Natural Search Engine Optimization Tips

Monte: So, Jay, let’s roll right into it. Talk about this particular segment, the 10 tips to drive traffic to your web site and why you feel it’s so important for people with new domain registrations and existing sites to have these top 10 rules.

Jay: Well, we just try and create great content for the Moniker newsletter; and we wrote this one for the second edition, so that if people are looking for the content, they can find it at DomaiNEWZ on the bottom right-hand corner of the Moniker newsletter. And we wrote this in Volume 2 to DomaiNEWZ. And we called it 10 Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Web Site. The first tip is to optimize your site for search engine traffic, and we’ll spend a lot of time talking about that on this show; because I call search engine marketing the gold rush of 2004. A lot of people we’re doing business with are making up to $10 for every $1 they spend advertising on Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines. The reason is the search is so great is because there is nothing better than a customer who is looking for your product or services. The first area of the natural search engine optimization, what we’re talking about is the left-hand side of a Google search result. And 62% of customers who come to Google on the other search engines prefer to click on the left-hand side as opposed to the right-hand side. So, in this tip, I talk about how you get ranked on the left-hand side; and there’s over a hundred different things that Google and the other search engines put into their algorithms, but I think there are really 3 key factors that are going to help you get ranked high on the Google search. The first one is your meta-tags, and these are the tags that tell them description tags, that tells the search engine what your site is all about. And you can see these by going into your web site and, at the top of the browser, click on view, and click on source, and if your title tag says something like “Welcometomysite.com”, you’re missing a really important opportunity. And what you want to do is change your title tag and your description tags, change those tags to keywords that people use to search for your product and services, and there’s a great free tool on the internet at a site called GlobalPromoter, and I’ll post that on the chat now. And GlobalPromoter has this free tool that’s also available at Overture, and you click on the keyword tool, the GlobalPromoter tool is slightly better than the Overture tool, and if you click on that link, you can find out how many times a month people are search for the different keywords. If you add the keywords that people are searching very frequently to your title tag and to your description tag, it’s going to improve your results in the search engines. The other way to use those keywords is to actually add the copy to your site. The search engines come out and they spider or read your web site and they do that on a 2-6 week cycle; and if you have the words that people are searching for, the actual copy on your site, those words, then there’s a good chance that the search engine will know you have those words and they’ll link people to your site.

Monte: That’s great.

Jay: The final area is to build links to your site. Google puts a very high importance on links from another site to your site. They kind of see that as a vote for your site, and it’s like all the other sites on the internet are saying your site’s important. So you can build your links by trading with complimentary partners and suppliers by saying, hey, I’ve added a link from my site to your site. Will you add a link back to my site? And it’s a very effective way for you and your partners to build your performance in the search engine.

Monte: Now one of the big questions that comes up when you have that strategy is, what if your page rank is less than the person that you’re linking to or more than the person that you’re linking to? What is the proper strategy there? Do you want to be linking to somebody with a higher page rank or a lower page rank or does it matter? Let’s tell the audience how to go about that.

Jay: Well, both quantity and quality are important. So, even if you’re getting ranks from sites with lower ranking than yours, if they’re quality sites, and by that I mean they’re….

Monte: Relevant, relevant sites.

Jay: Relevant to your business.

Monte: So you don’t want to be on a site that’s selling automobiles when you’re in a commerce site that’s selling something completely different and expect to get ranked high because of that.

Jay: Exactly. So, if you can get in with a whole bunch of sites in your industry, the best are highly searched, highly trafficked sites, that are commentaries or journalists or people who talk about your industry, qualified resources, if they link to your site, that is very, very valuable.

Monte: Somebody in the chat room is asking where this link, the keyword linking tool is. Well, we’re going to post that in the chat room. Jay, will you post that at some time during the talk here today?

Jay: Yeah.

Monte: Okay. Great. So, just cover point number 1.

Jay: So, point number 1 is all about improving your natural search engine optimization; you know, and the three really important things I said for that is 1) your title tags, 2) the actual copy or words on your site, and 3) building links to your site from other sites.