Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The objective of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site. This relative ranking is often viewed as a struggle to best use a few keywords, instead of a struggle to out-do your competition. If you search on your target keywords, you will see the leading site in the rankings. All you need to do is to be better than that number one site. This page suggests ways to optimise and improve search engine results with ranking and placement advice, information, hints, tips, and clues to improve your search engine keywords relative to existing leaders. After all, better keyword ranking is your real objective.

It is not enough to simply add META tags and do search engine submission of your site to a million search engine indexes and directories. The first placement step in obtaining significant web visitor counts is to seek first-page search engine results. An early step is to build a great content-rich site. One of the last steps is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory. In the middle is a step that is VITAL if you want to obtain front-page results. Most sites skim past this step because it is forgotten or too complex, but without competent Search Engine Optimisation you are destined to be search engine fodder. The following FREE tools and advice describes how to design your keywords with Search Engine Optimisation and ranking in mind.

There are no Search Engine Optimisation secrets -- just ranking and placement methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords. SEO training, content and link services are just one small part. This site targets improving search engine rankings by using a "follow the leader" approach to keyword selection and page wording. Once you know what keywords and search engine marketing services (not spam) worked for the "leaders", you can "beat the leader" and do even better! Proper Search Engine Optimisation requires that you beat your competition, so knowing the keywords and criterion used by your competition is the most important first step. It will become obvious that good ranking excludes keyword spamming the search engine, and that with the careful selection of your keywords that you will fare well for a little effort. The Bruce Clay website offers help, hints, and tips for improving search engine results via a specific search engine keywords placement methodology.

Step 0 - Search Engine Optimisation Overview

What is Search Engine Optimisation? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the science of search as it relates to marketing on the web. It is mostly technical in nature, combining programming with business, persuasion, sales, and a love for competitive puzzle solving into a written form capable of maintaining desired revenue goals while achieving high rankings in the organic sections of search engine results pages. It is not just technical, nor copywriting, nor links, nor just search engine submission, but an intricate blend of over a hundred variables into the fabric of a website. It is difficult to accomplish without a formal proven methodology and strong proprietary tools. We offer you a tutorial on all of that and more on these pages...

Before you start, you should understand that top 10 rankings with every single major search engine and directory can be obtained, although very few sites can get there and the effort is often beyond reason. Note: URL ranking results change week-to-week due to competition, so maintaining a top ranking requires constant keywords monitoring and information rework. Search Engine Optimisation never rests, much like your competition.

"It is not the job of Search Engine Optimisation to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the web site so that it becomes an eagle."

The key information on this page includes how to prepare both you and your site for the search engines, choosing the right keywords, how to analyse your competition, what is submission and how is it best accomplished, when to monitor your ranking, instructions for performing an analysis of your site results, complete with tools and aids. This site covers all basic and advanced strategies and the common mistakes to avoid.

Please start with a review of our SEO Code of Ethics and SEO Standards pages before you edit your site pages.

Search Engine Relationship Chart ® We think it is important that you learn how the search engines and directories relate to each other. View our Search Engine Relationship Chart ®. This is a flash rendering of our famous FREE PDF that is suitable for color printing! And the links are all active. NEW: Search Engine Search Hub NEW: Search Engine Relationship Chart ® - Local Edition - see who feeds who for local search results and technology. Singled out as the Best Professional Services Interactive Application award winner for 2004 by the IAC Web Marketing Association.

About our tools: We wrote them and we own them. For server and business reasons we operate them under our SEOToolSet.com branded domain. But they are our proprietary tools and are integral to our entire process. We understand the needs of SEOs, and we use these tools ourselves while providing service to our clients. BUT as great as we think they are, we still offer each subscriber a 15 day full refund cancellation option. If you wish a full refund within 15 days for any reason, your subscription will be cancelled and your fee fully refunded. Really! Not only tools, they come with free SEO technical support to assist with your tool questions! Click here to SUBSCRIBE NOW. Nothing to lose and everything to gain!

Advanced topic: How to Solve Web Server Technical Issues - to help with your Search Engine Optimisation projects it is critical that many technical barriers to ranking be removed. These tips are available with detailed instructions and we encourage you to read and implement those that apply to your installation. Server and design problems need to be fixed in order to receive top rankings.

Step 1 - How to Identify Your Competition

To select keywords that you expect surfers to use to locate your site, submit your obvious keyword terms and use our Research Tool to locate top ranked competing sites. Then create a list of the top one to five site URLs that return from each search. The results are sorted by sites with the most top-25 rankings (with the best first for near-duplicates). The numbers represent their current (real-time) ranking position (1 is first, 3 is third, etc.).

Try your major keywords (ours will be Search Engine Optimisation or search engine ranking). You will find that in a web-sized audience of billions of web pages, your competition will generally rank well in several search engines. True high rankings are achieved by having a first page ranking in most of these search engines for many keywords (not just one or two).

Try our Competition Research Report - The purpose of the Competition Research Report is to provide a real-time search engine ranking report for your specified competition for your keywords. This report produces a table with rows, labeled by the ranked corresponding competitors web site, and columns, labeled by the major search engines.

You should keep track of any URLs that you happen to know are well ranked or your major competition. You may also visit the search engines directly to see specific results. For instance, type your keywords into the search field for each search engine and view their individual results pages.

Need More Information? - Competitive Research

Search Engine Optimisation Services Allow us to provide your Search Engine Optimisation services - obtain a quote for Bruce Clay to Africa research, precision tune, submit, monitor, and much more for a full year at competitive rates. Much less expensive than you would think, and the results are generally higher and last longer than common do it yourself projects. View our optimised ranking results, and compare them to other Search Engine Optimisation firms you are considering - nobody else is as well ranked for as many terms. Please contact us for a no-obligation SEO services quote.

Search Engine Optimisation and other website placement hints, tips, and advice are reported by our comprehensive and free search engine tools! These are the analysis tools our staff uses day after day when optimising our + -/' sites. Additionally, this free step-by-step tutorial covers keyword research, link analysis, submission, a Keyword Density Analyzer, a position monitor, and many, many free ranking reports. Presented in an easy to understand and sequential step-by-step manner, the free tutorial coupled with these search engine analysis tools have helped thousands of people each week to transform their website rankings into top positions for their important keywords. Designed for do-it-yourself novice users with little or no HTML experience, we discuss how to optimise your web pages without utilising spamming techniques.

As a reminder, this page focuses on Search Engine Optimisation and Ranking Advice with a collection of SEO tools. It is a part of a MUCH larger site covering broader search engine marketing topics. Everything from search engine marketing strategy to search engine placement tactics, awards, email, press releases, links, suggestions for optimal search engine submission, and Search Engine Optimisation. It is strongly recommended that you follow the steps on this page, but that you also review this entire site if you are serious about promoting your web business.

Step 2 - How to Use Link Tracking: Locating the Links TO a URL

Link tracking allows you to identify and choose possible sites that you will want as link partners once your site is content-rich and optimised. If these sites link to your competition, then you want them to also link to you! This is also done so that these potential link partners can be checked for META keywords that might be related to your site that were missed by your competition. Add these URLs to the URL list from Step 1 to be used in Step 3. You might also try putting the http:// in quotes and using Google (above). Hint: the number and authority of the links to your site is a factor in determining how well your site will rank with some search engines. Popularity is good. Popularity with well respected sites is better. You will want to begin to develop links as soon as possible.

On the subject of popularity -- we consider links vital to long-term Search Engine Optimisation and ranking. The objective is this: if you get a site to link to you then you gain popularity points. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot of points, but if that site has few quality sites linking to it, you get only a few points. As such, a link from Microsoft.com would be worth more than a link from Bobspage.com provided both had content similar to yours. In essence, if enough quality sites link to you then your site becomes a quality site by association. So you want the best sites, not the most, to link to you. Likewise, if you link to other quality sites then your site is assumed to be a quality site by association. However, the sites must be covering the same topics as your linking page in both directions. All other links are minimal importance (or in the case of spam they are ignored or even a penalty). And do not bother to buy hundreds of URLs and cross link them or to buy into an advertising network. The search engines can locate them and filter them out faster than you can perform submission on these pages. At best they are short-lived.

LinkMaps™ is a Bruce Clay, Inc. tool designed to analyse pages from other sites that link to your site and to facilitate having them indexed by the major search engines. If you are trying to increase Link Popularity as part of a Search Engine Optimisation and positioning strategy then LinkMaps can help a great deal. Link development tools are wonderful aids and can help you with the "how do I get links" issues you will eventually face.

Need More Information? - Link Popularity

Step 3 - How to Identify Keywords

It is critical that we understand the search terms and keywords used to locate your site as a part of a search engine query. To help in this keyword analysis effort we offer advice and tools to research the competition and query history information available through several sources.

Enter the site URLs from your list one at a time Their URL: Print the results for the first inquiry report (specifically the top phrases), then analyse the other URLs

If you find that there are no META keywords in the site, the chances are that the site is using a server technique designed to hide keywords (such as server side includes), such server scripts submit alternate pages when a specific search engine looks for the page. These stealth CGI scripts were designed to offer content to the search engine that is exceptionally keyword loaded in an attempt to bias the spider into a higher ranking position, or both.

"Some people submit pages that present our spider with content that differs from what browsers will see. We strongly discourage the use of these techniques." - AltaVista Spamming Restrictions

Or perhaps the site author indexed then subsequently uploaded a keyword-less page to keep you from figuring out how to beat them with their own keywords. I do not recommend that you try this on your site because, in most cases, anybody can resubmit your URL, thus your site will drop from the search ranking results. As a housekeeping matter, the search engine will eventually revisit and reload registered sites without owner knowledge in order to purge deleted pages or to address spamming, so these sites will eventually vanish anyhow.

Hint: you should also search for your domain name in the major search engines. While this is not obvious, it is very informative. Search in Google using the following search format: ".bruceclay.com -site:bruceclay.com" for Google and Yahoo. Replace bruceclay.com with your domain name.

It is important that you do NOT take the HTML source from a competitor's page. All that you need is sample keywords used for search engine ranking, and some idea that your list is complete. There may be a copyright on the site, but you may make sure that your keyword list is not missing a word or two from the keyword list (after all, all of the words are in the dictionary, and you do have a right to individual words that are not trademarks). However, the copyright protects contiguous character strings and includes displayed and hidden text (thus it includes keyword strings), so you cannot take large portions of their list as entered and use it to compete against them. Even if there is not a copyright, the content is intellectual property, and there may be a severe negative effect from taking it.

The use of trademarked or registered names is illegal without appropriate notations and statements in the page. If you intend to use a legal entity name belonging to a competitor you must follow accepted publication and legal credit guidelines.

It is far more important to rank well with many search criteria than to be number one with only one criterion!

As an additional comment, use different keyword patterns and titles for ALL of the major pages in your site, and submit each individual URL to get all of the different keywords and titles added to the search engine. The goal of Search Engine Optimisation is to be found for many keyword searches, so have each page cater to different keywords!

Hint: the META tag "keywords" may work for some search engines (like Yahoo!) while Google and many others emphasize content and titles. As a result, it is important to have the most common words also appear at the top and throughout your site if it can be done without hurting the appeal of the site. If the search is for "search engine advice", put that string in the title, keywords, and top-of-page content.

SEOToolSet™ is a Bruce Clay, Inc. authored collection of indispensable SEO tools designed for Search Engine Optimisation. This product set includes research tools, keyword density analyzers, ranking monitors, ranking report modules, link analysis, and more. Exceptionally robust and feature rich, this is a synergistic system of inter-related tools designed to be one of the best tool collections on the market. It combines a great many tools not commonly connected together in this intuitive manner, facilitating deeper understanding and control of the SEO process. If you intend to promote your own web site, then you MUST try our tools. "Search Engine Optimisation without the best tools is like doing brain surgery with a hammer". Review our tools, then try them: [ Free Visitor Versions | Subscriber Versions | Subscribe ]

Step 4 - Repeat Steps 1 through 3 Until you Have Finished All Your Keyword Searches

Be sure to mix up the sequence of the keywords if appropriate, for example: 'word1 word2 word3' then 'word3 word1 word2' then 'word2 word3 word1', etc. Keep searching until you are satisfied that you have most of the keywords. Simply put, you can never have sufficient search engine ranking. If you think you do, simply add some more keywords appropriate to your site.

Need More Keyword Help? - Search Terms and Keywords  What Makes a Good Keyword?  How to Choose Keywords  How To Use Keywords

Step 5 - How to Combine the Keywords Based Upon Frequency of Use and Applicability

You will end up with hundreds of words that you should sort by your perceived descending order of importance (how likely it is that they will be used by visitors as search words). If uncertain, leave them in the order used by the highest rated pages. Be sure to identify two-word or three-word phrases if used, or if applicable. It is also important that you add words to help clarify the use of your keywords. For instance "capital" might have very different meanings -- such as intellectual capital, state capital, capital letters, venture capital, etc. So a keyword or two that helps the index builders learn the context of your keywords will help raise your search engine rankings. Hint: each keyword in your META tags must also appear within your content to avoid spamming penalties. Also, consider common misspellings [sic] as additions to your keyword lists.

Once you have your personal list, validate each phrase for popularity as a search term. There are several free tools which allow you to get a glimpse of the usage of various words and phrases. A good one to use is our affiliate KeywordDiscovery.com. The best tool for determining what stemmed word is commonly used is Wordtracker. It is so good that we recommend it to our clients in our SEO training courses. The results will indicate what terms generate the most searches, thus those are the most important terms (if they are appropriate to your page).

Search Engine Optimisation and Ranking Advice: Excessive use of META keywords is going to cause a search engine to ignore or decrease the weight for that keyword. And if you use a single word as a keyword, and later repeat it in your keyword string, then you may also be penalised. The string "Web, Web Design, Web" would be considered spamming. Also, keywords like 'word, words, wording, worded' may cause indexing to fail. Things are definitely getting tough, and it is advised that you use extreme caution when creating your Meta Tags. If you are indexed by any engine, and remain indexed for a week, then you have probably passed their test. Run our Keyword Density Analysis tool (step 3) on your site before listing with the search engines. The guidelines are accurate and will help a lot. We recommend a repeat limit of three times.

"For best results, the following Web publishing techniques should be avoided:

• Overuse or repetition of keywords
• Use of keywords that do not relate to the content of the site
• Use of fast meta refresh
• Use of colored text on same-color background
• Duplication of pages with different URLs
• Use of different pages that bridge to the same URL"

It is also important to discard potential keywords that are not likely to be used in a search if they do not contribute to your revenue. Properly done, you might end up with as few as ten or as many as a hundred major keywords. If you add all of the words it will dilute the importance of each keyword, so select well. In general, you will have a hard time keeping the keyword analysis list short if you include plurals and various combinations of words to maximise your frequency counts. This site has many keywords in various forms and combinations but we felt each word was important when we designed our keywords. The last keyword should be your site identification taken from your URL (ours is bruceclay.co.za), for ranking and placement reasons discussed later. Be sure that this string appears as content to avoid spamming (can be in a URL string or mailto at the bottom of your page).

As for spamming technologies, there is evidence that the major search engines look across pages within their index for long-string repeats, so mix up your keywords in the ALT tags to be sure they are not identical in sequence to words used elsewhere (text or META tags). Duplicate content is a very bad thing, and it can cause site-wide penalties. Hint: Be very careful not to replicate content on other URLs, and if it happens (as with affiliate sites) you have a serious problem. Duplicate content is a real problem when doing SEO.

Also, repeating your keywords in the content, as long as it is within a reasonable sentence construct and has appropriate context, will not be considered spamming. A search engine usually cares about spamming outside of the standard sentence construct when reviewing content instead of sentence spamming issues. Using exotic "hidden" text techniques will usually have you eliminated, so avoid them when possible.

Step 6 - How to Add Your Keywords to the Content

You are about to discover your real issue... you have insufficient or weak content. It takes a lot of words to convince a search engine that you are a subject matter expert. Also, most sites use images to relay their message to humans, but are now discovering that search engines are blind and do not see images. Or the site content comes from a data base and the data base has little unique content. Or the site accepts feeds from other expert sites but this makes all of their content someone else's, and they either get no credit for it or are penalized for duplicate content. In any case, the design and content on your web site may very well need to be restructured and expanded. [If this is not you, buy yourself a drink -- you have earned it!] Avoid mistakes, use clean optimised graphics and do it right, minimize the use of flash, avoid pop-up windows, restrict the scope of forms except where really needed, make javascript and css files external to the source code, always use a site map, solve obvious problems first, and by all means keep it simple. Web page layout problems really hurt SEO projects.

So where do you add keywords? It is important that your page TITLE be as descriptive as possible of what you do and that it contain your top few keywords, but generally fewer than 12 words. Listings that include the dominant search terms in the META TITLE and META description tags have a higher ranking and a higher clickthrough rate (often more than double the traffic) than those that do not! Use these keywords to make up your Search Engine Optimisation targets. Also, review your content to add these keywords, especially two- and three-word phrases, into the content without losing the message. This is important for a search engine that does not reference META tags. You want to use these phrases time and again without spamming a search engine. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta description fields. Such a search engine will exclude some appropriate keywords unless you use them throughout your content. And try to keep the title and description fields as short as possible to prevent you from diluting the keyword impact.

Additionally, it is good to practice a basic rule: begin each word in your META keywords list with an initial capital letter. There has been a lot of discussion about the continued use of META tags. META tags (actually the major HEAD section tags) we consider important to Search Engine Optimisation. What is not known is what is meant when it is said that search engines "ignore" a META tag. Our research is that they are not ignored and that they actually do count. It is commonly known that the title is vital, and that the description is often used as an abstract, but thought that the keyword tag is ignored. Knowing the history of spammer abuse for these tags, it would not be surprising to find them of lesser importance than before, and that perhaps words are ignored if and only if they do not appear in the content of the page -- but they are used if they are in the content. Is selectively ignoring words the same as being "ignored"? And if you were a search engine wouldn't you tell spammers not to bother?

Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right, you would never be penalized for having them (unless you spam), and not all engines will ignore them and maybe not forever. You can never go wrong by using META tags, and only hurt yourself if you don't use them.

You must also unconditionally, absolutely, positively have keywords (and certainly sufficient content containing them) throughout your body section. We recommend that you have at least 400 words of clean, grammatically correct sentence-structure content on every page. You must also have your keywords appear as the most common (without excess) phrases on your pages. In many cases there are ways to do this that work well for whatever your page format or content, all of which is customized to the look-and-feel of the site and the nature of the content.

And you also need to link pages together using the keywords of the landing page in the anchor text of the sending page. This is a must... use text links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are related. If the topics are not related, then use image links so the search engines do not see the text and get confused.

And never, ever create doorway pages, or information pages, or hallway pages, or whatever they are called today. Spam by any other name is still spam. If you cannot make the real page into a subject matter expert, then hire someone that can. But do not try to make a pig fly!

Step 7 - How to Tune Your Keyword List

Some search engines will allow you to submit (to replace or add a page to the index) a URL once every day and changes are usually live quickly (faster than other search engines), so use the search engine with the fastest indexing process to 'debug' your keywords and Search Engine Optimisation tactics. Unfortunately this submission cycle varies, so you might need to submit pages to all major engines, but certainly not all 200 search engines. It is important to understand that the time it takes for a search engine to actually respond to a submission and to place you into their index varies greatly day-to-day. Search engine indexing was once a matter of hours, and now is weeks. You would be wise to consider submission to other engines as well to cover your bases. How search engines work is a wondrous thing, and every engine is different.

Once you have selected your major keywords, add the main words to your TITLE string, your META description string, your META keywords string, ALT tags (image tag parameter), and especially imbed them into your top-of-page displayed content. Try to use as many keywords as grammar will allow in your opening few sentences since this sets the topic for the page and contributes to the theme of the site.

Keyword tuning is an iterative loop; you keep doing it until you rank reasonably well on several search engines. At that point you at least have the right words and a reasonable META keyword tag. But some search engines use different strings to determine keywords and their algorithms downplay or ignore META tags. These search engines extract keywords from the content on your page, so you need to place your best search words throughout the displayed content for your page. An example (grossly oversimplified) would be:

Note: If you are not "programming" the design of your own web site and are not familiar with how to add HTML code, please contact your web designer and request that they add these commands.

We have a Keyword Density Analyzer that is part of our SEOToolSet™ Search Engine Optimisation tool that will list the top keywords plus all words used in your META tags. This report presents the density for each word in the various categories: META TITLE, META Description, META Keywords, ALT Tags, Heading Levels, and two categories for Body copy. Following our specified methodology, you would review these reports and web pages to see what you need to change or add to your pages. Red and Blue colors are "bad".

Your URL:

Hint: some search engines ignore content in comment blocks, but some other engines may process this content. Also, some engines process ALT text for your images as keyword text as long as you do not spam these areas. However, at least one search engine has added indexing logic to consider the exact (or long-string) duplication of substantial portions of your keyword list in this fashion as spamming, and your entries will be removed within a week of their addition. To get around this, reword your keyword list to read as sentences, and place them in content appropriate to the page.

It is the mission of SEO to make the content worthy of high ranking by being more relevant and competent than your competition. Placing the keywords in the right spot at reasonable frequency is critical, but there is much more... you want your content to be the best it can be and then just maybe you will be considered relevant. Subject matter experts always do better than rambling text with randomly inserted keywords. Yes, you need the keywords, but you need to also be worthy.

This would also be a good time to perform a last minute check on the "spider-ability" of your site, and to detect any redirects or other issues that may prevent your site from being well ranked. Use our Check Server Page Tool:

Your URL:

Step 8 - How to Submit to Each Major Search Engine

Once the same words are in your META title, description and keywords, and also in other text (Alt and comments) and displayed content, and you are satisfied with your results, and only then, is it appropriate to submit your URLs to each major search engine. For search engine submission to just the top few search engines you may use our URL ADD page with links to the add pages of the major search engines.

We suggest that you pace your search engine submissions, adding only up to five pages per day per site as a maximum, and not doing submission more than two or three times per week. As a result, performing the above add requests as scheduled will allow you to remain within the acceptable range for most search engines.

Hint: the engines will regularly discard search engine submissions without processing them. By resubmitting you have a higher probability of having one of your submissions "take." Also, some indexes appear to give preference to "fresh" submissions as determined by the date of last update and the last submission date. So you should update your site often following prescribed Search Engine Optimisation tactics and resubmit at least twice per month.

Allow two to four weeks for each search engine submission to be indexed in each major search engine. If you do not show up (as is common), then resubmit. If you continue to miss the search engine rankings results you desire, then go back and review your keyword usage, either increasing or decreasing frequency until you have the desired results. Suggestion: on the Yahoo directory, register regionally instead of nationally (they will add you everywhere as well, but you get registered much quicker regionally), and on the others, register frequently until you are listed. Your ratings in the organic search results appear to be affected and while Yahoo is changing this is still a good move.

Once you are happy with this ranking placement, you are ready to promote your site with all of the other search engines and directories by going to our announce area. If you desire Placement Services to maintain your site and expand your search engine coverage, we provide a tutorial on our Placement Services page.

For frequent placement validation, please visit our Free Tools Page (click on Visitor). And please BOOKMARK this page now and remember to visit often.

Need more information on the Submission process? Please visit our Submission and More Submission pages.

Need more information on the Yahoo! Directory? - Yahoo! Directory

We strongly recommend that you install TWO toolbar tools: The Google Toolbar - we use this constantly to check rankings and to investigate backward links to sites. Good tool to get an impression of your ratings with the search engines. The SEOToolSet™ ToolBar - The future of SEO is now. Designed by SEOs for SEOs, the SEOToolSet™ ToolBar is a beta release, in development project. The current release represents only the initial stages of the ToolBar.

Step 9 - How to Recheck Your Search Engine Registration

It may take a few weeks for accepted search engine submissions to actually become effective with the major search engine. In some cases, it may take several submissions before you get registered. Considering that the Web is growing at an exceptional rate, it is a wonder at all that any search engine can keep up. Keep trying to get registered. Visit the search engine that you care about and see if you are registered by searching for your url. Your ratings will improve with time under our methodology. Hint: one way to see if your latest change has been indexed (if the title did not change) is to check the Google cache and see if that source matches your current page. If it does then the current page has been indexed.

Consider adding this link to your site if you support the SEO Code of Ethics: <a href="http://www.bruceclay.com.au/web_ethics.htm"><img src="http://www.bruceclay.com.au/images/seoethics.gif" vspace="10" hspace="10" align="left" alt="SEO Ethics Graphic"></a>

Step 10 - How to Check Your Search Engine Placement

There is a very specialised high-tech market for tools that convert raw data into intellectual capital that you can actually use. It is hard to have a great product, and those that do must charge for their wares in order to justify the effort. Fortunately, most of the truly good products offer a free trial and easy upgrade path. The power of Search Engine Optimisation tools justifies the effort, so we recommend that you visit our SEOToolSet Free Trial Page. Our Search Engine Optimisation monitoring tools (there are several) are straight forward and reports are easy to understand. If you like the free search engine advice in the visitor versions, there is a much more powerful set available on a subscription basis. These tools are very powerful, and they are recommended. But then, we are biased.

Once you have these ranking results, you can easily identify where you need to go back and re-submit your site and fine-tune your keywords. Hopefully you will be placed at or near the top of your search results page.

MANY people are concerned about their Google rankings, and cannot seem to see any significant change in rankings when they change things (optimise pages) in significant ways. We believe that the changes do matter and are causing ranking changes, but users simply cannot see them. In most cases, if you do a query for a keyword, Google will calculate the sequence of pages in the results list based upon the algorithm, then filter them so that not more than two pages are shown from the same site. In other words, if a site is all of the top-10 results, two will show and eight will be suppressed. So if you are shown in the Google results as number 3, are you really number 3 or are you really number 11? Google will also resequence results to present two pages that would appear on the same results page in sequence (an indented result) even if they are not naturally in sequence. Sites with a page in position 1 and another in position 10 will find Google resequencing the results to be number 1 with an indented number 2 where that number 2 result is actually in position 10.

SO, want to see what pages appear above you REALLY? Try our REALGoogle ™ tool!

Your URL: Your Keyword:  Google API Key: Please get a free key from Google and provide it here

In some cases the keywords are highly competitive and the top positions are commonly held by different domains. In such cases the listed pages seldom see duplications. In other cases there are dominant sites. Query for a keyword of cisco and see how many pages are from the same site!

Step 11 - Now the Other Stuff

This is a restated and clearer translation of a Google quote that we received a while back. We have made it "modern" in response to a forum thread request so it is obviously no longer a quote but simply our interpretation of the quote. It says a lot about the Google desire to avoid deception and "hidden" code. To be well ranked in all major search engines you should avoid all hidden links, avoid hidden text, and avoid cloaking as these are usually forms of deception. Most search engines prefer for their spiders to get the identical page that users see. In general, you can assume that most search engines are as conservative as possible. Avoid hidden links/text in divs/layers/iframes/css, or links that are inconspicuous or punctuation, for example. Similarly, cloaking or sneaky redirects in any form, whether it be user agent/ip-based, or redirects through javascript, meta refreshes, 302's, or frames frequently result in ranking penalties.

If you cannot tell if you have violated these rules, we recommend professional help.

TIME FOR SEO TRAINING? - If you have done the above correctly, and if you do not have rankings yet, then we recommend SEO training or services to go the final mile. We have given you what we could for the average SEO on the average project, and then some. But you may have something more difficult. Call us... we can help - 866-517-1900.

Links - You need links, and probably a great many of them. You do not want to join a link farm, or spam in any way. You do not want to purchase "junk ads" that look like links but are not worth very much. What you want is links from quality sites where their content is supplemental and synergistic to your own. The links should be within the main body of their page, and contain YOUR keywords in the anchor text (within the link where they click). We offer reports and methodologies on this as well, but that is not the topic for this page.

Need More Information? - Link Popularity

Server issues - you need a FAST, clean server. We recommend that you use a dedicated IP for your site, and that you not be on a crowded or slow server as that causes the spider to visit fewer pages (they do not want to crash your server). A slow server diminishes the number of indexed pages, hence cuts into your ability to have a broad theme. This in turn hurts your ranking. Bruce is a repeat speaker on Server Issues at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in the Advanced Track on this topic.

  Finding Plagiarism - WOW! Great tool! Copyscape provides a free plagiarism detection service that lets people easily search for plagiarism online and identify instances of content theft. You can use Copyscape to find sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that are quoting your site. Simply type in the URL of your original content, and Copyscape does the rest.

Blogging for SEO - The art of blogging has been around for decades, but many businesses are just starting to realize the true impact blogs can have on their SEO campaigns. The result: Business-related blogs are popping up everywhere, proving to be a very marketable and profitable SEO tool.

Advanced Search Operators - Search engines find what you tell them to search for. A typical search will often return too many results or even results that are not relevant to the subject at hand. Therefore, search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN came up with tools to narrow the search to obtain the specific information being requested. They have also created several search commands that are very useful for SEO experts as well as searchers who want very specific information. These tools are called Advanced Search Operators and Combined Searches.

SEO Training - We offer training on SEO and our tools so that you can better optimise your sites. If you are at all interested in learning SEO, please visit our SEOToolSet site and review our SEO training classes. You will not be sorry!

Bookmark this page. When you are ready, contact us. And come back often.

Step 12 - Start Again - This Never Ends!

Go To Step 1 again and again. We will be adding steps and additional Search Engine Optimisation tools to this page in the future. You will want to visit this site frequently to make sure that you remain ranked where you need to be.

Search Engine Optimisation and ranking, although great, is not enough. There are many that are too new to the web and do not know how to find a search engine, let alone how to use it. To many, the Internet is email, and nothing more. You still need to consider the other forms of placement as discussed on our Internet Marketing Strategy and Philosophy page.

Want a Price Quote? Please consider having us help with your web site marketing projects. If you would like a price quote for our products or services please contact us. We can customize our rates to your needs, but you should visit our Rates Page for general guidelines.

This site contains free advice that you need to design for higher keywords ranking results, although there are many other reference sites available. Do yourself a BIG favor and visit the Search Engine Watch site on this topic.

The advice within this site is free to all that wish it. However, we regularly get requests from businesses to present a site specific Webmaster Site Placement Course. This allows the webmaster to have focused training based upon their existing site design, where the course is customized around their specific needs. Such hands-on real-world training is invaluable to businesses that want to win.

Dynamic Site Mapping™ is a Bruce Clay, Inc. system designed to identify and spider popular pages in a dynamic environment. It includes a robust feature list including a private "your site only" dynamic content search engine as well as several spider reports that facilitate search engine indexing for all crawler-based search engines. Click here to see the full feature set. Click here to see some sample pages. Click here to Subscribe.

Subscribe to Updates to This Site

We add new content on a regular basis throughout this site. By subscribing below you will receive an email notification each time our content significantly changes. This may be useful if you are serious about improving your site on a regular basis.

To receive an email notification of any significant changes to information on the Search Engine Relationship Chart ®, including when this site is updated, please request notification and we will add your email to our opt-in notification list.

You can always discard the email if you don't have time to review the changes just then.

WebAssured maintains an unbiased log of compliments of our products and services that can be shared with other users of our site. Feel free to comment on our SEO Services or Tools at the WebAssured site. Likewise, if you have a complaint please let us know right away!

As a reminder, this site focuses on our Search Engine Optimisation Methodology. It is a part of a MUCH larger site covering Web Placement topics -- everything from initial design, awards, email, press -- you name it, it is there. It is strongly recommended that you follow the steps on this page, but that you also review this entire site if you are serious about having a prosperous web business.

Proceed to Placement Services Page

Placement Services are the finishing touches to a well worked site. Search Engine Optimisation services are offered for those that want them. Our clients are small and large firms. We are frequently hired by large sites, often with hundreds or thousands of pages, where placement improved by even a few percent amounts to tens of thousands of dollars per month. This permits us to offer this much free content. And, of course, this allows smaller sites to use our professional services at reasonable fees. You must at least review the final page to see if it is right for you!