One of our clients graciously shared his experience learning about SEO and building traffic to his website. His traffic increased from 200 visits a day to 3000 in just a year.

"I have spent the last 18 months reading everything I can possibly read about SEO (search engine optimization); I have come up with four topics which will cover everything I have learned about SEO and how to make your website soar in search engines.

Page Rank

Text Links

Content

Website Optimization

I began my research with what separates one site from others. Similar sites have varying degrees of SEO based upon factors: what are these factors? The first thing I noticed was that when visiting one site I saw this green bar on my browser and on other web sites I did not see this bar. What is this bar? This bar is the Google Page Rank Bar. Page rank is based upon a formula (ever changing I may add) that Google uses to determine the importance of a particular page, and when I mean a particular page, I mean a particular page.  As a home page (home pages usually have the highest page rank of any page on a domain) may have a PR of 6 and several internal pages may have a Page Rank of 3 or 4 and some even have zero page rank. I needed to understand what PR really meant, after a few hours of reading everything I could find about Google Page rank, I discovered that PR influences the Google search engine spider (or GoogleBot) in how often (if ever) and how deep GoogleBot goes on your website. Zero Page rank websites may only get indexed once a month when a Page rank 10 website may get indexed every hour. Huge websites likes Wikipedia have PR10 and have 100,000 webpage’s and these pages get indexed every single day and nearly every page gets indexed every single day. Indexing means GoogleBot goes over that page reads all the content on that page and provides search results based upon what it reads on that page. Yet a PR 0 Page may only get visited once a month and may only have its home page indexed. That is why some huge PR10 websites end up all over Google, Yahoo and Live, and most little tiny sites only show up under very specific search terms, at times only under a direct search for your URL (www.yourdomain.com) and will not show up under any other search. Now that I noticed this one differential between sites, I need to know how and why some sites have PR8, 9, or 10 and why some have PR0 or have not even been indexed.

Generally it is somewhat easy to figure out, you have nothing of value on your website and Google knows this and will not reward you or your website if you do not offer anything to the visitors of your website. If you provide site visitors with value, Google will reward you with traffic. So how to have value? You need to have content, relevant and interesting, something that people are interested in and something that cannot be found anywhere else on the internet. If you provide your visitors will value, Google, Yahoo and Live will see this and reward you with a better page rank which will inherently give your better SEO and deeper indexing. There is a little bit of the chicken and the egg theory in play, but I will save you some of the circles I went in and deliver you the information you need in the order you need it. Unfortunately I did not learn my SEO techniques in this order, I kind of scrambled around trying many different things in all different orders, but now I understand how to go about SEO and what steps need to be taken.

So the first thing you need is content for your website. Write information that is on topic and relevant to your website and DO NOT COPY IT from some other website. Why? Guess what Google can tell: the minute Google reads content it puts a date and time on that content and says this content was new on 12-14-07 at 10pm and if it sees that content again, it knows it and will ignore it or give the value for the content to the highest Page Rank to website displaying it. So the content on your site needs to be unique and original. In doing this you will give your site visitors value and hence Google will assume your site is now more valuable with the content you just posted then it was before you posted it. I know this sounds simple, yet many many internet companies do not realize this, great items for sale at great prices will not really help you unless there is additional value associated with your site and for your content.  This content can be in the form of product reviews, er product reviews, expert reviews, buying guides, product descriptions, articles on related topics, etc. Get creative.

OK now that you have decided to write some content for your site, you should make sure it is optimized. A couple of 1000-1200 word articles about your topic of choice will do the trick. Too short and Google knows, and too long and it is viewed as a ramble and will be penalized. You need to write to your topic and do not use filler words, you need good content.

So now you have your articles posted to your site, you have now added value to your site. Google will eventually find it, index it and give your site some value. Content is a never ending battle and you will need to continue to add content to your site for as long as you are in existence, or as long as you care about SEO and the benefits of SEO for your site, its sales and its popularity.

Now I have content on my site too, but Google came and saw my content, indexed a little bit of the text, and the search results that my site was appearing were far from relevant. Google seemed to pick up on few weird combinations of words and not really anything that I was saying, or topics I wanted to Google to get. I was perplexed, so I decided to find out why. Based upon what I read, each time a search engine spider comes to your site it takes a little more information and sorts it out based upon the last few times it was there and what has been recently added. This requires there to be new content nearly every time GoogleBot comes to your site especially in the beginning. That means you better write a relevant article about every week for the first 3-4 months your site is live, I watched as GoogleBot continued to come to my site and each time it picked up and few more keywords and phrases and started to sort them out and make sense of them and began to give my site some appropriate search terms. This was good news but GoogleBot or search engine spiders were only coming about once a week and this was taking forever, and I was getting frustrated. There had to be way to make GoogleBot and search engine spiders to come more often. How?

I began reading more. I learned that with the formula that search engines use, in particular Google, is do you have other websites linking to your site? If your type the words link: www.yourdomain.com, you will see a list of all the websites linking to your website. If your site is somewhat new this number is surely zero. So how does one get links to there site? Since you need to have links to your site from other sites for Google to come to your site more often, how do I get links? I started reading more. Turns out there are several ways to get links to your site. The simplest is to add your site to directories. Yahoo is a directory first and a search engine second. Now Yahoo is the god of all directories and they know this, hence they charge you $250 to submit your site to their directory so probably not the best place to start if you’re in a tight budget. The best thing to do is search for your site’s topic and the work directory; you will find small niche directories which will offer you the opportunity to include your website for free or for a small fee. This is the best way to start your site getting incoming links. This is very time consuming, you will need to thumb through sites looking for the best value and post your website to these directories. In doing this you will begin to get incoming links to your website which will help. As I understand it, an incoming link is like a vote for your site. Not all votes are the same, some votes are little votes, and some votes are big votes. 1 big vote, like a link from Google or Yahoo, is worth about 1000 little votes. But little votes are easier to get and a lot cheaper. So you want to start with small votes from these small niche directories. Then work your way up. Two of the most important votes your can get from directories are both expensive: Yahoo and Dmoz.com. These both will help your popularity considerably, but this will cost you $250 each, 500 bucks. In the end you will have to fork this money over but does not need to be your first votes, you can save this money until you start to see some traffic on your website. Since many popular website may have 50-100k incoming links your not going to win this battle over night.

Once you have exhausted your simple incoming links from directories or are just plain bored and tired, you will realize that you need other links. Now here is the crossroad. In my research I read information from Eric Ward who discussed link bait strategy and the right way to get incoming links, and the other way which would be paying people for incoming links from their sites.

Link bait is simply making your site so filled with content that other sites feel it necessary to link to your site.  Yeah, right, we are going to make a new site so wonderful that the big sites are going to link to my little website, I have a hard time believing this and find it nearly impossible that I can create content that is going to draw the attention of site enough to have them take the time to link to my site without incentive. I think not. So this leads me to getting incoming links, and having to pay for them. Warning to readers: search engines view this as working the system and could potentially penalize you for this, but if you have no page rank and GoogleBot is not indexing your site what do you have to lose? Nothing and that is why Google will never win this battle, the new guys have nothing to lose.

So now you have some little votes, and GoogleBot and the other search engines spiders are coming to your site more often and starting to give your site some reasonable search engine placement usually somewhere on a half baked search terms in the 9th pages somewhere around 90. The good news, you’re seeing progress. The bad news, no retirement anytime soon with these poor search terms and on page 90. So you have your small votes and your website with some good content, now what you need to do is get everything to go times 10, you need 10 times as much content and 10 times as many incoming links. You can either hire a bunch of employees. Or hire an SEO firm to help you. Both quite expensive propositions. Or you can do it alone. I decided to go it alone with a little help, I hired a company based in India to write content for my site fairly cheap, and I decided to pay for some text links incoming.

I picked the top 3 terms I wanted to do well in search. I had a company write me 2500 word articles specifically written for search engine optimization and I knew I needed votes for my site from somewhat big sites for my keywords.

Let’s circle around and talk about links, text links and votes. Now these votes can be very specific. If you have a vote for your site, it can be a vote for your site for a particular word, lets say house for sale, if you have incoming links for house for sale and this is a hyperlink or text link to your website, GoogleBot or the search engine spiders view this as a vote for your site for that keyword. Now we are talking! Now you have your 3 terms, you’re having content written for your site, you need to get incoming links or votes for your site for these three keywords.

I did additional research. There were many ways to get these incoming text links to my site. I could take the articles that were written and insert my links and pay to have these submitted to article websites, which post these articles, and then they will eventually get indexed and point to your site, and be a vote for your website for those keywords. The downside is that the content you wrote is not on your site, and these article websites are not big votes. The upside is this is cheap and will reap rewards. I did it and it worked, but was a waste of really good content.

Back to reading everything possible. There are websites where you can buy straight up text links, place your keywords and your links on nearly any kind of site you want. In reading I found out that a bigger vote is from a site relevant to your topic. If you can find a site about houses, and you can get an incoming text link from a site on topic, this will have added value or be a larger vote for your website. In searching, these text links websites you pay a monthly fee! Yes a good site with say a Page rank of 5 for a good text link wants $100 per month, that’s expensive. I tried it, bought a few of these very expensive text links for about 2 months. They work, they work well. I added more content to my site, had my little vote text links from directories and a few larger votes from relevant content sites with better votes. I did not see this as a long term solution but was the only choice I had at this time. The results did appear to be that GoogleBot and search engine spiders came more often and sorted my content even better. So I was seeing results and was getting excited as I understood what was happening.

I needed to do additional research. (Did I mention that I did some research on SEO?) I stumbled across these things called .edu links. www.edutextlink.com where they sell text links to your site in relevant content with relevant links and they do not want to charge you monthly. They will create this and let you buy it for 1 year plus. Now this seemed like a deal, I was excited. It bothered me paying monthly ‘rent’ to these other companies that were basically doing nothing after the first install.  Plus edutextlink.com would provide the content, saving me money over what I was paying the company in India to write for me. These edu text links were valuable because they are on an edu domain.  Edu domains can only be registered by legitimate schools and universities, so Google assumes they are legitimate and not paid for. I selected my keywords and submitted my pages; I saw good results fairly quickly. I bought 5 pages to start, but after a few weeks when my edu pages were indexed and I saw my page rank climb, I went back and purchased a 10 page package at a repeat customer discount. Now I was excited. 15 pages of hard to obtain links.

Now I had about 100 incoming links and about 100 pages of good content on my site and was starting to see some results on my site as for sales and traffic.

A good place to see a big picture of results for traffic is on www.alexa.com. Here they rate all sites on the internet based upon traffic and reach. How many people come to your site, how long they stay and how many pages they visit. It is an easy way to monitor your website and see some results. Expanded ways to monitor this information are through webmaster tools. The big three all offer this. www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ webmaster.live.com/, siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. You can set up your website on each of these and micro manage your site and watch every thing that happens on your website. This will offer you detailed information about your website, its visitors and how you’re doing in SEO or the search results for your keywords.

Now I keep on reading, I learned some additional cool things; the age of your domain goes into the formula that most search engines use. Of course, you have no control over this, but I thought it was worth mentioning. So if you have the opportunity to buy an aged domain name this is a slight advantage as search engines value older sites more. What else they value is where your website is hosted; if you have a high end host this will help the search engines value your site more, and give your site a little more additional value.

More reading resulted in more education: website layout and URL layout, reading about Meta tags, title tags, page tags, and URL layout. To date, GoogleBot and other Search Engine Spiders only have the ability to index simply html pages and html text link. Dynamic sites can be built fast, but indexing or reading your site is difficult, so insure you have static html pages so search engines can see your pages.

I also learned that Meta tags needs to be written in a very specific way, not too long not too short, not too many keywords not too little keywords. Since this is a complete overview, I lean towards about 150 characters for the title tags and keyword tags.

Furthermore, URL tags need to be displayed in text format, such as yourdomain.com/homes-your home-buyyourhome etc this is the known best way to format the URLs of your site and anything else will penalize your site. So make sure all your internal pages are written this way. It is not always easy to make dynamic pages this way, but is quite important.

I have also learned that more pages = more indexing = more often GoogleBot comes, so make your site big, bigger than it really is. You can do this by tweaking out your similar pages to appear as new pages, give them new URL’s so they appear as new pages and each new pages will be read a different way by Google and other spiders. This gives you higher opportunities to be indexed, the keywords you want to be indexed, and gives you better results.

One of the most painful things I have learned is if you do all of these things, you have to have patience as this will take time. Each step is a step in the right direction, but GoogleBot and other spiders are only going to come to your once in a while. Each time they come they are going to visit a few pages and get some content and index you a little differently, you need have time to wait for these things to work for your advantage."

WJ, computer sales website