Search Engine Myths and Legends

Sell Online with a Yahoo Store Newsletter Archive

Diversify Your Business with Affiliate Programs Part 3
Search Engine Myths and Legends

Last week, we talked a bit more about Diversification of Your Business via Affiliate Programs.

This week is going to be a wee bit different.

Let’s talk about Search Engines, specifically, all of the myths & legends surrounding search engines, search engine positioning, optimization, and how an average Jane can open a can of whoop hiney in the general direction of their competition.

My English teacher just rolled over in her grave. Once she finds out how we tune our pages for the search engine spiders, she might do a complete 360…

Hang On!

We get about 250 questions a day from our customers. Roughly 45% of them have to do with Getting Traffic from the Free Search Engines, which ultimately leads to questions about tuning and optimizing their sites for the search engine spiders.

So, here are some of the most common questions I get regarding Search Engine Positioning, with my answers, sprinkled with comments, and dramatic streams of consciousness.

Hang On!

“Andy, Audrey, all kidding aside, what’s the easiest way to get the search engines to rank my site well? Keep in mind that I’m not a guru or anything like that....”

It’s all about being relevant. Let me back up and give you an example. If you want to be found in the search engines for the search phrase “Party Balloons”, then your site must talk about Party Balloons.

Now, having said that, there are some guide lines that you can follow when you set-up your site that have given us an edge in the search engines for our chosen keywords. Here they are:

We always try to include the keywords that we want to be found for in our URL. In the above example, our site might be called www.party-balloons.com. Or, if that URL was taken, we’d choose www.a2-party-ballons.com.

Having relevant keywords in our URL helps our relevancy… It’s the first thing a search engine spider sees when it crawls our site, AND it’s what a Human looks at when they see our listing in the search engine results. Logical, right? You’ll find that competing in the search engines is all about being logical…More on that later.

The second thing we’d do it to include “Party Balloons” in our Title Tag, at least once, and not more than 2 times. Then, we’d make sure that our Meta Tags (both the Description tag AND the Keyword tag) have “Party Balloons” incorporated into them as well.

Again, the Meta description tag is going to be read by a Human, so it has to make sense!

Now, the Meta Keyword tag is where a lot of folks goof. I’ve seen sites that have over 100 keywords in their Meta keywords tag.

Look, if you want to maintain relevance, you need to focus your efforts on no more than 8 to 12 keywords or keyword phrases on your site. Here’s why.

Meta Tags are becoming a whole lot less important. Search Engine Spiders are getting so smart that one’s like Google ignore the keyword tag all together. But, if they find that your Heading Tags, your Body Text, your Hyper Links and the file names of your pictures have the same theme, then they may include your keywords as part of their overall evaluation.

The above paragraph barely makes sense – sorry. Let me try to explain it like a human…

Search Engine Spiders look at a lot of things when they come to your site, but what all of the search engine companies WANT a search engine spider to do is make an intelligent guess. Using their “Vector Based Keyword Algorithms”, they want the spider to determine what your site is all about.

They do that by (and this is a simplified explanation) counting how many times a particular word, or related word, appears on your site.

It’s called “Keyword Density”. A simple example:

You have 100 words on your site. You use the word Balloon 12 times. You’re site has a keyword Density of 12% for the keyword Balloon.

Okay, the spider makes a note of that. Now, the humans that programmed the spider figure that a site that talks about “Balloon” 12 times in the course of 100 chances is “Likely Relevant” to the word Balloon. (At least that’s what they think this month…)

Relevancy. You’re Relevant! You’re Relevant about Balloons!

Good for you.

How did you get that way?

Noticed that I used the phrase “Talks About” in the paragraph above?

That’s right, your site needs to actually talk about something.

It’s called Content.

Content is your chance to tell your human visitors and the search engine spiders what your site is all about. In this example, we’ve told the Humans and the spiders by using the Text on one of the pages of our site.

If you’re not doing this, if you're just putting your product up on your site, and stuffing your meta tags with keywords, the spiders are going to ignore you.

The spiders, because they are programs that MEASURE OCCURRENCES, like to have correlation between what they are being told, and what they are seeing.

They’re like parents of a teenager. (Hang On!)

If your kid tells you that the boy that they are going out on a date with is an A Student, athletic, and likes rabbits – consider those statements the “Meta Tag Information” about their date.

Now, if this kid showed up to take your daughter out and you see that - on his Rabbit Skin Jacket there is a name-tag with his name spelled wrong and he boarders on malnutrition…

...you pretty much decide to ignore your daughters “Meta Tag Information” about her date.

It’s the same idea with Search Engine Spiders. As a matter of fact, in the bad example given above, if your daughter “undersold” her date, and Prince Charming Arrived…

My point is, all of it, your Meta Tags, your Titles, your Body Text – it must all relate logically to the subject at hand – The same subject you want to rank highly for in the search engines.

Your pictures should be named “Party Ballons1.jpg”, “Party Balloons2.jpg”…

Your links should look like “For Blue Party Balloons, Click Here”. Not “Click Here for Party Balloons”

You Headline text (looks like this in HTML: <h1> at the beginning of the headline and </h1> at the end of the headline) should relate to the theme of that page “Party Balloons”.

And your words, your Body Text, it should talk about “Party Balloons” at the beginning of every paragraph, and if you want a density of 12% (Which Google appears to like this month) make sure you are that “Dense”. (No Pun intended…Well, maybe a little one.)

You’re going for a theme on your site. It’s about Party Balloons. And the more you talk about Party Balloons, the more likely it is that you will be Ranked well in the search engines for Party Balloons.

Which brings me to the next question…

“Yeah but, I sell a lot of different things on my site, all related to Party Balloons – like Party Supplies, Party Hats, Party Games… I sell like 40 things! How do I stay relevant with all of those keywords?”

GOOD QUESTION!

Here’s how.

If you’ve got multiple products, pick the 6 or 7 most common (and profitable) occurrences of those search terms according to your supply and demand research. Then, treat every product page like it’s has a chance to rank well for that particular product.

Meaning…

Pick the 6 or 7 search Keywords that you know are getting used to search for Party Related Items and use them as your content on your home page.

In this case, if “Party Supplies” was searched for 20,000 times, and then Party Games was searched for 18,000 times – those 2 keyword phrases would be prime candidates for my Home Page content.

Now, something that most people forget is when a spider crawls your site, they DON'T stop at your home page! They have been known to crawl 4 or 5 levels deep into your site!

Consider your Yahoo! Store. You have the Home Page with your Sections on them (Buttons), then you have your Section Pages, then you find your product pages.

That’s only 3 levels! A Search Engine Spider is likely to crawl the entire product line in your entire store if it’s only 3 levels deep!

So what’s that mean?

Treat every page like a chance to get ranked in the search engines!

If you search for “medieval knight armor” in Google, you’ll find that we are ranked number 9 on the first page. What’s really great about this ranking is that it’s not a ranking for our Home Page. It’s a ranking for one of the section pages in our store.

We’re ranked number 1 in Google for “Famous Swords”. Famous Swords is a section page in our store. Level 2.

My point is, a spider will crawl your entire site if you keep it relatively shallow (No more than 5 levels deep; 3 is better). And if each page that it crawls is relevant to a particular keyword or phrase, it CAN get ranked, all by itself, for that keyword!

So, if you construct your home page for the more general keywords of your Site, then continue to fashion the content of your internal site pages with product specific keywords, they can score very highly in the search engines!

“What’s Theme Based Ranking?”

Search Engines keep track of what combinations of words are used when a search is made. They form a database of those combinations - “A Vector Algorithm”.

The search engines will, based on their databases of word combinations, know what search terms are most often used in conjunction with each other. It’s called a Theme.

For Example: Medieval Sword, Medieval Armor, Medieval Shield, Medieval Helmet are commonly used search terms for the products that we sell. The Theme of those searches is then “Medieval”. So, if our site contains content that uses those terms on a regular, relevant basis, our site begins to take on a “Medieval” theme.

The benefit? If the theme of our site is “Medieval” and that keyword is used in combination with another search term, (Like Sword), even if another site has more content about swords than we do, because we have both a Medieval Theme, and some content about a sword, we might rank just as well, or better than that competitor in some search engines.

“I’ve seen little 3 or 5 page web sites rank number one in some search engines. How can they do this with out a ton of content?”

Those little sites are very focused, keyword wise. Let’s say that you’re little mini-affiliate web site is all about Neon Computer Cases. Now, that’s a pretty specific search term, so by the nature of the focus of the search term, you can then create a site that’s ONLY about Neon Computer Cases. Your URL, Your Meta Tags, Your Title Tags, Your Headline, Your Content, Your Links AND your Image Names all use the keyword Phrase “Neon Computer Cases”.

With such a focused site, the search engines will come to the conclusion that your site is about “Neon Computer Cases” and do the logical thing – Rank it well.

Now, this little mini-site might have some other things going for it, like incoming links for another related web site… But, ultimately, if a site is all about Neon Computer Cases, then the search engines WANT to rank it according to that search term.

“It seems like this whole Search Engine Optimization thing is awfully redundant.”

I don’t disagree. But, the truth is, it all makes sense, if you think about what a search engine is supposed to do.

Let me give you an analogy.

You’re taking a car trip, and you realize you need to fill up your gas tank. One of the first things you do is start to look for those little signs on the side of the road that tell you how many miles you have to go until the next service area.

In the course of your quest to get gas, you see that you can probably drive 45 more miles until you’re on fumes. So, you don’t stop where the first few signs tell you that you can.

You risk continuing because you’re making good time, knowing that the one of the signs said there was a gas station 43 miles away.

After 43 miles, you pull into a service area, expecting to find a gas station, and instead, you find a Vending Machine, a Dog Walk, and an impromptu Hell’s Angels Rally.

You were counting on those signs to give you the correct information so you could make a decision to continue or not.

Now that you realize that the signs were wrong, you have to make another decision (Like trading your daughter’s boyfriend’s Rabbit Fur Jacket for a gallon of gas from a biker named Tiny).

If the signs told you that you would find only a Vending Machine, a Dog Walk, and an impromptu Hells Angels Picnic, you wouldn’t have stopped there.

So, who looses? You, (because you’re out of gas and the Hell’s Angels have just started chanting “Burn Baby Burn”), your daughter’s boyfriend, and the gas station – Because they didn’t get your business.

So, from a search engines perspective, if a site is truly about Neon Computer Cases, it’s in their best interest to make it clear to human visitors that your site is about Neon Computer Cases. You do that by giving the search engine spiders little signs (in the form of content) that tell them what to expect.

So, tell them – over and over again – what your site is about. Give them many “Signs” in your site that assure the spiders and the humans that they will find what your “Sign” says they will when they arrive at your site.

“I don’t trust you. You’re shifty. You write bad and I hate your jokes (Except the one about the Rabbit Fur Jacket). Where can I go to find some real information about search engine optimization? And after you tell me, unsubscribe me from your newsletter or I’ll fork your lawn… P.S. Thanks for the Free-Download last week!”

First things first. I’m only shifty when I play Audrey in chess.

Second, we’re big fans of Michael Campbell’s “Nothing but Net”.

Listen, I only know what I know about search engines because I’ve read about how to use them, and I’ve made enough mistakes to learn what to do, and what not to do.

But trial and error can get annoying.

So, I’ve re-read “Nothing but Net” about a dozen times, and every time I do, it makes more and more sense.

Let’s talk about Nothing But Net for a moment.

Usually, I hate theory. Just about anyone can copy someone else’s material and pass it off as their own (It’s happened to us, 2 times, and we’re not even that interesting!).

But there are 2 critical elements that I love about Nothing But Net.

First and foremost, his book is about how he sold $750,000 of REAL PRODUCT in one year using nothing but free search engine traffic – thus, the title.

That means a lot to me. I’m sure you’ve seen all of the systems about “How to Sell Information” and “How to Sell You’re Services” in your Internet Travels. And in a sense, that is E-Commerce. But, there are different techniques that you MUST use when you take to the Internet to sell a “REAL PRODUCT”.

Whether it’s a Sword, a Candle, a Bike, a Bar Stool, or a Glass Figurine, selling a “Hard Good” over the Internet requires a different Marketing and Search Engine Optimization approach.

That’s why I like Michael’s Book. It’s tells all of the search engine techniques that he used to sell 3 quarters of a million dollars of cell-phones in one year. That’s a real product, and that’s real money!

The company that he did it for (Cell-West) started with 2 employees, and by the time Michael was done with them, they had a huge staff and their own warehouse.

Here’s the table of contents of Nothing But Net.

Now, the second reason I love this book is actually 2 reasons ( I’m a horrible writerrrrrr).

Michael uses his Search Engine Optimization Techniques to earn more than $200,000 a year by promoting affiliate programs. And since this Newsletter Series is about diversifying your income with Affiliate Programs, his material fits nicely into our “Theme”.

But beyond his incredible knowledge of search engines and affiliate marketing, Michael’s techniques are responsible for 90% of our Top Ten Ranking in the free search engines.

90%.

And I’m talking about our Yahoo! Stores, not our affiliate web sites. So, when we consider how much it’s worth to A Squared Artifacts to have multiple Top 10 search engine rankings for our multiple stores, Michael’s material is priceless.

And so, he’s one of the Top 4 Affiliate Marketers on our list, with the added bonus of being a crack search engine expert. Take a look at Nothing But Net, and see how he did it.

Until I blow the doors off the spell checker again,

Shop You Soon!