COMPLETE WEB-SITE OPTIMIZATION FOR SEARCH ENGINES (part1)

By Pavel Lenshin
Posted Tuesday, June 29, 2004

SEO or search engine optimization strategy now becomes
widely popular among online business operators. Nothing
strange about it as it allows to substantially increase your
gross income, as a result of growing traffic or visitors
flow.

That is why one point should be stressed out - your business
return on SEO is directly proportional to the results your
business have now. It means that SEO strategy, unlike
marketing optimization, directed to boost quantity, not
quality. If your business enjoys 1% response rate for any
action you demand, whether it is sale, subscription,
feedback or other it keeps on having similar response rate
after SEO will be accomplished, although the response will
grow in absolute numbers as a result of increasing traffic
flow.

As you see SEO is not a panacea. The highest and the most
efficient return on your SEO campaign as well as business
investment may be reached upon one condition. Only when your
current business model and marketing campaign has already
been optimized and reached high level or response rate and
efficiency, it is smart to grow your business "in quantity".

The reason for such attitude lies within the next
speculation as well. Having inefficient business model under
conducting web-site SEO will force growing number of
visitors to turn your online business down for good. The
obvious reason is that too few people actually return to the
site once they left it for any reason, so having low
response rate will substantially decrease your SEO result!

Let's draw an example. With previously mentioned 1% response
rate from every 100 visitors you get, would mean that 1
visitor only takes desired action. Suppose SEO campaign
increased the flow of targeted traffic to 1000. Using
children's math we can easily come up with 9 new people, who
would start to express their interest in your offer every
month.

Now what if your, as some marketers say, "conversion" rate
is 10% (10 visitors from every 100) and the SEO helped to
bring the same 1000 targeted traffic. You now have 100
“desired actions” per month! In other words, your net SEO
achievement is 90 new people. Compare this to 9 people with
1% conversion rate and it all becomes clear.
That is why SEO is mainly about quantity, while response
rate is mainly about quality.

I haven't intentionally mentioned about high quality of
traffic search engines generate. Many experts would probably
be skeptical by now for my evening-out the quality of
traffic and focusing on quantity only. The explanation is
simple - the quality of SE traffic is an Individual
parameter.

Unlike many marketing and SE experts I cannot tell you how
"quality" visitors coming from SE will be for your
particular business as I don't know your present promotion
methods. That is why the quality of traffic SEO campaign
brings may be neutral, slightly positive or even negative.
Yes, it may be negative.

I anticipate a small shock among online marketers, who were
taught for their whole internet business career that search
engine traffic is the most quality traffic they may have. It
is not true under some conditions. If banner or classified
ads were the only ways of generating traffic for you, then
SEO will surely bring a quality improvement to your business
response, on the other hand, imagine, that your present
visitors are interested readers of your books, ebooks,
reports, articles and other publications. Do you really
think that "response quality" of people coming from
"Description tag" of your search engine listing will be
higher? Hardly, you can surely expect a slight decrease in
response rate of SEO campaign, despite the unquestionable
quantity growth in accordance with our previous example.

Next vital point is to understand that before anything we,
firstly, should have those web-pages, otherwise there would
be nothing to optimize. That basic logic will lead to
another obvious conclusion. The more theme-based web-pages
you have the better SEO result you can achieve.
If your online business represented by 3 web-pages (main
sales letter, about the author and contacts), your initial
SEO "resources" are too weak to reach any substantial goal.
SEs look for information, that is why, content rich
web-sites may truly enjoy advantages of SEO.

Secondly, your pages should have already been listed in SEs.
If you haven't submitted your web-site to SEs yet, no point
to optimize the SE listing position you don't have.

An important dilemma every business operator faces is the
extent s/he allows to reach in desire to get outstanding SEO
results. Here is what I mean. As we all know the basic rule
of successful web-site optimization is focusing on keywords
with low or very low competition. In other words, the less
supply of internet resources for some particular keyword or
phrase is, the more chances are for your web-page of being
"noticed" and ranked high.

Here is the problem, if you want to get a maximum for your
web-site SE position you should be prepared not just to
rewrite or edit your web-pages, but to completely change the
theme structure and priority of informational content!

There would undoubtedly be web-site sections or pages with
extremely high competition that would stress the popularity
and importance of that topic, so if you decide to keep it
"as is", optimization will raise your listing, but somewhere
from 796,021 place to 545,932. Does it help you?

The extent of your "flexibility" and how far you can go to
look "pretty" from SE viewpoint is what should be decided
beforehand, because there are always 3 parts: you/your
business, target market/consumers and search
engines/directories, between which about 90% of
informational preferences are common, but the rest 10%
differ and it is up to you to decide what themes you should
focus on. Whenever you are implementing any of the SEO
tactics mentioned in this publication, keep in mind your
business and consumers' needs.

Having understood these fundamental features of SEO, could
we make a step further into a complete web-site search
engine optimization, expanding your business to the new
markets.

Note that SEO, despite all mentioned above, is all about
"asking for high ranking" and there cannot be any results
guarantee as no one except for SE developers themselves
control ranking algorithm and determine "who is where". More
than that, SEO takes much time before effecting your listing
positions and this timeframe may range somewhere from week
to several months, so don't panic if your optimization
efforts haven't resulted in Google #1 position by tomorrow
morning.

Structure

Let's start from drawing a scheme of your web-site link
structure very similar to one every web-developer draws
before designing a web-site. Under other equal conditions,
we will speak about later, it is also clear that the more
theme based web-pages or even web-site sections you create,
the more chances of being ranked high you have, no matter
how optimized your competitor's single web-page is.

Each web-page of web-site section should represent a
particular theme or topic. This way you can diversify your
"keywords market", increasing chances of high rankings.
Despite obvious visitors advantage your site is more likely
to win market recognition.

For now try to have "horizontal" as well as standard
"vertical" link connections between pages. If one of your
pages got a high ranking position (Google Page rank) it may
help to improve the rankings of web-pages connected to it as
well.

Keyword analysis

Next step is to determine keywords, mainly, phrases that we
would like to target. Talking about mentioned dilemma, I
would like to point to the other approach you should know
about, that is suggested by some experts. Let's call it
SE-oriented approach.

According to this approach, before creating a web-site your
first step implies searching for the best key phrases via
competitive analysis on main SE and then starting to develop
content around these keywords. It means that your web-site
will get highest SE ranking, but the informational richness
will be dictated by neither you nor your consumers. Under
such conditions it is SE or, to be more specific, your compe
tition will determine what kind of content you will have at
your web-site.
As you see, according to SE-oriented approach, the more
competitive some key phrase and based on it topic is, the
less attention you should pay to developing that theme at
your own site.

My attitude is slightly different. I offer at first to
create and evaluate your current web-site content based on
your business preferences and your niche-market needs and
then optimize those web-pages according to keywords taken
from your existed web-pages, no matter how tough the
competition may be. Of course, you are free to create new
pages around keywords with low competition just for traffic
building purposes, but the primary accent should be focused
on your business development and marketing needs.

As for the keywords, the basic rule is to choose the most
targeted phrases rather than single words for two reasons:
- Phrases could describe your web-page theme usually more
precisely than a word;
- Phrases usually have substantially less competition in
comparison with one-word.

Write down 3-5 the most targeted key phrases for each
web-page or section we are going to optimize. Then by
evaluating supply/demand ratio find the easiest keywords for
SE positioning.

Standard procedure of determining your key phrase
competition or, as i said "evaluating supply/demand ratio"
is to look at their supply and demand at popular SEs. Supply
is determined by results of searching them on SEs while
demand can be found through query on PPC programs at
Overture.com or Google.com's AdWords that have tool for
discovering how many time keywords or phrase have been
searched on them.

By doing so we are searching for the most prospective and
promising for optimization key phrases. Having them allow us
to go further and start optimizing the web-pages themselves.

(to be continued)

About the Author
Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur, founder of
ASBONE.com, where you can find everything to make your
business prosper. Discounted Internet services,
FREE ebooks (http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/)
FREE reports (http://ASBONE.com/reports/)