Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [36]
Here are some questions to ask:
How many of the Impressions keywords are your company name?
How many of the top 100 keywords on either side are company or brand-name keywords?
Are the keywords that you’re ranking and getting click-throughs for relevant?
What ranking position are these keywords typically found? Less than 10? Less than 20?
If you can see that the majority of keywords on both sides are your company name or your brand name, then that signifies your need for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization brings your website up in the rankings for more terms that are critical for your business. Right now, if you are found only for your company name, then your website is being found only by your existing clients or those who know about you.
It is vital that you research keyword relevance to ensure that you are being found for what it is that you do! Being found for misleading or irrelevant terms is a waste of time for both you and the searcher. Your research will help you refine your keyword list, which is covered in Chapter 6. Do you have pages ranking in the second or third page? Can you find immediate actions that will improve those rankings?
Congratulations. You’ve taken your first step to developing a plan of action! At this point, feel free to click around the rest of the tools available and see what they provide. They change frequently. If you don’t understand what some of the tools are or the terminology, be patient! Google offers definitions for all the main heading terms and also offers helpful guides throughout the toolset. After reading this book, you will be able to understand the terminology, the application, and the purpose of these technically mystifying areas of website programming.
Yahoo! Site Explorer
One of my favorite back-link tools is Yahoo! Site Explorer. It enables you to view the incoming links to specific pages on your website and track back to who is linking to you and the context of the link (Figure 4-5). Linking is an important part of increasing your website’s visibility, and it also counts toward the search engines’ evaluation of your website’s credibility and relevance. Chapter 16 covers linking in much greater detail, but for now use this tool to get a picture of the number and type of websites linking to your website. Site Explorer will provide information about any domain, regardless of whether you have an account. However, for more accurate link information, I recommend getting a Yahoo! account to manage your website. As with Google, you will have to claim your website through the use of a metatag or script. The information is more accurate when you are logged in and viewing your own website’s information.
Figure 4-5 lists the sites that are linking to the page www.thesaurus.com/fun/. Under Results in this example, there are four pages under that URL and 55 inlinks (links from other websites). By clicking the Inlinks tab, you can see each of the websites that link to the specific page.
Using Site Explorer, you can easily browse your own web pages and see the incoming links from other websites for each specific page. Or, you can do more of a surface check and look at the incoming links just for your domain. Then, compare the incoming links to your competitor’s domains and get an idea where you stand in terms of the number of links and the types of sites linking to you and your competitors.
Figure 4-5: Yahoo!’s Site Explorer
Webmaster Guidelines
If you are in the business of online marketing and have any responsibility at all for a website, then you need to be more than simply aware of the webmaster guidelines for each major search engine. These should be printed out, read, understood, and practiced.
I continue to be amazed at the number of online marketers, web designers, programmers, and agencies that are unaware of or, at worst, ignore these guidelines. The guidelines are a direct pipeline into the needs of the search engine and instruct users how to create a website that is easy for the search engines to access. In addition to