Emerging Methods for Effective Search Engine Ranking

Search Engine traffic has always been and continues to be one of
the best ways to drive qualified traffic to a web site --- it
presents information about goods and services when the interest
level is high and it can be acted on immediately. Up till now
opt-in e-mail marketing has been an effective complement to
search engine ranking campaigns; but the never-ending deluge of
Spam is rapidly ruining the effectiveness of opt-in e-mail and
helping to add luster to the value and cost-effectiveness of
search engine traffic.

Unfortunately, the increasing popularity of search engine
ranking methodologies is helping to raise the barriers to entry
- as more businesses, ad agencies and SEO firms concentrate
their efforts on creating highly optimized web sites, the
competition for keyword rankings and qualified traffic is
increasing significantly. The rules are changing rapidly and
if you expect to succeed you must deploy a sophisticated
methodology that blends technology and processes. Here is a
list of five bottom line requirements that must be adhered
to if you expect to generate qualified traffic:

Link Strategy: The web is maturing and search engines are
putting more and more emphasis on link popularity or page rank
or "PR" in Google's vernacular; i.e. the number of web sites
pointing back to your own. If you are to be successful you must
develop and deploy a systematic process to establish links to
your web site with others that are in your market segment and
setup an outbound "link to" resources page via your own site.
This takes an investment of time and resources --- typically
you need between 400-800 links back to your web site to achieve
a good "page ranking." Here is a link to an excellent detailed
article on setting up an effective link popularity strategy:
http://www.website101.com/arch/archive143.html

Keyword Fundamentals: Keywords are the fundamental building
blocks of any search engine ranking campaign --- many/many
companies waste significant resources optimizing for keywords
that are either wrong; i.e. not targeted for their market or
there is too much competition and rankings will never be
achieved. You must utilize keywords that are targeted for your
market and find those that can effectively drive page 1-3
rankings --- WordTracker www.wordtracker.com has rapidly emerged
as the defacto industry standard technology tool for researching
keywords --- we've used it for years and highly recommend this
cost-effective and comprehensive service to our clients and
business partners.

Keyword Saturation: Search engine "spiders" or "bots" are
automated software applications that constantly roam the web to
assess what is called "keyword saturation" via web site content
(pages) to identify how a site should be listed in a search
engine database. They typically look for 3-7% usage of keywords
versus the text on a specific page - you must adhere to their
standards if you want to achieve keyword rankings for your
selected keywords. And, to further complicate matters, top tier
search engines all have different rules for keyword saturation
--- we highly recommend and use this software application to
help us ascertain and setup the correct keyword saturation for
our client's web sites: http://www.se-optimizer.com/

Optimized Content: Highly optimized content is still very
important as far as search engines are considered --- the more
search engine optimized content on a web site the better. Search
engines prefer content that is thematically grouped, loads fast,
is textual with minimal graphics, is highly optimized for
keywords (keyword saturation fundamentals are addressed) and
incorporates one or two of your primary keywords for a specific
page in the page title.

Site Maps Essential: Site maps are frequently overlooked when
search engine ranking processes are deployed. A site map not
only serves as a quick reference and/or navigation guide for
anyone visiting your web site but it's also used by search
engines to "crawl" (the action a spider or bot takes to review
your web site) your web site to find pages and links. Make sure
you include a basic site map in your optimization plans, it's
very important to help search engines navigate through your
site.

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc. http://www.intelective.com, a marketing services company which provides strategic and tactical marketing services exclusively to small to medium sized companies. mailto:Lee@intelective.com Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications - this article may be reprinted freely, provided this attribution box remains intact. (c) 2002-2003 by Intelective Communications, Inc.