By then I had concluded that I would focus my comments in all my stories) on the needs of mainstream established companies-since those are the people I know the most about.

We have many many articles written for others, such as Internet entrepreneurs, in the Selected Newsletter Articles section of our web site. Therefore, I listened to what Heather and all the other presenters had to say from the perspective of those folks primarily involved in a traditional Main Street businesses with an Internet component.

What I found most refreshing was that her ideas “just made sense”. No rocket-science required. And since I had heard her in 2001, we had already taken advantage of some of them and know they work.

Heather’s Tip No. 1: Brainstorm keyword phrases.
This is important since the specific words and phrases that most accurately identify your products or services are likely to be different from the generic ones your web site designer would use. Who knows more about your business, your products, and your customers? You or your web site designer?

Plus, as search engines become increasingly sophisticated, more complex descriptions are possible to connect you with more targeted searchers. The closer you connect with your prospect at this point the more likely what you actually have to offer will match with what they are specifically searching for. Time spent here is time well invested.

Heather’s Tip No.2: Research your key phrases using trusted research tools.
Naturally this assumes that you actually take this important step. For me this has always been a stumbling block - costing me rankings, I’m sure. In the past I assumed that I knew what keyword phrases people are using, instinctively without testing to be sure. The result was time, energy, and money spent to optimize keyword phrases that were “just slightly wrong”, shooting myself in the foot before I got started. Actually, it was after hearing Heather in 2001 that I began to see the light and use search tools such as Wordtracker (www.WordTracker.com) and now the Google AdWords keyword selection tool before optimizing the page.

Heather’s Tip No.3: Choose two or three key phrases their highly specific to each page.
After hearing this tip (again) we made some simple changes that, within two weeks, made a dramatic difference in the traffic on our web site. We had 200 pages of what had originally been an ebook. Each page had identical meta tags and other code. By going back and optimizing each page around the specific keyphrases already on them the search engines are now seeing them individually. The result is that each page is, to a greater or lesser degree, generating new search traffic.

Heather’s Tip No.4: Include key phrases throughout your text, not just in the first couple of paragraphs.
Everyone “knows” that the search engine spiders enter your page from the top. Conventional wisdom was to put your keywords and keyphrases toward the top of your page. The result may have made your page look good to the spiders but not to the actual people who you want to be reading it. Now that we know that spiders zip through our entire site we have the freedom to insert the phrases where they fit best, where they make the most sense, and where they enhance the readability of our web site.

Heather’s Tip No.5: Include key phrases in your headlines and some headlines.
In some ways spiders are like humans. What gets emphasized attracts their attention. Headlines, sub-headlines, and bold faced type are considered to be more important by the spiders in the same way that they are considered to be more important when an actual person reads the contact.

When we made the changes on our web site based on Heather’s comments, it was the new title tags and the new content specific headlines on each page that made all the difference. These new headlines and new title tags attracted the spiders perhaps for the first time in a long time and when they saw how the individual tags connected to the page’s content they took them more seriously than before. This was a simple, although time consuming, process and immediately we began to see traffic to pages that never even shown up before.

Heather’s Tip No.6: Include key phrases in and around your hyperlinks.
By now everyone knows about Google’s pagerank system. In a nutshell it means that the search engines are now giving us “credit” for inbound links. They have a complex and unknowable process for weighting them based on the value of the web site from whom we are linked as well. In addition, when the links themselves are contextual, rather than just the base URL more weight is added. When there is an interest from a trade association or other reputable source to link to our web site, we encourage them to use the contextual link, in order to maximize the benefit of the link they create. You will see an example of a contextual link in the resources box for this article.

Heather’s Tip No.7: Include least to 250 words per page.
As I said earlier, the longer keyword search phrases being used make it more likely that the searcher reaches the specific products on your web site that they’re looking for. If you have enough content in which to place this keyword phrases. Again using our recent experience, pages with an average of 600 words, are being greedily consumed by the search engine spiders. I don’t actually know how many people are searching our content but I’m confident that those who do so are doing it based on a large body of relevant material. I do know that inquiries are more relevant all the time - which is better for us and the searcher.

Heather’s Tip No.8: Include keyphrases in your title (the blue bar above every web page).
I’m no expert but like I said before this just makes sense. I remember a time, back before I heard Heather in 2001, that all of all our pages said “iBizResources.com” across the top. Until then I had no idea what we were missing. Now all of them identify the content on that particular page and is directly related to the keyphrases included in the page or articles headline. Simple but powerful.

Heather’s Tip No.9: Never sacrifice your conversion goals for search engine positioning.
For me and for you she saved the best for last. The reason we have our web site is to provide relevant, actionable, and transferable strategies from office and our contributors to you. The copywriting is for people like to, not search engine spiders. Nevertheless we have to recognize their importance. It is up to them to put our content in front of you - so we have to balance the two. As a business person your objective is to expand your reach beyond your normal marketing area, to increase your market share and to increase the value of every contact. That’s why you head of a web site.

So, when you are taking advantage of Heather’s tips tools and strategy don’t forget it’s the people that write the checks not the search engine spiders.

Getting to the top of the search engines can be difficult and takes a lot of time, but it will pay off in lots of free traffic. Here are some ideas for getting to the top of the search engines.

Use a descriptive title for each page of your website. The first words in the title should be the ones you expect customers to search for the most. The title will be highlighted in the search engines, and you want people to see what interests them.

Placing keywords in the right places helps in getting to the top of the search engines. Search engines look for important keywords in the headlines, subheads, and first paragraph. While you should make the first paragraph as keyword rich as you can, don’t sacrifice content to do this.

Search engines view hyperlinks as important, so use important keywords in hyperlinks. This works especially well when the name of the page you hyperlink to has the same keywords as in your hyperlink.

Write a website consisting of several pages. Each page should concentrate on one keyword or keyword phrase relating to your site.

Submit your site to the major search engines. You can do this by using the “add your URL” link found on the search engine site.

Links from good quality sites will help you rank well with some search engines. In addition, they are another way for people to find you. Find sites that complement yours and ask if they will consider reciprocal linking.

If your business has a website, most likely it’s constantly changing and evolving. This can be a good thing but how you handle these changes can make a dramatic difference in how effective your website becomes.

Some of your content may be time sensitive, such as information on special promotions, contests and things of that nature. Some content may no longer be relevant to your business, such as discontinued products or services. Most people’s first course of action in these cases would be to simply remove these pages and all internal links (links from your own website pointing to your own pages) so that there is no path to them. This is not the best approach and can result in less website traffic and also potentially affect your search engine rankings.

There is a strong possibility that other people have placed links on their website pointing to the removed pages. Some people may have even previously book marked the removed pages for future use. Once you’ve removed the pages you have eliminated these sources of prospects.

Search engines follow links to find websites and web pages. By removing these pages, you are removing the content that they have come to expect (once they’ve found and indexed it). If they are unable to find a number of pages that you have improperly removed from your server then they very often will leave your website. This can make getting your new pages indexed difficult and slow.

Fortunately, the solution is relatively simple. If you plan to remove a page from your website you would first set up a 301 redirect to another related page. For example if you had a page named “july-sale.htm” and it is now August, you would set your 301 redirect to automatically send all requests for that page directly to “august-sales.htm” instead. Once that is in place you can safely delete the page. If you’ve already deleted pages from your website without setting up 301 redirects you can still fix the problem. If you view your error logs on your web server you can find all of the 404 errors which are caused by requests for files that do not exist and then set up a 301 redirect for each missing file.

This ensures that when someone comes to a page that no longer exists, rather than getting an error message and leaving, they are instantly whisked away to the next most relevant page and you get the chance to turn them into a client or customer. It also ensures that when the search engines come looking for a page that no longer exists they are redirected to the next most relevant page causing them to spend more time crawling your website. It’s important to point out that some hosts do not offer the ability to set up these type of redirects and will recommend adding a java script to the page. This will not work for the search engines because they do not execute any scripts, and it will only work for a portion of visitors.

You can add/edit content, display it in various formats (for example html vs. pdf vs. rss) and usually manage the content of a website with a cms.

Some definitions, or better, some of the feature lists of more popular cms’ go way beyond management of content, getting into actual site building, adding of modules like polls, newsletter sign-ups etc.

cms does not mean site creation but site content management.

To fully understand what it is a CMS does, we have to first define a) what it is we are referring to when we talk about content b) what it is we understand under its management and c) what do we mean by a system.

Content is in essence, any type or ‘unit’ of digital information. It can be text, images, graphics, video, sound, documents, records etc - or in other words - anything that is likely to be managed in an electronic format.

Content Management is effectively the management of the content described above, by combining rules, process and/or workflows in such a way that its electronic storage is deemed to be ‘managed’ rather than ‘un-managed’.

The system itself is definable as a tool or combination or tools that facilitate the efficient and effective production of the desired ‘output’ using the managed content.

“A CMS is a tool that enables a variety of (centralised) technical and (de-centralised) non technical staff to create, edit, manage and finally publish (in a number of formats) a variety of content (such as text, graphics, video, documents etc), whilst being constrained by a centralised set of rules, process and workflows that ensure coherent, validated electronic content.”

MODX CMS= OPEN SOURCE PHP APPLICATION FRAMEWORK.
MODx is an open source PHP Application Framework that helps you take control of your online content.

It empowers its users to build engaging “Web 2.0″ sites today, with its pre-integrated Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries.

Not only does MODx help you build sites quickly, but it also is both robust and simple.

Who uses MODx?

Bloggers, developers and other members of the digerati looking for more, MODx can help take it to the next level.

MODx makes working with the tools du jour easy, be it Ajax or the most highly search optimized CSS/XHTML sites.

MODx allows you to focus on usability, design, content and building great sites, not on the tools that build them.
The SEO CMS:

MODx helps you build sites that perform well in search engines – in fact, we think it’s a great SEO CMS.

Typically, sites with minimal code/markup compared to the actual words on the page fare better in the search game. Aguments with lots of good evidence behind them abound for that lean, semantic XHTML/CSS sites gives the words more weight or “relevancy” (a very important SEO term) compared to sites that are built on top of bloated structures with loads of non-semantic markup (typically, table-based sites).

MODx makes creating sites that search engines can love almost automatic. What you put in it and however you want it to look is what you get out of MODx.

Write XHTML code that puts the important content as close as possible to the body tag
We don’t force a cumbersome template language or “block” or “3-column” or “channel” or “insert-favorite-term-here” template system. In fact, creating a template in MODx is as simple as taking some static XHTML (or HTML chock full of tables even!) and replacing a few key areas with things like [*pagetitle*], [*longtitle*], [*description*], [*content*], [*sidebar*], [[Menu]] and {{footer}}. That means you can build a super-clean XHMTL/CSS driven site that uses the minimum amount of code so search engines have nothing but your content to think about.

Every MODx page has several bits of “metadata” that are automatically available to every page.

The way your browser’s URLs return are also important in the Search game. Google arbitrarily refuses to index URLs containing “?id=”. Many argue about how URLs should be written, so that’s why MODx and mod_rewrite let you do it whichever way you prefer. You can create URLs manually or dynamically in several formats:
* http://mysite.com/p1234.html (or .cgi or .jsp or .aspx or .php or .cfm or .anythingyouwant)

* http://mysite.com/1234 (no extension)

* http://mysite.com/page-name.html (manually created)

* http://mysite.com/page_name.html (automatically created from the page title)

* http://mysite.com/some/subfolder/pagename.html (uses site hierarchy and allows for duplicate aliases in different pages)

* any combination of the above
Meta Content Management (including Keywords)
The MODx Ajax CMS and PHP Application Framework brings plenty to the table, with more on the way, including:
* Strong Web Standards Support – MODx does not force you into awkward and confusing blocks-this or channels-that templating engines or layout rules. You can build XHTML 1.1 Strict sites just as easily as a tag-soup laden table layout. MODx is the dream CMS for CSS designers.

* Web 2.0 Features (yes, that means Ajax) – MODx is the first free PHP CMS to offer an API that fully supports Web 2.0 Ajax technology thanks to script.aculo.us. Expect to see this grow more and more into our manager over time, but you can make use of it today in your own custom applications including live search, web effects, Ajax communications and more.

* PHP Application Framework – a flexible API and a event model that allows to override how the core behaves means that you get both tremendous flexibility, but also the ability to customize the solution to your needs and a simple upgrade path.

* Works in your favorite browser – and yes that means Safari! You can manage your websites from anywhere in the world with an internet connection and IE 5.5+, Safari 1.3+, Firefox 1.0+.

* Graphical Installer – it’s now easier for less experienced users to get up and running fast with a step-by-stop online installer.

* Improved Rich Text Editors – All MODx RTEs are optional plug-ins, making for a smaller base download. FCKeditor ships out of the box. Adding new RTEs to MODx is simple with TinyMCE available now as an optional download and Textile, Markdown and widgEditors on their way.

* Better handling of aliases and menu indexes – Search Engine Friendly aliases are automatically created from the page titles and the system will check for alias conflicts before saving a page. Reordering your pages with Ajax-enabled drag and drop indexing.

* Robust CSS Menu Builder – Menus made from ULs are ready to go out of the box. Whether you want something simple as a bulleted list for a sidebar or as complex as Big John’s deluxe menus complete with CSS “hover zones”, MODx has you covered.

* Improved Meta-tag and keywords controls – consider MODx your #1 free Search Engine Optimization CMS. MODx helps your SEO efforts by making it easier to adjust meta-content of your site on a per-page basis.

* Separate Manager and Web User sessions – simplify your testing and development workflow.

* Improved Document Parser and Error handling – build better custom applications with a more robust API and greatly improved error handling and reporting inside the manager.

* Custom Content Types – use MODx documents to manage your linked Style Sheets, Images and Javascript. Transform them into XML, PDF, Excel or Word documents with snippets and this handy new feature.

* Bug fixes and usability tweaks – a more polished and robust product, bringing us to the home stretch to the official project launch and 1.0 release.
Finally, MODx also provides several ways to manage the meta content on every page. You can use {{chunks]] to create sets of meta content, or it’s built-in (but optional) meta content management system.

As an editor there are two ways to publish content:
* in the main Content Area, and

* in other areas called Template Variables (traditionally side blocks, but they can be placed anywhere on the webpage).
There are two important feature of MODx that you you need know about:
* Chunks - these are re-usable pieces of HTML content. You can place a Chunk in the main content area or in a template variable. For example, you could put your contact details into a Chunk and then you can publish them in different places on the your website without re-typing the details.

* Snippets - these are small functional items, such as menus and search bars. These can be published in the template, a document’s main content area, a chunk or in a template variable.
A Chunk or Snippet can be placed directly into the template by your web developer, or inserted by you into the Content Area or a Template Variable.
* The template contains the main framework of the webpage. Your web developer may choose to have content that appears on every page in the site. In this example the header and logo are fixed in the template.

* The template contains the Content Area, identified in pink, and inserted into the template with the syntax [*content*]. This content is taken from the Document as edited in the Manager.

* The template also contains MODx tags that insert Snippets. In this example there are two menu Snippets, identified in blue and inserted with the following syntax [[SnippetName]]

* The template contains Template Variables that allow the Editor to insert text, images and other content items outside of the main Content Area. These are identified in green and are inserted in the template with the following syntax [*TemplateVariableName*]

* The Editor can insert pre-set pieces of text or html into the Content Area or a Template Variable by using Chunks. In this example there are two Chunks identified in red. Chunks are inserted by the editor by typing into the Content Area or a Template Variable space.
 

Guestbooks - In a woebegone era people placed simple scripts on their websites, with the hopes of getting feedback from their visitors. A great number of these scripts are still in existence. A web spammer will identify a guestbook because of its’ footprint. Millions of these guestbooks have been abandoned and are not monitored by their owners. For this reason, automated guestbook spamming has been rampant. An interesting thing about Guestbook spam: some of them can even be spammed too death. Since many of these are old CGI scripts, they can’t handle the volume of spam messages, and end up crashing. At that point the Guestbook will live on until the domain owner removes it.

Blogs - blogs became even more popular than guestbooks. they’ve been installed by the millions and abandoned at 90% rate. Blog software prior to 2005 had a default setting which allowed comments to be published without prior approval. It also allowed live html, so these blogs are out there still begging to be spammed and many are each day. What ends up happening is they get so many outgoing links that the page becomes a massive size, and at some point the page may even have trouble loading.

Forums - a frequent victim of webspam. Since almost all forums allow users to submit material without pre-moderation, web-spammers will attempt to post to them. The good news about Forums is that are usually not abandoned like Blogs or Guestbooks, and usually someone will come along and clean up the mess. This isn’t always true, but it does happen quite a bit.

Any form on the internet that allows html is vulnerable to webspam attack. Without some sort of moderation it’s impossible to ensure that malevolent html will not be inserted. if you don’t pre-moderate the form, make sure you receive email notifications whenever the form is submitted. If you don’t at least check the form often, it’s inevitable that you’ll be spammed by one of the numerous bots on spam duty.

Search engines introduced the rel nofollow tag in order to deal with the rising tide of link spam. All popular blog software comes with the nofollow in place, so the main risk of Webspam is to legacy blogs installed prior to 2005. Nofollow essentially tells the search engine that the link is untrusted. In essence it says this link was entered by a person other than the website owner, so treat it with a grain of salt. Forum software makers have also been quick to add nofollow to their core technology. The fact of the introduction of nofollow gives great insight into how much trouble search engines were having with the enormous load of link spam. Basically they threw their hands up and admitted defeat. Nofollow has had an enormous impact on Webspam, but there are still an awful lot of blogs and forums out there that haven’t been patched.

Link spam appeals to certain web marketers for obvious reasons. It’s a scalable and free solution to building link popularity. Web marketers who automate the process can quickly vary their anchor text between ‘runs’. This will give them a wide variety of links from a broad spectrum of websites located on diverse IP addresses. This is normally a sure-fire recipe for success for virtually any website. By simulating the link popularity of a popular website, the link spammer is able to fool the search engines into assigning it higher rankings. The manipulation of link popularity has become a major issue to all of the search engines. Each will offer more and more attempts at reducing this threat, but unless search engine rankings are based only on on-page variables, it will always exist.

Link Structure

First your site’s link structure. Your site’s pages should not have more than 50 links each. Second, any one page on your site should be linked to every other page also known as mesh topology. These are the first steps toward implementing SEO methods on your site. To succeed in SEO you must next consider the naming structure of your url, not just the top domain name. We need to have each url as closely related to it’s page contents as possible. This must be done in concurrent with keeping a low word count and using popular keywords. The links on your pages are divided into to categories. Outbound and Same Domain. Spiders follow the links to other pages on your site or to pages on a different domain.

Web page Content

A principle of SEO is to keep low saturation in all aspects, while getting the point across to visitors and spiders. Not an easy task! Your content’s structure is the key to pulling relevant ads and/or converting visitors. No more than 3% keyword density in your entire body. The first line of text should include top keyword or phrase. Your outbound and same domain links anchor text(text representing link) will be included in the SE spider’s calculation of keyword density. You should not combine the percentage. Outbound Links should be under three percent density and the same for same domain, 6% anchor text keyword density for all links.

Content Comprehension

Human visitors are important to base your site’s interaction on, but don’t forget the search engine spiders! When coding your pages or purchasing a pre-written script you want to use or look for search engine friendly languages. HTML, PEARL, and PHP are the most popular with search engines. Avoid using scripts such as, Javascript, VBscript, etc., because they are like a foreign language to the search engine spiders. Your content must change at least weekly to provide fresh content for the spiders. The search engine spiders visit sites, frequently, when their content constantly changes. An easy way to accomplish this is to include content related rss feeds on your site’s pages. For this technique to work you must display the feeds in a SE friendly language. Now just build your incoming links.

One of the most pervasive bits of misinformation concerning the indexing process is that you should &quotsubmit” your site to the search engines on a regular basis. According to people who sell this bogus service, the search engines spend their day waiting for website &quotsubmissions”, which, once received, they obligingly go look at and then index, presumably with no concern for the quality of the site in question.

But the fact is, search engines are very busy little beavers. They are not sitting around waiting for submissions. On the contrary, they are constantly out there scouring the web so they can keep the most up to date database possible.

In many cases new information gets recognized by the major search engines within hours of being posted. Take news sites, for instance. In order to keep abreast of breaking news, and to make their news services relevant, the search engines have to be crawling these sites several times every day and be constantly updating what they find. Otherwise their &quotnews” results would be of very little value.

On the flip side, given their preoccupation with sites that are regularly changing and being updated, if a site is rarely changing or being updated, it is not likely to get regular visits from the spiders. Why would they waste their time?

So if you are a webmaster wanting to get traffic from the search engines, this should tell you something quite important: keep your most important pages fresh and updated. Give the search engines a reason to come back and look at them again. Regularly add content, and keep fine-tuning the &quotrelevance” of your content.

Another important fact about search engine behavior has to do with the importance of links. Normally search engines index pages because they have followed a link from an already indexed page.

So it stands to reason that the more links you have pointing to a given page, and the more significant those links, the faster that page will get indexed, the higher it will get ranked for your most important keywords, and the more often it will get visited by the search engine spiders.

Once you are indexed, regular submission of the kind offered by bogus &quotsite submissions services” is not going to help you. What will help you is regular updating of your pages and getting more links. The search engine spiders will follow the new links and have even more reason to visit your pages more frequently.

If you give the spiders something new to chew on when they get there, so much the better. As they learn that your pages are worth spidering (because your pages regularly change and contain useful content), they will get crawled more often.

What this means is that the best way to get a new site, or a new page indexed is to create a link from an already indexed page. But bear in mind that if the page that contains the link rarely gets crawled, it may take quite a while before that link is of much help to you.

When people speak of &quotquality links” they often fixate on the page’s Google Page Rank. But while Page Rank is important, it does not tell the whole story. Often a link on a page with no PR at all will still send the spiders your way. It just depends how often that page gets crawled. For instance, getting your link on a blog page — even a brand new one with no PR — is usually a very effective way to get search engine attention. The reason is that the search engines often visit active blogs on a very regular basis.

Among other things this should tell you that exchanging links with other sites and having your link end up on a relatively useless &quotlink page” is a very inefficient way to make an impression on the search engines.

An easier and much faster, more efficient way is to buy quality links from a link placement or text advertising service. For example, buying a listing in a syndicated blog that gets crawled on a regular basis will have almost immediate impact. The blog entry will get crawled very quickly, and if it is syndicated so your link is live on additional sites, that will give you even more search engine exposure.

Option 1: Become an SEO Expert
This is the hardest path to take to implement SEO on your website while yielding the greatest personal satisfaction. You will want to start by spending lots of time reading books and online articles to catch up on the latest SEO trends, practices, and methods. Next you should start experimenting with different methods you learn about, analyze the results, and change your website again. This is the continual learning process of search engine optimization and takes a great amount of time, energy, patience, and resources. However after several months when you start to realize the benefits of your work it will yield a great deal of satisfaction.

This option is recommended for those if you want to start offering SEO services as a part of your business or if you have multiple websites that you manage. If you only have one website and do not plan on providing SEO services to others this route is probably not ideal considering the time involved to make it successful.

Option 2: Find a Professional SEO Guide
This is the ideal option for most people who want to start internet marketing on their own, learn more about the industry, and yet not invest a considerable amount of time in the project. There are several SEO consultants who would be happy to guide you along the way and assist you in creating a successful online campaign. With this option you will not have to learn everything on your own but will have an experienced professional at your side to assist you in creating a successful campaign. The most difficult aspects of SEO could be handled by your consultant while you could manage SEO implementation.

For example your consultant could assist you in developing a keyword phrase list, sample methods of finding link partners, guidelines for using title, alt, heading, bold, internal link, and meta tags. After you have finished working on a few key pages you could request your consultant review your work and give you further suggestions. At first you will probably rely heavily on your consultant for advice but as time goes on your reliance on your consultant will diminish as you become more affluent in SEO practices and techniques. Another important service your consultant should provide is monthly or weekly progress reports. They will most likely have access to software that will enable them to generate reports such as rankings, keyword phrases, incoming link, and others. Consultants can usually provide other valuable insights to help your business succeed online on subjects such as PPC, conversion, usability, professional image, email campaigns, banner advertising, and other online marketing options.

Although this method will require some investment on your end it is far less expensive than a full-service SEO package and over time the cost will diminish as you become adept at SEO yourself.

How to Decide which Option is Best
When deciding between these two options the most relevant question to ask yourself is how much time do you have to invest in SEO. Through experience I would estimate that having an SEO consultant at your side will reduce the time you need to invest in your SEO project by about 50-75%. You must also determine how competitive your industry is. The difference between a national web hosting company and a local pest control company can play a huge factor in how much time will be required to be successful. Whichever path you choose as long as you are dedicated and determined you will succeed!

The advice from many web designers and search engine optimizers has been to find as many keywords as you can. They advise you to search for keywords using a variety of online tools and software programs which can identify leading keywords. At first sight this seems attractive, but it actually defies logic.

Let’s take a look at the aim of a search engine. Its job is to track down pages that meet the specific search term that a web surfer has typed in. The more closely the pages it serves up match the search term, the better it is for users. Search engines need to be as accurate as possible in delivering the right material to their users. Otherwise the web surfer goes elsewhere.

Now imagine you are a search engine algorithm – the mathematical program which calculates the probability of any web page matching the search term typed in. If the page has hundreds, or thousands of keywords you’ll be a bit confused.

For instance, is this web page about ‘article writing’, or is it about ‘feature writing for journalists’. They are different things. You’ll end up knowing the page is relevant but not that relevant. So you rank it down the bottom.

But what if the page only has the keyword ‘article writing’ several times? You’re absolutely clear the page is about article writing and so you rank it highly. Admittedly, it’s not quite as simple as this. But this is the principle of search engine technology. It is trying to find the most relevant pages that match the search term.

What this means for Internet marketers is that you need separate pages for each keyword. Focus each page on each individual keyword. Use the keyword in headings, sub-headings, the page text, the page title tag and in the Meta tags.

Avoid having pages which contain several key-words as that simply confuses the search engines and lowers your rankings. So forget the advice to have hundreds or thousands of keywords. Go for single pages that match single keywords and you will find your page traffic increase.

This trick also works for Google Adwords. Each advert should apply to just a handful of keywords - you get much greater click through rates and therefore cheaper advertising when you only have a couple of keywords per advert. If you have hundreds of keywords you’ll find you’ll get greater results by having keyword specific ads, rather than one advert with hundreds of keywords. So go against the advice of filling your pages and adverts with keywords. Go specific.

There have been many studies and debates among web designers with regards to how to cater specifically to PageRank’s indexing techniques in order to obtain the best rank for desired keywords used by searchers. Google has been extremely tight lipped about the actual elements making up the ranking system, and the way in which those elements are weighed for ranking. This secrecy is necessary in order to ensure the most accurate search results. Further to their efforts to keep their searches of the highest quality, PageRank is continually updating, changing, adjusting, and modifying the way in which its ranking is achieved. Though this is extremely good news for people who use Google as their primary search engine, it does present a challenge to web designers who wish to create a web design and content that is conducive to the highest rank results on Google.

To understand how to properly create a search engine optimized web design, it’s important that you first understand PageRank itself.

Ever since the world wide web was first created, search engines have each developed their own ways in which to rank web pages. Until just recently, such ranking was based upon a search phrase which occurs as a primary factor within a web site’s content. This has been the basis of every search engine’s ranking system. Therefore, until recently, all a web designer needed to do to achieve a high search engine rank is to make sure that the desired keyword – that is, the term the web designer feels is most likely to be used by users of a search engine in order to find their type of site – is used in a document of adequate length, and with enough density within the rest of the text. This technique could be accent with the use of certain additional HTML tags.

However, to create better search results, and to avoid automatically generated web pages, link popularity became a factor in search engine ranking. This was based upon the analysis of different ranking criteria of doorway pages.

Soon, another element was added. This was the number of inbound links to a website from other sites that were unrelated to the domain. This helped to measure the general importance of the website and so the higher the importance, the better the ranking.

However, it has been noted that the concepts of link popularity and inbound links from other websites hurt perfectly useful websites that just don’t happen to have a following as of yet. Furthermore, many webmasters learned to elude this hurdle by creating masses of inbound links for doorway pages from a whole swath of equally insignificant web pages.

Therefore, PageRank is not based wholly on the total number of inbound links or the popularity of a site. It is a complex balance of several factors which are not weighted equally.

So if you want your website to score well with PageRank, then make sure that it is well balanced in as many of the factors considered by PageRank as possible. Make sure the keywords are well used in your content. Write content that is long enough to “count”. Exchange links or add your site to the link lists of many other sites – especially others that have good ranking or that you feel are on their way to good ranking. As your popularity as a site grows, as will your page rank. This will allow your web design to grow at a manageable and profitable rate.