Internet World Stats


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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:

  1. To make as perfect or effective as possible.
  2. In Computer Science. To increase the computing speed and
    efficiency of (a program), as by rewriting instructions.
  3. 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.
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