The Acid Test

The Acid Test
Here is the acid test that will prove what we just said is right: Carefully examine the body text of your existing homepage. Then, attempt to insert three to five different keywords and key phrases three to four times each, somewhere within the actual body of your existing page. In doing that, chances are you will end up with a homepage that is next to impossible to understand and read.
One mistake some people do is to force their prospects to wade through endless key phrase lists or paragraphs, in an attempt to describe their features and benefits. The other reason they do that is in trying to please the search engines at the same time. Writing a powerful and effective homepage around carefully defined keywords and key phrases is a sure way you can drive targeted traffic to your web site and keep them there once you do.
If some people still say re-writing a homepage takes too much time and costs too much money, think of the cost of losing prospective clients and the real cost of lost sales and lost opportunities. In the end, writing a strong homepage that will achieve all your desired goals will largely justify your time invested and the efforts you will have placed in the re-writing of your homepage.
This section presents a recommended layout for your homepage in order to make it as search engine friendly as possible. This is where you set the theme of your site. Let's suppose the primary focus of your site is about online education. You also have secondary content that is there as alternative content for those not interested online education. There is also other content that you would like to share with your visitors. For example, this might include book reviews, humor, and links.
The top of your homepage, as discussed earlier is the most important. This is where you set the keywords and theme for the most important part of your site, the thing you really want to be found for.

The Home Page

The Home Page
Your homepage is the most important page on your web site. If you concentrate your most important keywords and key phrases in your homepage many times, the search engines will surely notice and index it accordingly. But will it still read easily and will the sentences flow freely to your real human visitors? There are some good chances that it might not. As a primer, having just 40 or 50 words on your homepage will not deliver the message effectively. To be powerful and effective, a homepage needs at least 300 to 400 words for maximum search engine throughput and effectiveness. One way to do that is to increase your word count with more value-added content. This often means rewriting your whole homepage all over again. The main reason to this is you will probably never have enough room to skillfully work your important keywords and key phrases into the body text of your homepage. This may not please your boss or marketing department, but a full re-write is often necessary and highly advisable to achieve high rankings in the engines, while at the same time having a homepage that will please your site visitors and convert a good proportion of them into real buyers.

Website Give Enough Contact Information

Does Your Website Give Enough Contact Information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.
In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), writing a strong homepage that will rank high in the engines and will read well with your site visitors can sometimes present a challenge, even to some seasoned SEO professionals. Once you have clearly identified your exact keywords and key phrases, the exact location on your homepage where you will place those carefully researched keywords will have a drastic impact in the end results of your homepage optimization. One thing we keep most people say is that they don‟t want to change the looks or more especially the wording on their homepage. Understandably, some of them went to great lengths and invested either a lot of time and/or money to make it the best it can be. Being the best it can be for your site visitors is one thing. But is it the best it can be for the search engines, in terms of how your site will rank?
If you need powerful rankings in the major search engines and at the same time you want to successfully convert your visitors and prospects into real buyers, it's important to effectively write your homepage the proper way the first time! You should always remember that a powerfully optimized homepage pleases both the search engines and your prospects.
In randomly inserting keywords and key phrases into your old homepage, you might run the risk of getting good rankings, but at the same time it might jeopardize your marketing flow. That is a mistake nobody would ever want to do with their homepage.
Even today, there are still some people that will say you can edit your homepage for key phrases, without re-writing the whole page. There are important reasons why that strategy might not work.

Understanding Your Target Customer

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don‟t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor‟s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

What Your Website Absolutely Needs

What Your Website Absolutely Needs
This section will go over some of the most important elements that a page that hopes to get high research engine rankings needs. Make sure that you go through this while section very carefully as each of these can have a dramatic impact on the rankings that your website will ultimately achieve. Don‟t focus solely on the home page, keywords and titles. The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can‟t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Blanket Policy,

Blanket Policy On Doorway Pages And Cloaking
Many search engines are opposed to doorway pages and cloaking. They consider doorway and cloaked pages to be spam and encourage people to use other avenues to increase the relevancy of their pages. We‟ll talk about doorway pages and cloaking a bit later.
Meta Tags (Ask.Com As An Example)
Though Meta tags are indexed and considered to be regular text, Ask.com claims it doesn't give them priority over HTML titles and other text. Though you should use meta tags in all your pages, some webmasters claim their doorway pages for Ask.com rank better when they don't use them. If you do use Meta tags, make your description tag no more than 150 characters and your keywords tag no more than 1,024 characters long.
Keywords In The URL And File Names
It's generally believed that Ask.com gives some weight to keywords in filenames and URL names. If you're creating a file, try to name it with keywords.
Keywords In The ALT Tags
Ask.com indexes ALT tags, so if you use images on your site, make sure to add them. ALT tags should contain more than the image's description. They should include keywords, especially if the image is at the top of the page. ALT tags are explained later.
Page Length
There's been some debate about how long doorway pages for AltaVista should be. Some webmasters say short pages rank higher, while others argue that long pages are the way to go. According to AltaVista's help section, it prefers long and informative pages. We've found that pages with 600-900 words are most likely to rank well.
Frame Support
AltaVista has the ability to index frames, but it sometimes indexes and links to pages intended only as navigation. To keep this from happening to you, submit a frame-free site map containing the pages that you want indexed. You may also want to include a "robots.txt" file to prohibit AltaVista from indexing certain pages.

Query-Dependent Factors

Query-Dependent Factors
1.The HTML title.
2. The first lines of text.
3. Query words and phrases appearing early in a page rather than late.
4. Meta tags, which are treated as ordinary words in the text, but like words that appear early in the text (unless the meta tags are patently unrelated to the content on the page itself, in which case the page will be penalized)
5. Words mentioned in the "anchor" text associated with hyperlinks to your pages. (E.g., if lots of good sites link to your site with anchor text "breast cancer" and the query is "breast cancer," chances are good that you will appear high in the list of matches.)

Values

Values
 Long pages, which are rich in meaningful text (not
randomly generated letters and words).
 Pages that serve as good hubs, with lots of links to pages that that have related content (topic similarity, rather than random meaningless links, such as those generated by link exchange programs or intended to generate a false impression of "popularity").
 The connectivity of pages, including not just how many links there are to a page but where the links come from: the number of distinct domains and the "quality" ranking of those particular sites. This is calculated for the site and also for individual pages. A site or a page is "good" if many pages at many different sites point to it, and especially if many "good" sites point to it.
 The level of the directory in which the page is found. Higher is considered more important. If a page is buried too deep, the crawler
simply won't go that far and will never find it.
These static factors are recomputed about once a week, and new good pages slowly percolate upward in the rankings. Note that there are advantages to having a simple address and sticking to it, so others
15
can build links to it, and so you know that it's in the index

Ranking Rules Of Thumb

Ranking Rules Of Thumb
The simple rule of thumb is that content counts, and that content near the top of a page counts for more than content at the end. In particular, the HTML title and the first couple lines of text are the most important part of your pages. If the words and phrases that match a query happen to appear in the HTML title or first couple lines of text of one of your pages, chances are very good that that page will appear high in the list of search results. A crawler/spider search engine can base its ranking on both static factors (a computation of the value of page independent of any particular query) and query-dependent factors.

Crawler/Spider Considerations

Crawler/Spider Considerations
Also, consider technical factors. If a site has a slow connection, it might time-out for the crawler. Very complex pages, too, may time out before the crawler can harvest the text. If you have a hierarchy of directories at your site, put the most important information high, not deep. Some search engines will presume that the higher you placed the information, the more important it is. And crawlers may not venture deeper than three or four or five directory levels. Above all remember the obvious - full-text search engines such index text. You may well be tempted to use fancy and expensive design techniques that either block search engine crawlers or leave your pages with very little plain text that can be indexed. Don‟t fall prey to that temptation.