Optimize your site

Optimizing your site is a phrase that seems to be thrown around a lot and few really understands the methods involved. There are many that will tell you that you need to flood the pages with your keywords in various ways. This is only partially true, and can be dangerous to your listings if not done with care.

Some will advise you to use a lot of keywords and create huge meta-tags that contain everything from the specific models of the products you supply to your grandmothers birthday and various capitalization schemes and misspellings. This can kill your listing before it hits the engines. Many spiders will see this and pass you on by.

Some people will tell you to hide things from your customers (and this is appealing to quite a few people) and leave hidden text on your pages that the engines will pick up, because they read the pages differently. This is just as bad.

In all, there are a number of things you can do to try to influence the engines in various ways. As a rule of thumb, however, if you are trying to feed them something that your customers cannot see by simply browsing, you are putting your listing at risk. In other words, if you have found a technique of hiding information from your customers and think that the engines are not already aware of it, you are likely quite mistaken.

Simply put, if you can do it, they can detect it.

There are, however, a number of legitimate methods of optimizing your site. There are also limits that you should work on in your optimization. Let’s look into a few of these that you may or may not be aware of.

First off, your domain name can play an important role. If you want to promote Widgets, you should look for a domain name that contains the word ‘widgets’. Something along the lines of widgets.com or superwidgets.com or even widgetsemporium.com. It doesn’t matter what you find, but the domain name will have an impact. Even more so if combined with a keyword you want to promote in conjunction with ‘widgets’. If you are selling ‘super widgets’ the superwidgets.com domain would be ideal.

You will want to find about 10 ‘key phrases’ to work on promoting on your home page. The home page is the best place to start your promotion. Doorway pages can be useful in optimization, but the home page, wherever possible is the best place to optimize. A ‘key phrase’ is a group of two or three words that makes a logical inference to your products, company or site. In the above example, ‘super widgets’ is an ideal key phrase. This is based on the assumption that super widgets are known to your customers and they are looking for a supplier or information about them.

You do want to look for key phrases that people are using in the greatest number and promote them, but stay focused on the target customer! Focusing on the customer is probably your most important objective. If your widgets are designed for a target audience of engineers, and you are promoting a keyword like ‘lawyers’, then you are wasting your time even if lawyers is a very popular search term. The people using these unrelated terms are not looking for your widgets and would have no use for them if they found them. A non-target customer is not a customer. They waste their time at your site and will likely just become frustrated with you for not supplying what they are looking for.

I don’t know how to stress this point more, TARGET YOUR CUSTOMERS!

The next best place to promote your top key phrase is in your title. Look into this aspect of your page design and avoid ‘New Page 1’ like the plague! This is what people will see first when searching for your super widgets, or more likely, won’t see. Not optimizing in your title is very nearly like not putting a sign outside of your brick and mortar storefront. Use a title along the lines of ‘Super Widgets from Widgets Emporium’. This will help to focus on your product and customers.

Be careful and use a good deal of thought when going to work on your title. You will want to keep it at about 6 or 8 words and, again, very focused. An important note about titles and designing an optimized page is to remember the copywriters number one rule; Write your sentences to encourage reading of the following sentence. You will not sell someone on having a perfect title, but if it entices the customer to look further, and your content, in turn, leads them further into your site, they will find themselves at your order page with cash in hand.

My next article will go into further steps of optimizing your pages, so please don’t take this one as an end all. There are quite a few more places and things to work on before you have a good page to submit.

By Jon Peterson
Cyberspace HQ