Optimizing a Site for Google

Chapter 4 Optimizing a Site for GoogleIn This Chapter Understanding the building blocks of site optimization Researching and determining great keywords for your site Selecting a domain n

Chapter 4 Optimizing a Site for Google

In This Chapter

Understanding the building blocks of site optimization

Researching and determining great keywords for your site

Selecting a domain name for visibility in Google

Designing your content and pages

Accommodating the Google spider

Knowing the important SEO terms

Considering professional SEO services

The field of search engine optimization (SEO) is both simple and complex.It’s simple in that the principles of preparing your site for beneficialcrawling are a lot easier than SEO companies (who want you as a client)might have you believe It’s also complex because ideal SEO goes beyondtweaking a site’s tags or page structure to a deeper consideration of a site’spurpose, who it wants to attract, and how it wants visitors to behave

SEO might or might not be connected to making money (For low-revenueand no-revenue sites that want more traffic, the main investment is time.)Improving a site’s placement on Google’s search pages is a generally desir-able goal for any Webmaster, even those not selling products or trying to con-vert free visitors into paying customers So this chapter concentrates on siteoptimization for its own sake I sometimes refer to revenue priorities, but thefocus is raising a site’s visibility for the sake of visibility

To that end, search engine optimization — which, in the context of this book,means Google optimization — is about creating Web pages that are rankedhighly in search engines Optimization is not about tricking the Google spider,though some disreputable SEO companies have based their services on justthat — a risky game, in Google’s case Optimization is a win-win-win strategythat results in a site that’s more coherent to visitors, ranked higher in thesearch index, and more prosperous for the owner In a well-optimized site,the goals of everyone involved converge

Optimizing before Building

A fully optimized site is not built from the outside in — in other words, as avisitor conceives it Instead, you build an optimized site from key conceptsand keywords, and its pages never stray from a tight connection to thoseconcepts and their related keywords Furthermore, business-oriented Webdesigners are always focused on their target audience — the people whosearch for the key concepts and keywords embedded in the Web page Thiscircular thinking — the relentless integration of design with result, of key-word with content — distinguishes a finely optimized site

In theory, you would construct a perfectly optimized site in roughly thisorder:

1 Conceive the site.

Conception means determining the site’s purpose in specific terms An

optimized site can have more than one purpose (information publishingand Amazon affiliation, for example), but those purposes should betightly related Conception means also identifying your target audience

2 Identify keywords.

Boiling down the site’s mission to key concepts and keywords is tial Keywords can be single words or phrases, but keep phrases short fornow — three words at most For example, using the fictional The Coin

essen-Trader site (from Chapter 3), the keywords and phrases might be coins,

coin trader, coin trading, trading, collecting, coin collecting, and so on.

Eventually, you need keywords for every page of your site, and theymight differ from the core words used to distill the subject matter ofyour entire site During the entire keyword process, think about yourtarget audience — not only as a topical demographic, but as searchersgoing into Google with certain keywords When you identify keywords,you identify your customers

3 Register a domain.

Choose a domain name that incorporates core keywords

4 Design the site.

Use spider-friendly principles explained in this chapter, Chapter 3, andthe final section of Chapter 2

5 Write and acquire content.

Content development is an ongoing process that starts while you designthe site

6 Optimize content by keyword.

Embedding keywords in your page’s text helps visitors and Googleunderstand the content quickly

7 Tag the site.

Tagging means embedding keywords into important HTML tags thatGoogle’s spider observes

So much for theory, you’re probably thinking Few Webmasters deal withoptimization issues from the very start Most people optimize after the fact,which is why SEO professionals stay in business: It’s harder to fix problemsthan avoid them But no matter how you approach it, improving your opti-mization isn’t hard at all And the knowledge it provides about sound pagedesign, content development, concise communication, and smart taggingtranslates to invaluable online marketing technique

The steps just provided merely sketch a process The following sections getdown to the nuts and bolts

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

If you’re not dreaming of keywords at night, you’re not optimizing enough

Keywords are the thread that runs through the entire SEO process from start

to finish

Your keywords are the kernels of your site’s content They’re embedded inyour site’s important headers and HTML tags If your domain name is apt,keywords are drilled into every incoming link because the domain name isspelled out in each link to your site An appropriate domain name spreadsthe identity and purpose of your site through the Web

Your content should be densely saturated with keywords Your keywords arecarried into Google’s search engine by your future customers and visitors,who are searching for your site as well as similar sites that might containlinks to your site — links that spell out your site domain, which, ideally, con-tains core keywords If you’re an AdWords advertiser, your site’s keywordsprobably form the basis of your ads and determine on which results pagesyour ads appear In that case, Google users searching for your keywords findyour site through your ads, further driving to your site visitors who are think-ing about the same keywords you are

Keywords are the battleground of Google marketing You and your tors are fighting for position on search pages resulting from keywords youhave in common Remember, Google is all about keywords, so your site should

competi-be all about keywords As I descricompeti-bed in the preceding section, keywords canactually form the basis of a business plan and even help determine the nature

of a business, if that business will be marketed online This concept might

seem far-fetched — doesn’t the business come first, then the keywords whichdefine it? Often, yes But keyword-based marketing has become an imperative

in the online space, especially for small businesses, and I am seeing sites andbusiness plans created on a foundation of keywords

Keywords are not purchased — not even in Google AdWords, where the tiser purchases a position, not a keyword Keywords can be shared but a posi-tion cannot be shared When you select keywords around which to build andmarket a site, you’re attempting to secure position on the search page, in com-petition with other “owners” of the same keywords All this notwithstanding,

adver-you should feel as if adver-you own adver-your keywords and that they will propel adver-you to

dominance in your field

This section deals with selecting keywords Later, I discus how to embedthem in your content and HTML tags

Going for the edge

When it comes to building business, you don’t just optimize — you optimize

for something More accurately, you optimize for somebody, and that

some-body is the customer or visitor you seek

Accordingly, define your site in terms of specific keywords, not general ones

If you operate a courier service in Chicago, for example, you might not want

to optimize for the keyword couriers Your potential customers probably

reside in Chicago and are searching more specifically, by location Optimizing

for chicago couriers makes more sense Check both searches in Google to see the competitive difference of the two key phrases A recent check of couriers

brought up 441,000 results, the top 10 of which were large companies offering

nationwide service A search of chicago couriers resulted in about 19,000 hits,

including an undefined smattering of companies in the top 10 There was

room to make noise on the chicago couriers results page Interestingly, a search for chicago couriers same day turned up 50,000 hits, with mostly small

companies near the top — only 4 of which operated strictly in Chicago Thatpage presented a tightly contested field, but with plenty of room for a same-day courier site dedicated to Chicago deliveries

This type of experimentation and keyword research is part of the keywordselection process Read on to find out about other keyword research tips

Checking out Wordtracker

Wordtracker is one of the most popular keyword assessment tools on theWeb Nearly everybody who optimizes has used Wordtracker at least once.This interactive gadget looks at your keywords, shows related keywords, and

displays a table displaying the relative popularity of keywords This much nology brought to bear on simple keywords might seem like overkill, but key-words are too important to treat casually In addition to choosing keywords(which, by itself, is not necessarily easy), you should assess their competitivevalue — and that’s exactly what Wordtracker does.

tech-Evaluating keywords means assessing two factors: popularity, or the quency with which they appear, and competition, or the number of sites using

fre-them (By “using them,” I mean using the keywords in any fashion and anycontext, not just in the site’s metatags.)

Wordtracker covers both bases by suggesting keywords related to your coreterms and by evaluating the suggested keywords you select (In Wordtracker,

a keyword means either a word or a phrase.) Wordtracker is a paid service,

charging by the day, the week, the month, a 3-month period, or a year Youcan concentrate your keyword research into a 1-day or 7-day blitz, withoutcommitting to an ongoing subscription

Wordtracker offers a free trial of 15 keyword suggestions, using just onesearch engine (Alta Vista as of this writing) instead of the multiple searchengines that paying customers get The free trial is a good opportunity towalk through Wordtracker’s screens and tools Start here:

www.wordtracker.com

Click the icon for the free trial and surf through whatever opening screensWordtracker throws at you before getting down to business The Wordtrackerprocess comprises four steps:

 Enter keywords On the Step 1 page, enter one or more keywords Keep

your list short for now One word works well because it gives Wordtracker

a relatively open field to find related words As you can see in Figure 4-1,you can opt in and out of two settings: Lateral and Thesaurus I find theLateral search more helpful because it investigates hundreds of Webpages related to the keyword topic The Thesaurus just finds synonyms,

which doesn’t turn up much with new terms such as mp3 You may

choose both types of search, but because the free trial delivers cated results, I’d stick with Lateral Click the Proceed button

trun- Select keywords Step 2 displays a preliminary list of related keywords,

with your original at the top Click a keyword for more detail When you

do, the right side of the screen displays a table containing the selectedword and a list of related words (See Figure 4-2.) On this screen, anyclicked keyword from the left-hand list is added to a basket in whichWordtracker performs its keyword analysis and comparison in Step 4

Try the shovel icons; they dig into the corresponding keyword and find

related words to it (Clicking the shovel icon next to your original

key-word merely replicates Step 1, so try the shovel icon next to a differentword.) The number in the Count column indicates the number of timesthat keyword appears in Wordtracker’s index The Predict column isWordtracker’s estimate of search queries for that keyword in majorsearch engines over the next 60 days (Click the Predict link to see whichengines are currently represented.) When you’re finished, click thearrow icon for Step 3

 Export or e-mail your keywords Wordtracker creates a tab-delimited

text file of your selected keywords and an e-mail link (both in the paidversion) In the trial version, simply move through this step by clickingthe Step 4: Competition link

 View your competition results If you select all 15 keywords in Step 2,

this step takes a minute to load What you finally see is a table listingyour keywords and their total instances in Wordtracker’s index, thistime ranked by the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), as shown inFigure 4-3

Figure 4-1:

Entering

a keyword

in tracker

Word-Figure 4-3:

Measure ofthe potentialmarketabil-ity of yourwords

Figure 4-2:

trackerdisplaysrelatedkeywordsand theirpopularity

Word-KEI is a measure of each keyword’s competitive power and is constructed

from two other statistics: the keyword’s count (frequency of appearance) and its breadth (the number of sites containing it) The idea here is that

by comparing a keyword’s frequency with its prevalence, you can gaugeits effectiveness When a high count is concentrated in only a few sites,there’s less competition among sites optimizing for that word than therecould be Conversely, when a lower count is distributed among a largenumber of sites, competition is fierce among sites optimizing for a rela-tively unpopular word Broadly speaking, it makes more sense to opti-mize your site for the first scenario than for the second

Don’t use KEI as a rote tool, obeying it mindlessly As you see in Figure 4-3,

KEI gives the highest rank to stacy’s mom mp3 A large number of hits are

con-centrated in 25 pages — possibly on a single site belonging to Stacy or hermom (Actually, a quick Google search reveals that Stacy’s Mom is a musicgroup.)

Note the high KEI of metal mp3, which might inspire an imaginative

entrepre-neur to test the waters with a page devoted to that music genre Note also

that mp3 scores much higher than mp3s, suggesting that a site optimized for

MP3 music topics should concentrate on the singular keyword, because theplural is relatively unpopular and spread among many sites

Read on to discover a free means of comparing the popularity of keywords assearch terms

Trying the Overture Search Suggestion Tool

Overture, a search technology company owned by Yahoo!, provides someservices similar to Google’s searching and AdWords programs Overtureoffers front-end searching at its main site, as Google does, but the company’smain businesses involve licensing its search engine to other companies andproviding a search-engine advertising service

The Overture Search Suggestion Tool reports the number of times your word (or phrase) was entered in Overture keyword boxes as a search termduring the previous month The report is easy, fast, free, and available forunlimited use Try it here:

key-inventory.overture.com

As you can see in Figure 4-4, Overture tells you about your term and delivers

a list (often a long one) of related keywords The list is ranked by frequency

of search use in the previous month

The Overture Search Suggestion Tool is valuable on two counts: It suggestskeywords and phrases that are in active play among searchers, and it rankskeywords according to popularity The Overture list gives you a good idea ofthe competitive landscape surrounding your keywords and offers ideas forniche subjects.

Remember the connection between keywords as search queries and words as linchpins of optimization? Roughly, if a keyword is in heavy rotation

key-as a search term, it is in rampant use key-as an optimization point That means(again, speaking broadly) when you optimize a page or site for a popular key-word, you’re competing in a thick field of sites These popular keywords arethe “hot” keywords that SEO consultants speak about The broader the sub-ject of your page, and the more general your keywords, the harder it is tomake your mark — a lesson I repeat in the chapters about AdWords Themore likely path to success lies in niche subject categories, where you cancreate uniquely powerful content, fine-tune your optimization, and climbtoward the top of that category’s search page

Keeping this in mind, use Overture to find keyword niches that apply to yourcontent (if you have content at this point) and to give you new keywordideas Then take these new ideas to Wordtracker (described in the precedingsection) to discover their position in the Keyword Effectiveness Index

Figure 4-4:

Relatedkeywordsand theirsearchcount inOverture

Google also provides a Keyword Suggestion Tool in the suite of online ucts associated with AdWords Anyone can use this keyword machine, evennonadvertisers, by going to this page:

prod-Adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox

Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool delivers unranked lists of keyword tions based on your original keywords Without any supporting information(popularity or competitiveness), the lists are arguably less useful than those

sugges-in Wordtracker and Overture But Google does an exemplary job on the gestion part, with deep, wide-ranging, and imaginative lists of keywords Nobody beats Google at understanding context throughout its index, andyou’ll be amazed at the interesting keyword suggestions, many of whichmanage to be both relevant and unexpected Google’s suggestion tool is anindispensable part of your keyword arsenal

sug-Peeking at competing keyword groups

The keyword tools described so far afford a broad view of your competition.The degree to which your keywords are hot is a measure of the competitive-ness you face You can also check the keywords in play at a specific siteeasily by looking at its meta-tag keywords (I get into optimizing metatagslater in this chapter.) The snooping described here isn’t unethical; the Web

is engineered to make code-specified keywords accessible to anyone Allmodern Web browsers display a page’s HTML code in two clicks

Checking the keywords of successful sites in your field is instructive, ing, and sometimes disillusioning You can get a tutorial in smart keywordingthis way; you can also get a cold-water lesson in the apparent irrelevancy oftagged keywords in some cases When a poorly tagged site lands in Google’stop ten results for certain keywords, you know that optimization isn’t every-thing, and that good content on its own can work wonders However, smartoptimization always helps promote good content

reveal-Checking a site’s metatags is a simple, three-step process:

1 Go to any site.

2 Click the View menu of your browser.

3 Choose Page Source, Source, or Page Info.

The Page Source and Source views display that page’s entire HTMLcode, either in a text processor such as Notepad or a special browserwindow, depending on your browser and its settings There is no way tochange the code of another site in your browser, even inadvertently ThePage Info view (in Netscape) summarizes the page’s feature in severalcategories, such as tags, graphics, and links

With the page’s source code on your screen (see Figure 4-5 for an example),look near the top for the metatags One metatag probably starts this way:

<meta name=”keywords” content=

followed by a string of keywords and keyword phrases If the page’s codedoesn’t contain the metatag like this, it simply means that the page’s ownerhas not coded keywords into the metatag But he or she might have opti-mized the page for certain keywords in other ways

The influence of metakeywords on search engine crawlers has diminishedduring the last few years, so it’s increasingly common to see pages withoutthem At any rate, you’re peeking at the metatag to gain keyword ideas andbetter understand a competing site’s success, not to critique that site’soptimization

You can also check out the page’s link text — an important area of page mization, as described in the Chapter 3 It’s easy to simply look at the site’s out-going links and view how they are worded The easiest way to do this, if youuse the Netscape browser, is to click the Page Info selection of the View menu,then click the Links tab to see a summary of all the site’s links and link text

opti-Figure 4-5:

A page’ssourcecode, withthe metakeyword taghighlighted

On the other hand, eBay (www.ebay.com) isn’t above optimizing for words in the metaspace, even though it has virtually no competition in theauction field However, eBay does compete ferociously in the broader e-tail-ing space, and its keywords reflect its desire to promote wide-ranging prod-uct categories: “ebay, electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles,sporting goods, ebay, digital cameras, antiques, tickets, jewelry, online shop-ping, auction, online auction.” See Figure 4-6.

key-Some major media sites, such as the New York Times site (www.nytimes.com), do not contain metakeywords Likewise, Google itself does not opti-mize its home page in this fashion, as you can see in Figure 4-7 (I understandthat google.comhas a rather high PageRank in Google.)

A recent Google search for picnic baskets hand-woven brought up www.basketville.comas the number-one site Checking its metakeywordsturned up: “Basketville, Baskets, Shaker baskets, Nantucket baskets, Ashsplint baskets, Black ash baskets, Basket weaving, Putney, Vermont, Antiquereproduction baskets, Shaker style reproductions, Nantucket style reproduc-tions, Picnic baskets, Gardening baskets, Laundry baskets, Country baskets,Spoke bottom baskets, Scrimshaw, Gift baskets, Basket store.” Note that

hand-woven is not a metakeyword; the site is optimized for that keyword inother ways

Figure 4-6:

The metakeywordtag,highlighted

in thesource code

of eBay’shome page

Determining great keywords

The tools described in this section help you brainstorm and evaluate words Eventually choices need to be made, and they are business-planchoices as much as optimization choices

key-Everyone wants to succeed in the businesses represented by hot keywords —the most-searched words — because that’s where the highest traffic flows Ifyou’re not on that first page of search results, you’re not visible However,rising to the top of competitive search pages is sometimes impossible

Success is less about meeting the competitive standard of hot keywords than

it is about becoming a hot site in a smaller niche There is a lot of traffic outthere Google fulfills over 55 billion searches a year A small niche in Googlestill represents thousands or millions of searches, and that many potentialvisitors and customers So, refine your keyword choices to specific, tightlydefined concepts around which you can build a high-quality, optimized page

Better to focus your ambition on quality and precision than grapple withGoliath

Figure 4-7:

Sourcecode ofGoogle’shome page

It doesn’tuse themetakeywordtag, whichwouldappear

in thehighlightedpart

The only meaningful test of keywords and your page’s optimization is mance Fortunately, Google makes performance easy to track through thePageRank display in the Google browser window and, of course, the searchresults pages However, remember that it can take six weeks for PageRankchanges to affect your place in the index Your traffic logs also serve as indi-cators of the success of your optimization efforts.

perfor-Selecting a Domain

Carrying through the idea that site optimization begins at the beginning, thefirst SEO step is to register your site’s domain The domain name should bechosen with an eye to the keywords around which your site is, or will be,constructed Ideally, the domain actually contains core keywords

Searching for com domain names can be discouraging With the Web 10 years old, most of the obvious com names have been long taken But as an obses-

sive domain-checker, I can tell you that imagination and brain-wracking sistence can locate that elusive name

per-The best domain from an optimization viewpoint is one that incorporatesyour chosen keywords You should probably ignore gigantic success storiesYahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Google, whose domain names (and companynames) have little contextual meaning If you own technology or a businessmodel as groundbreaking and earth-shaking as each of these companiesdeploys, you can get cute with the domain name, too

For most businesses, the domain name should convey the subject at hand.The relevance factor in the domain name isn’t about making it easy for visi-tors to remember you, although that doesn’t hurt You should choose adomain name that contains your keyword(s) for the Google spider, whichlooks hard at domains as indicators of relevance

The spider’s needs in this matter outweigh your visitors’ needs Accordingly,

throw out the old-school optimizing rule that com is a more valuable sion than net, biz, or the others Although it’s better to have a perfect domain name as a com than another extension, Google’s spider treats net, org, biz, and other domain extensions the same as the com extension As little as it

exten-cares about the domain extension, Googlebot does care about domain namesmatching page content, and it rewards that correlation

The average person remembers the com extension more readily than others,

and usually assumes that a site address uses that extension In that sense,

.com is preferable for business cards and conversations But when visitors

find your site through a search engine and then bookmark it in the browser,the extension type is irrelevant And from the viewpoint of search engineoptimization, the extension doesn’t matter So your job is to optimize with