Practical Tips for Your Online Marketing Campaign

By Eli Hurst
Posted Thursday, February 6, 2003

Unfortunately for many web marketers there are some site design and initial set up issues that can make it very difficult for the search engines to list your web pages no matter how well you optimize and submit them. Much of this can be avoided or fixed relatively easily. The most common problems are:

Sites that use Frames.
Sites that use Dynamic URLs.
Sites that use Flash.
Sites that use Image Maps for navigation.
Sites that use Javascript for navigation.

You should utilize these tips when selecting keywords for each page that you plan to submit to the search engines. Think "specific keyword phrases" not "keywords". Why? Due to the extreme amount of competition for general terms in the search engines, if your keyword phrases are too general it is very unlikely you will rank well in the search engines. You stand a far better chance to rank well for specific phrases where there is less competition.

Try to think like your target audience. What would they search for when looking for the page you are optimizing? It is very easy to fall in the trap of coming up with a short list of what YOU would search for, but what about everyone else? They will not necessarily use the same keywords as you. You should try to come up with as many keyword phrases as you can think of that relate to the page you are optimizing. Try asking a few friends and family what they would search for when searching for a site like yours.

Page text tips: For best results we recommend that each page you submit has at least 200 words of copy on it. There is some cases where this much text can be difficult to put on a page, but the search engines really like it so you should do your best to increase the amount of copy where you can. This text should include your most important keyword phrases, but should remain logical & readable.

Do Not: List keywords anywhere except in your keywords meta tag. By "list" we mean something like - keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4, etc. There are very few legitimate reasons that a list of keywords would actually appear on a web page or within the page's HTML code and the search engines know this. While you may have a legitimate reason for doing this we would recommend avoiding it so that you do not risk being penalized by the search engines.
Use the same color text on your page as the page's background color. This has often been used to keyword stuff a web page. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam. Use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.