Search Engine Planning

How to create a search engine optimization plan

What are the keys to success when trying to design your website to rank well with the search engines?

Many people have asked this question and it is a valid one. First off, you need to be patient. When making edits to your websites meta tags, alt tags, title tags, web page titles and descriptions it takes a while for a search engine to respond and update the changes in their database. Many people are under the misguided idea that changes made by a webmaster are instantly updated to the search engines. It is important to understand how search engines work, so that you can make goals that are achievable.

Planning - Decide who your target market is and determine the words and phrases most likely going to be used by your target market. If your target customer is looking for real estate in New York then you have few decisions to make. Keep in mind that the search term "real estate" is one of the largest and most sought after keyword phrases. Unless you have an unlimited budget to fund your online advertising campaign you might want to narrow your search terms down. If your main real estate area is Rhode Island and you work in Dartmouth, Yarmouth and so forth then you should look at keywording for Dartmouth, Rhode Island, New York and again for Yarmouth, Rhode Island, New York. Each and every page should have a purpose. The refined your search terms increases the effectiveness and search engine position. It makes no sense to keyword for real estate, Yarmouth, Dartmouth, Gosnold, Brewster, Plymouth, Truro, Rhode Island, New York and all other communities in your area of influence. Too many keywords and a lack of planning will dilute your keyword effectiveness with respect to the search engine results. As mentioned earlier, instead of one page with all these keywords, make one page for each keyword set.

Create the web pages - Once a webpage keyword set has been determined you need to write the content for that page with your keyword search terms in mind. Writing text for the search engines is not the same as your perfectly written, Harvard educated material. In our opinion many companies worry too much about perfect writing and not enough emphasis on writing for the search engines. Select a maximum of 6 keywords per page. Use these keywords repeatedly throughout all of your page content and search engine tags.

Example:

< html >
< head >
< title >Real Estate opportunities in Dartmouth, Rhode Island, New York< /title >
< META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Chris Carreck of Dartmouth: A Real Estate Agent in Dartmouth, Rhode Island, New York." >
< META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Chris Carreck, Dartmouth, Dartmouth Rhode Island, Real Estate, Real Estate Dartmouth, Real Estate Rhode Island, Real Estate Agent" >
< META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Chris Carreck" >
< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW" >
< META NAME="COPYRIGHT" CONTENT="2006 :: Chris Carreck, all rights reserved" >
< /head >
< body >

< table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 width=800 >
< tr >
< td >< img src="header.gif" border=0 alt="Real Estate Agent in Dartmouth" >< /td >
< /tr >
< tr >
< td >< img src="picture.jpg border=0 alt="Chris Carreck Real Estate Agent" >< /td >
< /tr >
< tr >
< td >< h1 >Welcome to Real Estate in Darmouth, Rhode Island< /h1 >< /td >
< /tr >
< tr >
< td >< a href="contact.php" title="Contact Real Estate Agent Chris Carreck" >< /td >
< /tr >
< tr >< td >Are you looking for real estate in Darmouth Rhode Island? Darmouth is a great community with many wonderful real estate opportunities. My name is Chris Carreck and I am a Real Estate Agent who specializes in the Darmouth community. I have lived in Rhode Island for 20 years and I have many tied to the Darmouth community. When looking to buy or sell real estate in Darmouth Rhode Island, New York you need a real estate agent who knows the area.
< /tr >
< /body >
< /html >

I decided before I started coding that my customers would be searching for "Darmoth Real Estate" or some variants of that search. Notice that every part of this page is optimized for search engines. Both < Title > and < Description > tags have similar information just worded differently. This page is heavily keyworded for Darmouth, real estate, Chris Carreck and Rhode Island. I have tossed in a few other keywords that I think are important but kept the density down like Agent and New York.

Search engine submission - Submit your website to the search engines. Most search engines offer a free submission tool which you can ask them to send a spider to visit your website. This is not a guaranteed process. Getting your website submitted to the search engine can take a long time if you don't have well seeded site linking to it to speed up the process.

Understanding - A basic knowledge on how the search engines work is very important when trying to develop your search engine rankings. First off, search engines do not know that your newly created site is on the internet. If you do not submit your site to the search engines, it will take a very long time for it to be found on its own. Once your site has been found a search engine such as Google will use a program called a spider, which visits your website and then stores text data gathered from the site and puts it into a database. Later a program runs an algorithm on the database that determines what your web page is about. Once the page has been indexed (undergone the sorting algorithm) it is now available to be displayed in the search engine results. This entire process can take weeks if not months to happen.

Patience - The key to a good search engine campaign is patience. It takes time for the search engine process to happen and making rash changes is not the answer. Sometimes, in extreme cases an edit will take as long as a year to filter into the search engine results. New websites tend to get very low ranking regardless of how good your search engine optimization might be. Often times, website owners get impatient and do more damage to their search engine ranking by making too many changes too fast. Changing your keywords and content can have a detrimental affect on your rankings as many search engines do not like pages that undergo extreme content changes. Search engines such as Google announce when they are re-indexing their databases and this is what you should be are watching. Make sure you, or you webmaster are aware of these events so that you can accurately determine how your search engine optimization plan is progressing. I stress, monitor your website but don't panic over the ebb and flow. Search engine results are an ever changing thing. If you follow the advice above you should get excellent results.