Search engine marketing optimization coaching.

Chapter 1

Determine Your Current Website Theme And Website Page Themes

This is the first step in that long term strategy we spoke about earlier. All search engines need to know what you are about in order to recognize and place you appropriately in their index.

So, remember that you have two target audiences; your potential customers and the search engines who are going to tell their searchers about you.

• List your target audiences
  
  To optimize traffic and sales, you need to know who will be buying your products and services (“p/s’s”). Who do you need to reach with your site? List them in the Target Audience Grid.

• List the p/s’s of your site?
  
  What p/s are being promoted on the site? What sales and responses by searchers will make your Return On Investment worthwhile. List the p/s’s on a separate sheet and transfer them into the Target Audience Grid.

• List all the Website pages related to your p/s’s
  
  Transfer the p/s’s from your Target Audience Grid to the Keyword Focus Grid – Current Website. Then, list every Page and File Name that relates specifically to each p/s’s, not just the product and ordering pages. Remember, we ultimately want to have many pages that will be optimized for different targeted keyword phrases.

• What is the overall “theme” of the site based on your pages?
  
  Looking over all your p/s’s and your relevant files, what is the overall Theme or Topic of your Web site. The total Web site will be a broad category such as Computer Software, Ford Automobiles, Computer Hardware, Men’s Clothing, Real Estate, Bridal Gifts, Restaurants. Place the Theme in OVERALL THEME cell of your Keyword Focus Grid.

• Given the Overall Theme of the site, add to your Keyword Focus Grid any additional pages that explain your p/s’s, content related specifically to your theme and your p/s’s
  
  If you’re a realtor in San Francisco, are there pages that give information about San Francisco? How about your selling process or recommended real estate professionals? Are there pages about how to prepare your home for sale or how to pick a good mortgage broker?
  
  Later you will be adding in additional keywords that can target these pages and drive traffic to your Website from searchers are looking for real estate information on the Web and are also selling or looking for homes to purchase.

• Establish the Marketing focus of each Website page
  
  Before starting Chapter 2, Expanding Your Traffic Potential, decide what is the goal of each Website page. This will help later in determining the best keyword phrases for driving traffic leading an acceptable ROI.
  
  Remember, you don't try to optimize for more than one or two related keyword phrases for a single page on your site. There will be some spillover, but you target one primary keyword phrase and one secondary keyword phrase for an individual page and apply what SEO instructs you about.
  
  For the San Francisco realtor, the page that shows commercial properties available downtown might have the goal for that page of “Finding buyers for properties for sale.” The Page about Choosing a Mortgage Broker could have the goal to “Provide information on mortgage brokers”.
  
  No search engine wants you to create special pages just for them. At the same time, since all search engines use their own algorithm, the only way to get a good ranking in all the engines is to have pages that are "friendly" to each engine, so they understand what keywords describe accurately what you are about. This means that if you are not ranking well for each search engine, you'll need to have specific pages that target them your keyword so they recognize your keyword phrases and can rank you in relationship to your competition. If you create some strong keyword rich content pages that target the algorithm of different engines, you may end up with three different pages of content related to the same keyword.
  
  Respect the needs of the search and protect yourself from spamming them by using robot txt files for the different pages you chose to target a specific search engine beyond what is part of your regular Website. Here is a page on the MSN site that explains about robot text files and their use. http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=
  SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_RestrictAccessToSite.htm
  
  By protecting with robot txt files the individual engines from indexing pages with some duplicate text, when the searcher finds a page in a search engine result page and clicks on it, they will reach a page on your site that has relevant content for them and all the links of your site. Then when they click on any link they will be into the rest of your site with it's complete navigation. So the navigation may only go to Page 1 that emphasizes a particular keyword and never see again the Page 2 or Page 3 they came in on from the search engine result.
  
  However, you have to make sure that the search engine can still find a link to all the pages you target for a specific keyword and search engine. Since you won't have links to all these different pages and will have a robot text file excluding them to other engines, the way to make sure the search engine can find your files is by having a text-based Site Map. MSN quote: "Create a site map that is fairly flat (i.e., each page is only one to three clicks away from the home page)."
  

Now you’ve established the Target Audience, products/service(s) and pages to optimize to reach your Page Target Goal, you need next to find a range of keyword phrases that will drive searchers to your pages.

For examples and a working template to download of the Target Audience Grid and Keyword Focus Grids, please go to the Target Audience Grid.

Also read about the overall theme of your Website at Chapter 3. Note especially the new emphasis at Google on Latent Symantic Indexing.

Proceed now to Chapter 2, Expanding Your Traffic Potential - Keyword Phrases.

Return to Search Engine Optimization Training Manual