Today, Google released their Google tools for webmasters. Not only are these tools useful for webmasters, but they are key for search engine marketing firms. Google provides a useful keyword analysis tool, as well as an external links analysis page. I can’t say that the external links tool is particularly effective considering my search for “linkto: thewebpreneur.com” turned up with 5 times as many results. Google claims that the tool will give you more in depth results. Unfortunately I didn’t experience that. On the other hand, I did learn that Google does not like keywords to include apostrophe’s and will remove all letters prior to the apostrophe. Rather than showing two of the main keywords on my site as “Nick” and “O’Neill”, it showed “Nick” and “Neil”. I have since updated my name at the bottom of my posts to not include the apostrophe. Hopefully in the next few days I will see an increase in my ranking for the search phrase “Nick ONeill” as a result. If you are somehow involved with search engine optimization, than this tool should definitely be on your radar.

“Can you make my website go to the top of Google?” This is a question I get asked by people all the time. The answer is yes or no depending on how you look at it. If you want your site to show up at the top for the phrase “dating site” then you better have a miracle worker as your search engine optimization consultant, or you better start paying for ads. On the other hand, if you want to increase your overall traffic from Google (and other search engines), you simply need to make your site easier for those search engines to read.

In my previous article “6 steps to the top of Google”, I highlighted some of the main steps to increasing your search engine ranking. These steps included effective backlinking, optimizing your content, optimizing your page URLs, and choosing good keywords. Recently, there has been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere as to how complicated search engine optimization is. While SEO can be seen as a challenging process, it doesn’t have to be. Ultimately, I am a firm believer that search engine optimization follows the law of diminishing returns. It is well worth the investment to spend a fair amount of time optimizing your site for search engines. After a certain point though, the returns on SEO are going to be far less than the price you are going to have to pay your SEO consultant.

Currently, over a quarter of my traffic comes from Google, and I have the lowest page rank possible, since this site is relatively new. Why do I get traffic from Google at all, and why does Google crawl my site at least once every hour? (I’ve noticed on Google blogsearch, that all of my blog posts show up within an hour of me posting them.) I’ve narrowed it down to three primary reasons that I get a fair amount of traffic from Google:

1. I am constantly adding content - In the world of search engines, content is king. Google, Yahoo, Ask, and the other search engines have the difficult task of trying to determine what is content and what is junk on every website. Once they have parsed out the junk, they store the remaining content in their databases to be searched. Since the inherit value of search engines is their ability to access as much content on the web as possible, they are constantly looking for places that provide them with more information. So do them a favor and keep adding content. The search engines will love you for this and you and them can co-exist harmoniously.
2. I have valid XHTML and CSS on my site and have utilized the html tags effectively - As I stated previously, the search engines are trying to parse out all of the junk on your website. By providing the search engines (and your visitors) with W3C compliant code, you will be making their life a whole lot easier. Help them help you, and make your site with valid HTML or XHTML. Additionally, I have utilized tags such as <h1>, <h2>, <em>, <strong>, and others in the right places. If you’d like to read more on this topic, read my previous article “The Art of Optimizing Content”.
3. I have other sites that are linking to my site - If you write good content others will link back to you. Market your site by commenting on other people’s blogs, adding signature lines when posting in forums, and joining web communities that allow you to place a link to your site. Over time, by providing readers with good content, you will see that more people begin to link to you.

In conclusion, search engine optimization in an effective method for website marketing. Although SEO can take a serious time (and possibly financial) investment, simple steps can be taken to improve your search engine effectiveness.

Remember to choose keywords that you can be competitive in. Also, take advantage of XHTML/CSS to improve your code to text ratio (while the text to code ratio is debatable, more content can never hurt). Additionally, swapping links with fellow bloggers/web masters can help boost your page rank.

Remember though, that the best search engine optimization in the world can not increase your recurring visitors if you don’t provide high quality content. In the world of user generated content (blogs, portals, video sites, etc), there is nothing better than having great content on your site. While search engine optimization can provide you with drastic results, creating valuable websites requires a significant investment of time (and sometimes money). SEO should be used as one of the many web marketing tools in your promotional arsenal … not the only one.

According to Google:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

I wish there was a quick and easy way to do this but there isn’t. As stated before, Google is a democratic search engine. Using the strategies outlined in the previous articles you will slowly build your pagerank. Ultimately, each page that links to you should have a higher page rank then you. The higher the page rank on the pages that link to you; the higher your page rank becomes.

Also, remember that each page a person links to on your site should target a specific keyword. The links from the outside sites should link to your page using the targeted keyword. In the end, page rank is a function of how long you spend using the tactics previously mentioned.

This one is pretty straightforward. If you are trying to optimize your site to a specific keyword, then you need other people that link to your site, referencing that keyword. One way of thinking about incoming links is that Google is a democratic search engine, and each link to your site acts as a vote for your site. Reverse links, pointing back to the page that linked to you also increases the value of the incoming links. There are a few key things to note (for these examples I will be optimizing for the keyword “Webpreneur”):

• The link to the page must be in the following format

<a href="http://www.thewebpreneur.com">Webpreneur</a>

• This type of linking is the most effective and simplest for the search engine to understand.

• It is best if the page that is linking to you contains the same keyword as the one you are linking for. For example if the site that contains the link above has multiple occurences of the phrase “Webpreneur”, the link will weigh higher.

This article is not to suggest that you should go out and start plastering links to your site in forums and the like. The only links that are truly valuable are links that you have earned. If you have a link from an article on another site, or a friend’s blog that has a high page ranking (e.g. Jess3.com boosted my search results to the top), that would work well.

Now that you have an understanding of optimized URLs and choosing keywords, we will move on to optimizing the heart of your content. There are numerous factors that play a role in having content which is search engine friendly. Search engine optimization relies primarily on your content. There is nothing better than having high quality original content. After you have created original content, you should optimize how you mark-up your content using HTML/XHTML.

One thing that I have started to realize is websites designed using XHTML and CSS are more effective than generic HTML with table based layouts for showing up in search engines. Why? There is a simple answer: it takes less html to code a site using xhtml and css. With an XHTML website, the html is simply used to markup your content, and all of the design is provided by the CSS. If possible use XHTML and CSS over table based HTML, you’ll be glad that you did.

Achor Text – Achor text refers to the clickable text of a hyperlink. When you create a link (e.g. Webpreneur) the text that you put between the <a> </a> tags is very important. One way of thinking of google is as a democratic search engine. Every link that you place, is a vote for the page that you are linking to. So the link that I just created is a vote for my name, for this page. I would not suggest browsing around the web carlessly (or targeting) specific places to put links that will link back to your site. Rather, creating useful links internally is very useful. Make sure that all of your links contain good descriptions of the pages that they link to. Also, if you are using images as links, place good descriptions in the alt propery of the <img> tag.

Heading Tags (H1 through H6) – Heading tags are used to provide emphasis to certain text on your page. If you emphasize important phrases (keywords) on your page, your page will rank higher. Do not get too carried away with this.

In summary, make your code easy to read using XHTML and CSS. There is a great article about the shift from regular HTML to XHTML and CSS at A List Apart. Use descriptive anchor tags on your site, and finally, use heading tags to emphasize important text on your page.

Now that you have done all of the necessary competitive market analysis it is time to begin optimizing your site. There are a few key things that are necessary when optimizing your site to get to the top of google. The first thing is optimizing your page URLs. If you mouse over the various links on this blog, you can see that the page urls are descriptive of the page. For example, the url on this article includes the text “optimize-your-page-urls”. Google sees this as “optimize your page urls”. How can you create good page urls?

Each page that you create should have a targeted keyword. As such, the URL for any given page should include the keyword that you are targeting. How do you get nice looking URLs? There are a couple of methods you can use:

1) Naming your file as the keyword that you are optimizing your page for. For instance if you are optimizing for the name “Webpreneur”, you would name the file Webpreneur.html.

2) Use url rewriting via Apache’s mod_rewrite module and modify your .htaccess file. This is a more complicated way of accomplishing things, but it ends up being a slicker way and makes url write easier in the future. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use a content management system for your site that utilizes url rewriting such as Wordpress or Textpattern. If you look at each of the articles on this site, the URLs are optimized using this method.

These two methods will serve you well when trying to optimize your page to reach the top of google.

Currently, keywords are one of the primary factors in what your website shows up for in search engines (if it shows up at all). In order to optimize your content for search engines, and to get to the top of google, you will need to choose a few distinct keywords and work them into your content. Choosing good keywords for your website can be done through completing a few simple (yet very important) activities:

Step 1: List all possible keywords that you would like to have your site display for when searching in Google. Remember, the only reason for spending the time on search optimization is to reach your target market. Think of keywords that your target market will be searching for. Also, remember that it is easier to show up at the top of the search results for keywords that are more unique. For example, trying to come up as the top site for the word “dogs” is going to be extremely difficult if not impossible. Instead pick keyword phrases such as “how to train dogs”. Also, for each keyword, try picking a few mispellings. There is a useful tool that can be used for finding common keyword typos at SeoChat. For this exercise I will be optimizing my blog to the phrase “Webpreneur”.

Step 2: Do an analysis of the competitive landscape for each of the keywords you have selected. When doing a competitive analysis I suggest using a spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet. This will allow you to organize all of your research into one location and determine which keywords will be best to target. When doing a competitive analysis I suggest going through the following process:

1. Search for each keyword in google and take a look at the top two results. Do the keywords show up in their URLs and/or page titles? If not, optimizing your site will be much easier.
2. Get the pagerank for the url and for the site, using a tool such as the SEOChat Pagerank Lookup Tool
3. Get the code to text ratio of each of the pages using a tool such as the SEOChat Code to Text Ratio Tool
4. Check the link popularity of each of the pages using a tool such as the SEOChat Link Popularity Tool

Enter in the information you find from doing your research above into your spreadsheet. This information should be used to determine two things: 1) Do you want to invest the time into optimizing for this keyword, and 2) What are the values of the optimization factors that you need to mimic? (What I mean by optimization factors is: PageRank, link popularity, meta-tags, URLs, and page titles). If the competitor has a text/code ratio of 30% (30% text), you should mimic this and have a similar amount (or slightly more text). Same thing goes for link popularity, and pagerank. You need to be at least equal if not better for each of the variables.

Step 3: Narrow down your keyword list to 5 or 10 specific keywords. Remember, search engine optimization is a difficult and time consuming process. If you pick too many keywords you will be spreading yourself thin. Once you have selected your keywords it is time to move on to the next step.

In this series of articles, I will discuss how to get your site to the top of the search results in google when someone searches a given keyword. As each article is published, a hyperlink will be added to the article list below. Top of Google Articles:
1) Choose Good Keywords to Optimize Your Site
2) Optimize Your Page URLs
3) The Art of Optimizing Content (HTML Tags and Text)
4) Create Links to Your Site
5) Boost Your Pagerank
6) Putting it All Together

Before diving in to the search engine optimization (SEO) articles there are a few key concepts that you must understand. These concepts will be covered more in depth over the course of the articles, but you should have a rough understanding for the time being. Key Concepts:

• Keyword Density - Keyword density is the ratio of the number of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a page. For instance if you have 1000 words on your page and the phrase “top of google” shows up three times. Your keyword density would be 3/1000.
• Code to Text Ratio - The code to text ratio is a method for search engines to determine how much content you have on your site and the page relevancy. The lower your code to text ratio (more text and less code), the better odds you have of getting a good page ranking.
• PageRank - According to Google’s definition, PageRank is a “formula developed by Google to determine a web pages ‘inbound link ranking’ Often referred to as ‘PR’ value.” Ultimately, PageRank is the algorithm that Google uses to determine the importance of your website. If one site has a pagerank of 6 (out of a possible 10), and another site has a pagerank of 3 and both pages are optimized to the keyword “Dog”, the site with a pagerank of 6 will show up first.
• Meta Tags - Meta Tags are information placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications. They are placed within the tags of your html.
• URL and URL Rewriting - If you don’t know what a URL is, good luck doing search engine optimization on your site. The URL is the unique address that you can find at the top of your browser that specifies the address of the webpage you are viewing. URL stands for “Uniform Resource Locator”. By optimizing the urls of each of your webpages you will be positioned to show up higher when searching specific keywords in a search engine. Take a look at the url of this specific article, it is optimized properly to show up as the first site in google when searching for “top of google”.

If you are truly interested in the anatomy of a search engine then I recommend reading the original Google research paper written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.