Some More Ideas about Search Engine Optimization

by Walt Thiessen

First Published: December 10, 2004
Last Modified: July 10, 2011

There are literally thousands of self-proclaimed experts out there touting their ideas for what it takes to do well on search engines. I don't have the last word on the subject, but here are some quick tips that will definitely help you.

1. Search Engines Like Real Content

This may seem obvious to some, but it's amazing how many SEO experts want us to avoid giving the search engines exactly what they want: real, text-based content. Of course you do want to include your favored keywords for which you want to be found on the search engines, but the text that you write should flow smoothly and read easily.

This confuses a lot of people. They get all befuddled about how to cram all their keywords into a page, yet make it read naturally. Honestly, they're making more of a big deal about it than it really is.

Let's do a sample page to see how it's done. Let's assume that we're going to write about online advertising and marketing.

First, let's decide what keywords we want to be found for. To do this, I always start with Yahoo Search Marketing's inventory database. (Note, June 2011: after this article was published, Yahoo removed their inventory database from public inspection. However, you can now get similar results using Google Adwords.)

For this article, I will start off with the word "advertising." Here are the top ten results as of December 10, 2004. They will vary all the time, but they give us a pretty good idea about what's popular:

Picking from this list, I see that the most relevant searches to what this page is about are: advertising, online advertising, internet advertising solution, and internet advertising.

Now, let's search on marketing:

Wow! Look at those counts for direct marketing, internet marketing, and marketing. Small business marketing doesn't have nearly the same interest level among searchers right now, but it still seems pretty strong too, as does business to business marketing, web site marketing, and marketing and advertising.

We could do a lot more searches and refine our keyword choices even more, but let's just work with what we have here.

Next, I list all of the terms from these searches that I plan to use as keywords, for which I want to be found on the search engines. In this case, I choose the following:

1. advertising
2. online advertising
3. internet advertising
4. internet advertising solution
5. direct marketing
6. internet marketing
7. marketing
8. small business marketing
9. business to business marketing
10. web site marketing
11. marketing and advertising.

That's quite a list! In general, it's a good idea to write a separate page for each keyword. If your writing naturally includes the other keywords, that's fine, and it actually helps. I used to think that you had to include all the keywords in the same article, and in fact this article was previously written to reflect that belief. However, it makes much more sense to write separate articles, if that option is available to you, and put them on separate pages of the website.

Why? Because the search engines love content! It's a very strange thing, but if you take a very long article that appears on one web page and split it up into shorter pieces that link together over a series of pages, the search engines will actually reward you for those extra pages. You don't want to do this if your article is already short. As a rule-of-thumb, try not to let your separate pages be less than 400 words.

None of this will help you if you don't know what you want to say, though. That means you have to know your topic. If you don't know it, research it. Hey, that's what search engines are for! Other websites are a great way to learn about your topic and become more of an expert. In fact, don't be afraid to credit your sources with a hyperlink to the best ones. It won't hurt your own rankings as much as you'd think, and the Googles of the world will reward your site in ways you don't even expect. Like I said at the beginning of this section: search engines like real content.

2. Add a New Page to Your Website Whenever You Have Something New to Say

What better way is there to give the search engines what they want: textual content! By putting it in a separate page, it also gives you what you want...more credibility (and therefore better PR scores) with the search engines.

3. Be Sure To Link To The New Page From All Your Other Main Pages

I can't tell you how often I see this mistake made. People will write these great little articles, and they'll even provide an obscure link to them. Perhaps they'll even be smart enough to link back to their home page. But so many people will fail to link to and from the new page from all their other pages, and particularly from the home page to all their interior pages, as well as back again. Big mistake!

Want to see an illustration of just how powerful cross-linking all your pages can be? Click here to try the PageRank Calculator. It's a quick way to see the power of cross-linking all your pages. Scroll down to the beige box. Scroll down to the bottom of the box where it says, "Number of pages (max 26) and enter 6. Then click the New Grid button. This will give you a much smaller, more manageable calculator for a simple, six page site. Now, put little checkmarks in all the boxes in the A thru F rows and A thru F columns. Don't put any checkmarks in the Outbound or Inbound boxes. Look where it says PageRank to the right of these boxes. All the PageRanks show 0.15, and the Total PR box shows 0.9. Now click the Calculate button. Instantly, each page's PageRank jumps to 1.0, and the Total PR for the site changes to 6.0.

What you basically told the calculator to do was to calculate the site's PR and the individual pages' PR for a six page website where all the pages link to each other. Isn't it amazing! For every page in your website that you add, and if all the pages are crosslinked, your Total PR for the site increases! No wonder there are so many websites with thousands of internal pages that do very well!

Ok, now remove all the checkmarks except for the checkmarks in the A row and the A column. When you're done, you'll see checkmarks along the top row and the left-hand column, but no other checkmarks. Hit the Calculate button again. The Total PR for the site is 6.000009, meaning that it hasn't changed hardly at all. But look at the A page! Its PR is now 2.8378427, while the PR of the other pages is just 0.6324333. If the A page was your home page...wow! You just increased the PR of your home page substantially, by linking all your pages to your home page AND linking your home page to all your other pages!

"But...but...I thought it was bad to link both ways! I thought I shouldn't link from my home page to all my interior pages! I thought it would lose pagerank on my homepage if I did that!" I hear you cry in dismay. No, it doesn't work that way. Actually exchanging links internally between your pages improves the pagerank dramatically for all of the pages that have reciprocal links at the expense of pages that don't exchange links both ways.

Playing with the WebWorkshop's Pagerank Calculator will tell you a lot about how pagerank flows from page to page. Of course, it does have some limitations. First of all, it assumes that the links from page to page all use the same keywords. That's not very likely, is it! We know that anchor text in a keyword makes a lot of difference in terms of how pagerank flows.

It also assumes that all pages get scored equally for their content. Again, that's not likely. Still, the Pagerank Calculator will explain a lot to you if you keep playing with it and thinking about the results you get.

More Reading

If you want to learn more about SEO, check out my article on inter-page web site linking for link reputation. Hopefully, it'll be the epiphany for you that it was for me!