Search Engine Positioning (SEP)

Updated July 19, 2008

This is a step-by-step guide that offers suggestions for search engine positioning of your site.

Please note that search engine positioning and optimizing are slightly different in that the positioning refers to the specific things you can do to your web page for better ranking and the optimization refers to the decision to design a site that follows the suggested guidelines of search engine companies and is designed with the positioning strategy in mind.

Know Your Online Marketing Goals

You know your business better than anyone else. You also know what you want to achieve with your business and with your online marketing strategy. However, most often business owners may know this subconsciously but do not have their marketing goals written down on a piece of paper or in a business plan.

Once you know what you goals are (ideally written down), it is easy to start planning your website for the search engines. You goals may be to increase traffic to your site, or get more phone calls from your online customers, or more enquiries through online contact forms or by email, or to retain your existing customers, or even to create an online community for your customers. Your goal may be a combination of some or all of these.

What ever your goals, you need to be clear about what you want to achieve. For instance, how many new customers do you want to attract? How many new visitors to your site you think you need to attract in order to obtain a certain quantity of customers from these visitors? How much revenue will these new customers generate for your business? How much are you willing to spend to get this new business?

Once you have a clear idea, then you can start looking at what your business can do and how you want to go about achieving it by deciding on your marketing objectives. In summary:

	You need to be clear about your online marketing goals
	What do you want to achieve with your online customers
	What revenue growth are you going after

Write down your business offering and your products and services

Your search engine positioning and optimization should not start with the search engines. It should start with your business first. You may already have a business plan that you can use here. So itemize on a piece of paper the key products or services you offer and describe each briefly.

Once you have done this, you can assemble a group of words and phrases that best describe your business offering.

From this you can now start to think about your customers. Ask yourself, who are your customers? What do they want? What are their needs? How do they want to obtain your products and services? How do they search online for your products and services? What words may they use to describe what they want when searching online?

You can do some research on the internet and look at your competitors sites and read their content to see how they define their products and services. One other very effective way is to ask your customers how they would search on the Internet for what your business offers and see what they say. Then compile a list of these searches.

Now you have a list of search words and phrases to start with and evaluate and modify based on your further review of these words and phrases.

	Itemize your business offering (use your business plan if you have one)
	Understand your customers and their needs
	Compile a temporary search-term list for evaluation

Decide on your search phrases for your website optimization and positioning

To choose the best search terms and phrases, you must anticipate correctly how your customers think and how they would search for your type of products and services. You can remove guess work from your endeavors by asking your customers that you already have or you can also use various WORD tracking software online to see existing searches for your type of products and services. You can also look at your competitors online and see what search phrases they are targeting for their website.

For instance, go to each of the search engines and search for your products and services by typing it in. Then look at the top sites that come up in the search results. Look at what search terms and phrases your competitors have chosen for their search engine positioning.

You can also look at paid advertisers and see what search phrases they are purchasing. This takes the guess work out a little since if those search words did not bring in customers, they probably would not be paying for them.

While you are looking at your competitors sites make sure that you consider how to differentiate yourself from them by including search terms and phrases that give you better positioning, such as location of your business (e.g. Denver General Dentistry), as well as all the phrases that describe services you provide (e.g. Family Dentistry, General Dentistry, Hygienists, Dentures, Endodontic, Orthodontic, etc.)

Also consider what words or phrases describe your products form your customers’ point of view. For instance, if you sell wireless phones, also consider other search phrases that describe wireless phones, e.g. cell phones, mobile phone, cellular phone, consumer electronics, etc.

You want to think of all the possible options available to you to attract new customer and what they would want, for instance, you can also target search words such as, cell phone accessories, cell phone plans, cell phone providers, wireless companies, etc.

Once you have a list of search words and phrases you can now try them out in the various search engines and see what results they produce. Now you can start to narrow down your search words and phrases to ideally no more than 10 to 20 main phrases that best describe your products or services and ones that you want to use for search engine positioning of your site.

One of the tools that we recommend is the FREE WORD TRACKER TOOL at the following link:

Free keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker

You can use this tool to review your list and refine your search words and phrases.

And finally, you can refine your selections to key words and start building your site using your search terms and phrases that best describe your business and products and services and potential traffic generating searches.

Building your website with search engine positioning

Divide the content of your site into the category pages that define the structure of your entire website. Each of these category pages are identified and labeled (with a HEADING tag) as per your final list of search terms and phrases.

The TITLE of each of these category pages will reflect the search terms and will correspond to your HEADING tag in the BODY text of the eventual content that you will develop to include in the category page.

These category pages will also be used as your main navigation links and will direct and navigate your customers through the entire structure of your website, ideally guiding them through the take-action process (e.g. Place and Order, or, Submit an email with your information, etc.

SITEMAP page is very important

Your category pages would ideally link to many other pages, each representing secondary search terms and phrases that you are targeting for your website, although your main focus is on your primary search terms and phrases.

What is critical is that all category pages and other secondary pages are all included in your SITEMAP. This helps your customers to find what they want pretty quickly, it helps search engine positioning, and it helps you manage the structure of your website over time when you may have forgotten the structure of category pages and secondary pages. It is a smart thing to do.

Location specific indexing

You may want to consider having pages (with search terms in the HEADING and TITLE tags) on your site that target a specific location, e.g. New York Catering Service, or Denver Colorado Landscaping Service, or Oklahoma Cosmetic Dentist, Chicago Accountant, etc.

This allows your geographically specific customers to be able to search for what they want locally and have the confidence that you are a local provider who is familiar with local needs and state and local laws. You may also want to consider domain names that represent the location you are targeting, if your business is really local and does not attract interest from customers outside a specific region that you can serve.

Modifying HTML page for search engine positioning

You will need to build and modify the HTML code for each and every one of your pages. This may seem like a tedious process, however, it is very important if you want to increase the likelihood of your website to obtain high rankings relevance for your web pages.

On top of your HTML code for each page, you need to add (or modify if existing tag are present) the following: 1) TITLE tag; 2) KEYWORDS tag; 3) DESCRIPTION tag; and 4) CONTENT tag.

Each of these should be used to correspond to the search term or phrase you are targeting, e.g. if you are targeting Chicago Family Dentist, your tags may look something like this:

<title>Chicago Dentist | Family Dentistry Chicago Area</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Chicago Dentist providing Family Dentistry" />
<meta name="KeyWords" content="Chicago, dentist, Chicago dentist, Chicago dentistry, family dentistry" />
<meta content="USA" name="country" />
<meta content="Chicago; USA" name="location" />

The TITLE tag is very important and should correspond to your desired search term or phrase since this plays a significant part in page ranking in search engines. The TITLE is also visible to your customers at the top of the browser page, so you may want to make sure that your customers can quickly relate to the title and feel that they are looking at the right page. Do not add unnecessary words to the title heading. Keep it as brief as possible and use the search terms and phrases.

Remember, it is a title not a description. It is better to be ranked high on 1 or 2 word phrases than to be ranked low on 10 phrases, don’t you think? The same also applies to the DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORD tags.

The DESCRIPTION tag should be brief and if you can, try to avoid unnecessary long descriptions. Each word is often weighed in the effect it has, so be brief and use the search terms you are targeting.

The KEYWORDS tag should also be used to include the search terms and phrases you are targeting. Do not put 100s of words and phrases in it, because it simply dilutes the effectiveness of the few terms that you are actually targeting. You may need to experiment with this over time to find the perfect balance. You may however include any common spelling errors of your search terms in this tag. Repeating your search words again and again will not work to your advantage and sometimes it may actually work to your disadvantage. So, be warned.

Repetition of search terms and phrases in the body of your web page should be strategic. Ideally, you want to include your targeted search term or phrase in the HEADING tag of the first paragraph and may be once or twice in the first 100 words of your first few paragraphs. However, do not overdo it since it could backfire on you. If you use your search words or phrase in every other paragraph it would be ideally, although avoid repeating it more than once in each paragraph when it does appear.

More Guidelines

Other pointers are also included here for you to help reinforce your site’s positioning. Remember traffic from search engines can come to any of your pages so apply these principles to all your web pages:

	Use TITLE of a page if you are linking to it from within your other pages, i.e. the text link you are using should be same as the TITLE of the page you are linking to.
	If you have to use Javascripts, then you may want to use it sparingly and it would be more sensible to place it in a Javascript file rather than include it in the HTML code.
	Using Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) is recommended as long as you use it sensibly and it is used in a search engine friendly manner.
	"Cloaking" will get you into trouble so avoid it. To deceive online users by presenting different content to search engines than that which you provide to your users, will get you into censorship list and banned. Also avoid re-directs that are specifically aimed at getting you higher ranking by attempting to fool the search engines. It will not work for long.
	Avoid FRAMES if at all possible. They are not search engine friendly.
	Images have no relevance in search engines and are ignored. When possible, use text based links for your navigation instead of images.
	Monitor your traffic by using a Traffic Analysis Software. In most cases, your ISP probably includes this with your web site hosting. Contact them for details on how to monitor and analyze the traffic source and the search terms used.

There are additional guidlines in the Search Engine Optimization.

Good luck.