are many people that will tell you that Meta tags don’t matter anymore and that most of the search engines don’t use them. My testing however has shown that even Google uses them not only for it’s indexing, but also for it’s directory listings. Overall they may not be as important as back links, but they still play a part in how the search engines list you and they do add relevance to how you get listed. It all comes down to keywords. My advice when it comes to meta tags is that you should place your top 5 – 10 keywords in not only your Meta Keyword section, but you should also include them in the Description for your site. So for example, the Meta information for this site is as follows:


meta name="description" content="Free Internet Marketing Tips discussing affiliate marketing programs, starting your own online business, home business programs, teen business, internet marketing strategies, Search Engine Optimization, business plans consultants, online small business marketing, secret business strategies, business opportunities, internet marketing blogging, Search Engine Marketing; Website promotion and internet advertising services, Starting your own internet business, website Linking, back Linking and reciprical links, Internet, marketing, house, home, business, internet marketing, strategies, tips, tricks, money, business, finance, wordpress, blogger, blogging"

meta name=”keywords” content=”internet marketing, internet marketing strategies, seo, search engine optimization, Free, marketing secrets, millionaire marketing methods”

Now you may be thinking that I have overloaded these meta tags, and you’re right I have. You should limit your keywords to about 160 characters because that’s about where the search spiders will stop looking, but I have found that allowing the search engine spiders to determine where they want to stop looking at the keywords is best for a site like this one where we are discussing a lot of different subjects. Now for a site where you are selling a specific product, idea, or service, you should only use a tight set of keywords so that your traffic is more targeted. The reason for this is because you want to have a high conversion rate on your sales and if you are using a lot of different keywords, your conversion rate will suffer because you may be getting traffic that has no intention of purchasing what you offer simply because you didn’t use the proper keywords, not only in your meta tags, but throughout your website content. So if this is your goal, then you definately don’t want a meta tag set to look like ours above.

Keyword Relevance

This brings us to the other subject of keyword relevance and keyword frequency. This plays an even bigger part in how well the search engines are going to rank your site than the meta tags do. Most, if not all search engines rank keyword frequency and relevance higher than they do the meta tag data so in terms of importance. In fact, this is proba bly one of the most important things you should be planning as you build your website.

What I suggest is that you pick approximately 10-20 keywords that tightly describe your product or service. You should be picking these keywords based off the following criteria. Who is your target market? What do they want? What are the likely keywords they will type in when they do a search for your kind of product or service? Are they young, old, rich or poor? Is your product localized to a particular demographic? If so then this will play a big part in the keywords you choose. I can’t emphasize enough on the importance and the time you should take in developing your keywords for your site. To get a good idea of what the most popular search terms, you will need to use a tool like Wordtracker Tour which gives you data you cannot get from the free online tools like Overture Search or Google Keyword Search. If you want the advantage over your competitors when it comes to keywords, Wordtracker Tour is the only way to go. This link will take you to the free tour and you will see what I mean. Wordtracker gives you keywords that show how many times it has been searched for by all the top search engines for the past 90 days and then also shows you how many competing websites there are that use the search phrases listed. None of the free tools will do this for you and you can actually Identify niches using Wordtracker that you wouldn’t be able to identify otherwise.

Once your keywords are identified you need to get them incorporated into your site, site headings, sub headings and in the content of the page. Your h1, h2 headings are so important when it comes to your keywords that you will want to make be sure they get placed there. The search engines place a pretty high relevance to your site based off the keywords in your headings so make sure they are present there. Likewise, the content of your site needs to have a certain amount of your keywords in order to be effective, which leads us to the issue of keyword frequency.

Keyword Frequency/Density

The rule of thumb here should be for every 100 words or text your keywords should be injected approximately 5 times. Now this rule of thumb isn’t set in stone and you really need to test your site to see what percentage works best. Since each site topic is different, it really just depends on the popularity of the keywords or subject matter of the site in question. In general however, this percentage seems to be a magic number and although it sounds easy enough to implement something like this, keeping your content flowing and readable, while implementing this kind of keyword frequency isn’t always easy. I do think that getting as close as you can to this number is important, I think the actual content is more important and you shouldn’t sacrifice the quality of your content for the sake of hitting these numbers, so keep that in mind as you build your site and it’s content.

Whatever you do, don’t keyword spam your site, you could ultimately get rejected by some search engines if they believe this is what you are doing so as I just mentioned, just keep your content flowing as you would normally and then analyze it to see if your keywords are close to the 5/100 rule. If it’s on the low side then see where you might increase it, if it’s on the high side then you may want to see if you can tone it down a bit.

The overall goal is to get search engine traffic and give yourself the best chances of ranking high, so let’s summarize what we’ve discussed:

• Research Keywords for a tight market segment using tools like Wordtracker Tour
• Ensure that your keywords are Relevant to your site, product or service.
• Populate your Meta description and Meta keyword tags with your keywords, but don’t overload it because it can dilute your conversion rate on sales.
• Maintain the 100/5 rule for your keyword frequency but ensure that your website content doesn’t suffer for the sake of the frequency rule.

I look forward to your feedback and or comments on this subject.

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<< SEO Website Content – Part 2 — SEO Website Structure and Layout – Part 4 >>

In a nutshell, It’s my belief that Content is King, but that doesn’t mean that other strategies don’t work or aren’t important in your overall SEO strategy. There are so many facets of Search Engine Optimization “SEO”, that it’s really tough to give conclusive information on what’s most important when it comes to this subject. Unless, you TEST! That’s right, the only way you are going to know what works and what doesn’t is if you test everything you do when it comes to SEO. It is the only sure fire way to cut through all the hype that’s out there and really get to the meat of what works.

I’m going to give you a good example. When I started this blog approximately 2 weeks ago, I purposely didn’t announce it to the world, didn’t create posts anywhere else on the web about it, or even tell friends about it. Why? Because I wanted to perform a test and that was to see where my Google ranking would be based purely on the content of the site. Now I will say that I did submit the site to Google, but that’s the only form of advertisement I’ve used to affect getting it listed. I’ve done this kind of testing repeatedly for all my sites, but the rules change with the search engines so it’s important to continually test to see what is and is not working. So what are the results after having the site up for only 2 weeks? Well, I think you’ll be surprised.

By performing a Google search on just a few keywords, here are the results at the time of this writing. These are keywords that more than likely people are paying for and not something so specific to this site that it would sway the results. In one search I used the term “Millionaire Marketing” and in the other I used “Internet Marketing Methods”. In the case of the first term the site is ranked 17th and in the case of the second term it’s ranked 35th! Now I don’t know about you, but getting this kind of ranking due to content is pretty phenominal, especially when you consider that there are many sites and site owners who are paying for rankings either via adwords placement or from paying SEO experts to get their ranking up. Consider that and the fact that no other method was used to get these ranks other than the content in the site and I think you’ll agree that Content within your site is a huge factor in it’s Search Engine Ranking.

Backlinks are Queen!

In case you aren’t aware, you can test your sites to see where backlinks may be coming from through many different websites such as Backlink Checker Use this tool to check this site to see that we have no backlinks.

Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that this is all you should do when you are trying to increase the ranking of your site, but I am saying that the content of your site has a huge factor in how well it’s going to do in the Search Engines and goes a long way in giving you a much higher ranking compared to your cometitors if the content is there.

Here’s the deal though, since we know Content is King without a doubt, Backlinks are Queen and if you are serious about getting any real top spots within Google then you will need to get as many backlinks to your site which use the proper anchor text of the keyword terms you want to rank for.  We will talk about Backlinks at length in another segment, but just keep this in mind as you build your sites.

Now there are a lot of people in the Internet Marketing world that discount Meta tags, especially when people are talking about Google, but my testing has shown that Meta Tags, Headings, Keyword Frequency/Density all play a part in Content Management and how well your site is going to do based purely on Content. I will be discussing these other areas surounding content over the next few days so stay tuned and begin developing a plan of action for your own site(s) to improve their ranking via related content optimization techniques.

<< SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Part 1 — SEO Keyword Density / Frequency and Meta Tags – Part 3 >>

Well, you will probably get 20 different answers if you were to ask 20 different people. This particular subject is so broad that there companies who spend all of their time doing only this for their customers. One of the things that makes this particular subject so difficult to manage is that each search engine has their own set of rules for optimizing against their algorithms, so if you setup your pages to be optimized against one particular search engine, you may not be optimized for the others. This doesn’t mean that you won’t be in a good position in most of the top search engines, it just means that there are differing rules for each. For example, some search engines rely on Meta tags, where others don’t put very much weight on them but you should still optimize your meta tags simply becasue some do use them.

Although I’m going to discuss specifically how to optimize for Google, I will be recommending other areas of optimization which will help with all the other search engines as well. You may be asking yourself, “Now wait a minute, we haven’t spent time talking about website development?”, and you’re right, but this was by design because a big part of designing your website has to revolve around Search Engine Optimization. If you know anything about SEO, then you know what I’m talking about. If you’re new to all of this, don’t worry, I’m going to explain this in as much detail as I possibly can over the next week or so. There is a saying in the internet marketing world and that is, you need to follow the 80/20 rule. What does this mean? It means that if you intend to be successful in marketing any product or service online, you need to spend 80% of your time driving traffic to your sites and only 20% on the details/technology/website design etc.. Spending to much time on website design (the way it looks) is one of the biggest areas that most new people stumble on and you should instead focus on adding great content to your website and then make sure to drive traffic to your site. One of the best ways to do this early on is to make sure you follow the things we are going to discuss here on SEO.

Following are some of the areas which we will discuss over the coming week(s) concerning Search Engine Optimization:

• Optimizing your websites for Search Engine Optimization
• The top Search Engines
• Submitting your Websites to Search Engines
• Submitting to Search Engine Directories
• How long does it take to see Search Engine Listing results?
• What are the most important areas of SEO to concentrate on?
• What are keywords and why are they important?
• What is keyword density, frequency, prominence and proximity and how do they affect my rankings?
• What are Meta Tags and how should they be used?
• What is Linking and how does it affect my Search Engine Ranking?
• Domain Names and SEO importance

And much much more…

<< SEO Top Level Category – SEO Website Content – Part 2 >>