Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization campaigns – positioning – How to achieve a good search engine position?

Effective positioning

Effective positioning depends on many factors. The focal factor is the website itself. An inadequate construction, a flawed navigation system, or insignificant contents can make positioning difficult or even impossible.

A well-done website does not require large investments or a lot of work to achieve a top search engine position. Yet if we have a lot of competition, and our main keywords are much sought after, we may not be able to avoid higher positioning costs or a larger workload.

How to optimize a website?

The answer is simple - keep things simple and not overdo it, as overdoing things often brings the opposite result: in the case of search engines, a so-called ban, which means either that our website is removed from the search engine's index, or is parked on position number 300 or 400. In both cases we have only one option: we can close our online business and start breeding goldfish, hoping that one day one of them will develop the ability to grant wishes.

The fact remains that creating a website with positioning in mind is easy, but… time consuming. This is why clients often receive a product which cannot be positioned, in other words a great looking website lost in the world wide web. But let’s not beat around the bush, and start from the basics:

Domain name choice

The decision should be decisive and concrete - we should purchase a domain name linked with our keywords, thanks to which we want to achieve a top 10 search engine position. A domain name linked with our company's name should matter to us as much as what we ate at the same time last year - unless we're a tobacco company. We don't purchase one domain - we buy at least 10, and launch 10 separate sites on our server. We should never set up 9 sites to redirect to our 10^th one, as our website will spiral down in search engine positions, and that is the last thing we want. Our domain name should include our keywords, separated with hyphens. Other characters or lack of hyphens causes the search engine to interpret the name as one word, a word that's not in the dictionary, and will redirect us to the "warehouse", not the website itself. If the domain name we want to purchase is taken, we either choose a different country code (e.g. "com.pl" instead of ".pl"), or change the order of the keywords in our domain name.

Example:

www.brushing-in-the-opposite-direction-of-hair-growth.com

Step two - the focal element, the website itself

Here we have a lot of room to maneuver. For our sensible clients, we should properly prepare our websites content. For our demanding clients, we must make sure the webmaster does everything by the book, and does it well.

Each of our subpages must contain 4-8% of our keywords, incorporated into the contents. If our company offers multiple services, each must have its own subpage, and must contain keywords linked with that service in various forms, in the singular and plural, in various tenses, etc. It is also a good idea to publish images linked with the service on each subpage and image titles, as well as so-called text alternatives for search engines, which is what we see when we run our mouse cursor over an images – these should also contain our keywords.

Example:

Service: Brushing in the opposite direction of hair growth

Image name: Brushing-in-the-opposite-direction-of-hair-growth.jpg

Alternative text: see how to brush hair in the opposite direction of hair growth

Each subpage should contain links in the text to other subpages, intertwined into the context.

Example:

Our offer focuses on the precise art of brushing hair in the opposite direction of hair growth. The last phrase should be linked to the subpage dedicated to “brushing hair in the opposite direction of hair growth”.

Step three – creating an easy menu, incorporating keywords

Our menu should be composed of text. We cannot allow the webmaster to create it using flash or JavaScript. That would confuse the search engine – and since the search engine is not about to doubt its own intelligence, it will assume that our website is insignificant.

Step four – we prepare for our webmaster the following descriptions and meta tag contents:

Subpage title – up to 70 characters

Keywords – up to 10 per subpage

Subpage description – approx. 2 sentences containing keywords

When we’ve completed the above tasks, we send our instructions via email to the webmaster, establish a so-called deadline, after which he’ll wish he were dead if he doesn’t complete our site on time, and move on to doing what we like to do best in our free time.

Time’s up, and so it’s time to assess our webmaster – also called step five. We open our sparkling new website in his presence – with the help of any search engine, choose the “view source” option, and make sure that the following contents are present on each subpage:

If we do not find this information (and each subpage should have different descriptions, keywords, titles), we give our webmaster a yellow card and subtly remind him that money has not yet exchanged hands.

Let’s assume that our webmaster not only knows what he’s doing, but also isn’t lazy and knows how to do his job. We move on to examining each subpage. The address bar should show the subpage’s title, e.g. brushing-in-the-opposite-direction.htm. If it’s not there, see the paragraph above. We inform the webmaster that we know what the rewrite function is, and that he should implement it, and look for a hosting service provider who uses the function on his servers.

Taking that our webmaster is the one in a million who actually did all that, we move on to checking if the website’s main catalog contains two files: robots and sitemap. They have to be there!

We also make sure that our website contains a legible subpage entitled “site map”, which in turn contains a table of contents of all of our subpages. The very same table of contents should be located on the bottom of each subpage. It might not look too good, but it works like a compass for the search engine’s “secret agents”, who inspect the site incognito before issuing a verdict concerning our position.

And finally, we should ask the webmaster to add a statistics counter to our website – preferably Google Analytics, which is free of charge.

Positioning for a fee

Here we can go bankrupt with nothing to show for it. Positioning fees are usually calculated per keyword. If there are many competitive companies in our field, it is impossible to position more than 3 keywords per website. That is why we’ve purchased 10 different domain names with different keywords.

What do we pay for? We pay for every keyword, which is then positioned, and the grand total can amount to 100-500 PLN per word a month. We should remember that no matter how much we pay, no one can guarantee that our website will have a top position, because… because it’s IMPOSSIBLE! Search engines keep changing their classification criteria, no one really knows these criteria as it is their secret, and besides: someone else can simply create a website that’s better than ours. So beware of companies offering guaranteed results – it means that they’re being dishonest from the very beginning.

So what is paid positioning really about? It’s about purchasing links to our website and adding its address to various catalogs. Yet here we can do more harm than good by paying for positioning. Someone might generate 1000 links to our new website, we’ll find ourselves among the top 10 search results, but fall drastically in the rankings after only a few days. Search engines accept an increase of links to new websites, but in the beginning it shouldn’t be more than 2 links a day, and up to 10 links after a year. Someone might also purchase for us links on sites with a high Page Rank (PR). The PR should be at least 4-5, but the domain with that particular PR should also be at least 5-6 years old.

There are also various programs which automatically add links. This, again, can be dangerous, especially if we do not know how to use them.

We can create a subpage – e.g. “Business circle”, and publish on it descriptions and links to websites that recommend our website.

In summation, we should concentrate on creating a good website, and take care of the positioning ourselves by adding 2 links to our websites a day, in business portals, other websites or WordPresses.

And finally – avoid those who promise miracles!

Marek Welzel

Ars Nominem Advertising Agency