[Continental USA]

Hi there Everyone,

I got these %'s from our web development company - they are a very successful company from Europe so I trust them to give good advice.

However - they did also say to take this with a pinch of salt - so take from it what you will . I thought I would share anyway.

The factors for getting up the list on the search engines are:

- 10% structure/technical considerations, i.e. is URL nice – is it a descriptive URL, site map to allow search engines to find content etc
- 30% Content on page – Page Title, Page Meta Tags etc match search words
- 60% inbound links to your web site

 

[dub3325]

Thanks for sharing Continental. Now if only it were that easy to get ranks up without buying out keywords.

SEO is very tricky, I know the basics.....Wish I knew more. But I suppose I'll do in depth research before launching my website.

 

[BodhiGear]

Here is (IMO) an excellent article from Search Engine Watch:




Search Engine Watch


Back to ArticleSearch Engine Placement Tips

By Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief
SearchEngineWatch.com
Updated: October 14, 2002

A query on a crawler-based search engine often turns up thousands or even millions of matching web pages. In many cases, only the 10 most "relevant" matches are displayed on the first page.
Naturally, anyone who runs a web site wants to be in the "top ten" results. This is because most users will find a result they like in the top ten. Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your web site.
The tips below will help you come closer to this goal, both for the keywords you think are important and for phrases you may not even be anticipating.

 

[BodhiGear]

(sorry, Rodney... I thought about that this morning and was coming in to correct it. Thanks for catching it!)

 

[Quickne$$]

What do you mean buy out a keyword?

 

[dub3325]

You can bid on certain keywords to have yourself become a "sponsor" on top of the search engine results for that specified keyword.

 

[badalou]

I would like to know where you would be happy at..any of you on the search index. Of Course we can't all be number one.. but what would we all be happy with? A few weeks ago we had this thread going about serch engines and I had just built my tee shirt marketing site. Even a few Weeks ago If you found me other than using my name as I stated in the thread it would a miracle. But I know enough to know that the basic elaments are the key words and content. So my site has been up (marketing) about a month and half and if you typed in "promotional tee shirts" on Yahoo I am number 55 and google I am number 20.. but add the words "and tote bags" and I am #3 on yahoo and number 4 on Google. So am I happy.. your bet.. So I may need to play with the "Promotional" key words a bit.. I may not get to number one but I am trying..Lou

 

[teestyle]

Thanks for sharing Continental. Now if only it were that easy to get ranks up without buying out keywords.

Isn't it more efficient (not to mention cheaper) to just add your designs to a few decent ranking sites (t-shirtcountdown, darnfineshirts, etc.) and maybe tag links to your products on delicious?

Also, if you add your products to Froogle, sometimes they'll show up as shopping links _above_ Google's search results. I really like when that happens.

 

[justal]

Good SEO isn't difficult, and the key is not to try to trick the search engines with black hat techniques. Good quality content, plenty of it and updating that content regularly is the number one thing to aim for.

Know your keywords... Regularly check your traffic logs to see what keyowrds people are searching for and use a service such as wordtracker to help you fine-tune your keywords.

Get those keywords into the strategic parts of your website, title tag, alt tags, header tags etc etc. Don't spam though.

Get as many quality (from high PR sites) inbound links as possible to your site... But only from relevant, quality websites. Put relevant keyword packed anchor text into those links.

I also work quite hard to make sure a site conforms to w3c recommendations and is as accessible as possible as most of the points aimed at accessibility also improve SEO.

Sit back an watch your rankings improve.

I set up a T-shirt shop a week ago and it is already top of the pile for my 2 main keyphrases (admitedly they are aimed at a niche market so the searches only show 150,000 results, but at least I'm number one out of those.)

It usually takes a little more perseverance than that though. The main search for another of my sites brings up 439 million results so it was a little more difficult to get high up the rankings (I'm currently in 3rd place) out of that lot.

Stick with it and good luck.
Al.