Analyze Your Competition
Now that you have prepared your content, it now time to see how it stacks up
against the web sites with top search engine rankings for your targeted keywords.
Ideally, you should analyze the top ten ranked sites for each of your targeted
keywords in each of your targeted search engines. This means going through every
site and looking at the placement and density of the keywords, use of meta-tags,
page title, page description, links and so on. We know from painful experience
that to do this by hand can be very time consuming. Fortunately, the tools we
mentioned in the section on Tweaking Your Content can help make this task much
less painful. These tools are Web Position Gold by First Place Software, Bruce
Clay’s SEO Tool Set, Keyword Counter, and Keyword Density Analyzer. The first
two are commercial programs while the second two are freeware.
Once you compared your web site against your competition, you can now realistically
improve your chances of success. If your site does not compare well against the
competition, assess the differences and go back and teak your content and try
the analysis again.
Beware of Stealth Pages
If you are offering goods or services that are highly competitive on the web,
you are very likely to run into web sites that use stealth pages. The concept
behind stealth pages is very simple. Give each of the search engines optimized
content while giving the ordinary visitor to your web site normal content. So
the content you see is not the content the search engines see.
How is this done? Every time you type in a web address you being sent to computer
or web server that holds that web page’s content. The web server has the ability
to identify the IP address of the machine requested the web page. People who create
stealth pages keep a list of IP addresses of the search engine spiders or indexing
program. So when a request for a web page comes from the search engine’s spider,
the web server will redirect them to a phony web site with content especially
prepared for them.
It is important to learn how to identify stealth pages so you can eliminate
them from the analysis of your competition. Fortunately, this is not that difficult.
If a site is not very content rich, or stands out because it does not fit the
pattern of the rest of the web pages in your analysis, chances are it is a stealth
page or stealth site. Most search engines consider stealth pages an unethical
manipulation of their database and are actively trying to develop ways of combating
this practice. Google’s solution is to “cache” or store a copy the web page it
actually indexed. Google lets you view this cached page. This is a foolproof way
of viewing the web page exactly as Google did when they indexed it.
Submit Your Site to the Search Engines and Directories
The next step in the process of search engine optimization is to submit your
site to the search engines. There are many services that will automatically submit
your pages to the search engines. Although some of them are probably good, we
feel it is still risky and do not recommend this. Search engines are very sensitive
to individuals who “Spam” their index by submitting automatic bulk submissions.
Many search engines will either ignore the entries or if you really over do it,
will ban your web site from being indexed. We strongly recommend you submit your
pages by hand. It is important that you read the instructions for submitting your
web site provided by each of the search engines. You may need to submit your requests
more than once because the search engines are known for dropping or loosing requests.
Directories, like Yahoo, require you to fill out a questionnaire about your
web site. This information will help determine how your site is categorized. In
addition, most directories will only let you submit URLs in specific categories.
It is worth spending the time and doing some research to determine what category
would be most likely to be searched by someone looking for the goods, services
or information that your web site offers.
Some of the search engines offer a guarantee that they will index your site
within a specified length of time for a fee. This fee, usually between $100 and
$200, does not guarantee that you will receive high search engine rankings, only
that your site will be indexed!
Track Your Progress and Refine Your Pages
Once you have submitted your web site it is time to track your progress. Some
search engines like AltaVista, will spider your site within one to two days. Others
may take up to eight weeks unless you pay them to index your site quickly. There
are several good tools for tracking your progress. This include the previously
mentioned Web Position Gold by First Place Software, Bruce Clay’s SEO Tool Set,
as well as Net Mechanic.
Based on your results, continue to improve your site. The best way to do this
is add fresh content that will be of interest to the visitors of your site. Overtime
many web sites will develop broken links. If you have a large site or a site with
a lot of links, continually monitor your site to make sure that your site does
not have any broken links. Your search engine ranking will drop if your site develops
broken links.
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