Internet World Stats > Internet Coaching > Web Page
Optimizing
Web Page Optimizing on a Budget
by Enrique De
Argaez
Before getting into the subject,
let's begin by getting things straight. According to the
dictionary " optimizing " has the following meanings:
- To make as perfect or
effective as possible.
- In Computer Science. To
increase the computing speed and
efficiency of (a program), as by rewriting
instructions.
- To make the most
of.
Web page optimization is the
"key ingredient" for a successful Web promotion campaign. What is
Website Optimization and how can optimizing a website promote my
business? Website Optimization consists of many different website
design techniques. When you combine a proper web site promotion
strategy with web development and optimization, you will achieve
the following:
* Get "Top Listings" on Major Search Engines
* Bring More Visitors to Your Website
* Turn Your Visitors Into Customers
* Keep Your Customers Coming Back for More!
Web page optimization has two parts: onpage techniques
and offpage techniques. The trick, of course, is knowing
what actions to take and what tools to use.
Onpage design and content requierements can be summarized
as follows:
# Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page
should be reachable from at least one static text
link.
# Offer a site map to your
users with links that point to the important parts of your site.
If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to
break the site map into separate pages.
# Create a useful,
information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and
accurately describe your content.
# Think about the words users
would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site
actually includes those words within it.
# Try to use text instead of
images to display important names, content, or links. The Google
crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
# Make sure that your TITLE and
ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
# Check for broken links and
correct HTML.
# If you decide to use dynamic
pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not
every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static
pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of
them few.
# Keep the links on a given
page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
To put you on the right track to optimizing your web site and
getting a good SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) position, let's
continue with some useful tools you need for improving your
offpage techniques:
1. TRACKING OF WEB SITE POSITION:
UrlTrends provides a visual "Trend Report" on the SEO
rankings of your website, and, if you opt for no-cost
registration, it will track your rankings over time and enable
you to compare them to the rankings of several competitors. For
example, according to UrlTrends,
the URL internetworldstats.com had (at the time of writing) an
Alexa ranking of 30,095, and a page rank of six from Google. This
fantastic tool will give you also the number of incoming links
from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alexa combined, keyword ranking for
certain search terms, link popularity and other SEO data. With
registration, you will be notified by RSS or email whenever there
is a search engine ranking change to any of your tracked URLs.
Recommended.
2. KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL:
WordTracker
compiles a database of terms that
people search for. You enter some keywords, and they tell you how
often people search for them, and also tell you how many
competing sites use those keywords.
WordTracker
helps you find all keyword
combinations that bear any relation to your business, service or
product - many of which you might never have considered.
3. LINKING RESEARCH TOOL:
SEO Elite offers some power-packed features for making the
linking work easier and more efficient. This tool will help you
to:
A. Discover how any page ranks at the top of the Search Engines.
And that goes for the major search engines like Yahoo, Google,
MSN, Altavista and Alltheweb. Finally, the keys to command top-10
listings are yours in mere seconds with this remarkable tool!
B. Instantly finds hundreds of high page rank websites in your
field. That way, you know who among your competitors are doing
well. By the way, this is one of the most powerful features of
the software, because there are entire tools created to do only
this single feature!
C. Searches for Super Affiliates willing to promote your
products. By learning who's promoting who, you access
star-affiliates promoting your competitors (or related products
and services), and can capture a piece of the action!
D. Shows immediately which partners are still linking back to
you. This feature alone slashes your workload time in half or
more! No need to manually follow-up with each and every linking
partner.
E. Allows you to do a backlink search on all major search
engines. This includes Google, Yahoo, Alltheweb, Altavista,
MSN.
F. Learns how many and which pages each major search engine has
indexed. This is very important when optimizing your webpages.
It's good to keep a close eye on how long it takes for your pages
to get indexed. And "SEO Elite" instantly tells you how many
pages there are. Again, there are entire products that do ONLY
this feature and charge over 100 bucks!
G. Notifies and keeps a daily, weekly, and monthly change record
of where your website is ranked for ANY search term. Plus, it
does so on all of the major search engines, including Google,
Yahoo, Alltheweb, MSN and Altavista. (Pretty fast, too!) So you
monitor your ranking, and know when it's high or if it ever slips
for whatever reason!
H. Analyzes and compares special search commands on Google to
the "regular" Google search rankings— such as "allinanchor,
allintext, and allintitle". This will help you know which area
you need to better optimize; whether it is your anchor text
surrounding your links, the number of times the keyword is found
in your text, or the number of times your keyword is found in the
title of each webpage.
I. Finds exactly which websites your competitors are advertising
on. This is a great way to find websites to advertise your
product. If your competitor has advertised on a specific website
for months, the you know it's profitable — and now you can
steal their spot!
J. Allows you to eliminate any penalized websites you link to.
In other words, by knowing which link partners have been
penalized by Google, you can quickly take corrective action
before it gets to you! This is a great feature that ensures you
NEVER get penalized, too.
Plus much more!
Quite simply, no other application in the world compares to the
power of this brand-new, cutting edge software. And no other
application in the world can nearly guarantee YOU a #1 Search
Engine Ranking!
4. VALIDATE HTML AND BROKEN LINKS:
There are several tools for this job, again, some must be
purchased and some are free to use. For online validation you can
try the W3C Markup Validation
Service, a free
service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML
for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards.
Broken links on your web pages cause a bad impression to
visitors and most search engines penalize your ranking for them.
There are several online and offline tools for broken link
testing. Among the online link testers the w3 link checker is fast and easy to use. For offline testing
download the Xunes Link Sleuth, a free and efficient tester that does
the job.
Check for broken links often, links can go bad at any time. Good
today, bad tomorrow. No point in risking a slide or a being
penalized for links that redirect visitors to nonacceptable
content.
5. SEARCH ENGINE SIMULATOR:
Webconfs will help you understand exactly what a search engine spider
sees when it comes by to crawl your website pages. Type in any
URL and you will receive a neatly organized breakdown of the
page's content, including all tags, all textual content of the
page and lists of the internal and external links the spider will
follow. The search engines differ in terms of which content they
use and how they evaluate it, however, this is your page content
in the eyes of a spider, pure and simple -- and it can always be
improved.
Check it out.
6. Asking the right questions.
Here is where the rubber meets the road. At the outset, the more
you know about your customers and prospects, the better sense
you'll have where that information could lead to action. When
there is little information to help frame the questions, it is
doubly important to anticipate possible actions. Whether you are
swimming in past research or starting from scratch, try the
following exercise when planning your next research
project:
This simple process will allow
you to view your question from various points of view and look at
action steps from various questioning perspectives. Realize that
it is normal to ask a series of questions to generate information
that will lead to action. The point is, you should be narrowing
your questions to the point where the answers do, in fact, lead
to clear actions that you are willing to take.
Generally, answers to one set
of questions will lead to another set of questions. Information
sometimes creates the need for more information. Even if the
questions asked are the right ones, know that there is the
terrible tendency for marketers NOT to take actions that they had
planned beforehand.
Instead, they are tempted into
conducting additional research to address the new questions that
are raised. This is called research for the sake of research, and
the research suppliers are the only ones that make any money from
it.
Conducting research and then
not using what you learned is a waste of time and money, as well
as a self-defeating proposition. Be prepared to take action from
the results you get, otherwise save the money you've earmarked
for research.
About the Author:
Enrique de Argaez is the webmaster of several
multilingual Internet websites and author of two monthly
newsletters. He is active in Internet Marketing and Internet
Market Research. Visit his main websites at www.internetworldstats.com and www.allaboutmarketresearch.com.