What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of modifying your site so that it appears in search engine results for individual search phrases that will drive good quality, targeted traffic to your site. This is the traffic that is most likely to convert into customers for your business.

These results are referred to as "organic", meaning they naturally appear in the search engine listings as opposed to paid advertising type listings.

SEO is basically a four-step process:

1. Find the search phrases that will drive targeted traffic to your site.

2. Modify your site to target those keywords

3. Ensure that the search engine spiders can find, read, and correctly index your site.

4. Monitor and tweak your site as necessary to obtain and remain placed in the search engine results page.

Keywords and Search Terms

Before you can start writing the essential text for your pages that will boost your search engine ranking, you have to know which keywords and keyphrases to use. This section will help you understand how to find the best keywords to use and how to incorporate them into your site text.

Make use of any PPC data

Chances are, your decision to begin a SEO campaign is fueled by your desire to reduce costly pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. While reliance on PPC will be reduced with a good SEO campaign, you can make use of your current PPC efforts when researching your search phrases to target. Analyze your PPC keywords and look to see which of them have brought the highest traffic levels, best click through rates and greater sales conversions. It is likely a search phrase that brought successful results through a PPC campaign will be very relevant in your quest to obtain top search engine positioning.

Expanding your Keyword list

Once you have completed your brainstorming and have compiled your list of 5-10 core keywords, it’s time to move on and expand that list. A list of 5-10 search phrases will not, as I am sure you will know, bring the amount of search engine traffic needed to make your website successful. However, that list will be a vital tool when determining which phrases to add to the mix. At this point, you need to turn to the search engines themselves and research which search phrases are actually being typed into Google, Yahoo, MSN et al. While few search engines will openly tell you which search phrases are the most often searched, there are a couple of very useful tools you can use to expand your list.  

Determining Competition

Once you have identified possible additions to your search phrase list, you must research further to determine if there is a good chance you will achieve your prized top search engine ranking or if the competition for that phrase is already saturated. While it can be tempting to target only search phrases that are very popular and searched hundreds of thousands of times in a single month, you must also consider the likelihood of you being able to obtain a ranking higher enough to capitalize on all of that great traffic. Many, many search terms are so saturated by competitors that it would be highly unlikely that you would achieve a high enough ranking to reward your efforts. Therefore, it is often worthwhile considering those search phrases that may not have quite the same level searches each month, but likewise do not have as many websites targeting that term.

Selecting Your Keywords

By now, you should have an expanded list of search phrases to target, taken from either Overture or WordTracker. In addition, you should also have a good idea as to the competition for each of those keywords, whether you used the KEI or Google format. Now is the time to start selecting the search phrases that will form the foundation for a successful SEO campaign. Ok, deep breath, we’re almost there.

In summary

When researching search phrases and targeting keywords for your SEO campaign, it is important to follow the steps above. Research your industry, talk to your potential customers and make use of the themes within your website. In addition, consider these final tips:

• Determine the intent of the visitor. Thoroughly research all search terms to ensure that the searcher intended to find your product or service. E.g. reconsider targeting the keyword "DVD" if you store only sells blank DVD discs, the chances are the searcher intended to find DVD movies rather than blank media.
• Don’t always rely on the numbers. Both Overture and WordTracker use historical data when displaying search phrase frequencies and neither archive more than two months back. Therefore you must know your industry and account for any seasonal or other trends. E.g. the search phrase "red roses" will be more popular for Valentines than at Christmas.
• Look for opportunities. Identify the search phrases that have been untapped by your competitors. Some search terms may have slightly fewer searches, but may have dramatically fewer competitors.
• Target the right pages. This cannot be stressed enough. Do not try and target every keyword on every page. Identify themes within your website and group relevant search phrases around those pages. You will see much better results

I hope you have found the above useful. This series is designed to help the beginner, but I hope a few experienced SEO marketers will find something fresh to consider. In the next installment of this series, we will look at the use of Meta Tags. These once champions of SEO have recently taken a battering, but are still extremely important for the success of any campaign. We’ll look at how they are used, how to construct them and why they can help achieve top search engine rankings. In the meantime, you should have enough information to assist you in your search phrase research and build the foundation for a successful search engine optimization campaign.

Conclusion:

Keyphrase compilation, evaluation, and performance are all vitally important to any search engine marketing campaign. While high rankings in search engines are an admirable goal, high rankings for poor keyphrases will consistently deliver poor results. Integration of this keyphrase process into your overall search engine marketing strategy can dramatically improve your website performance (and thus your bottom line).

Meta-Data Tag

The title tag for each page of your site is very important. If you look at the code of a web page, you will find it in the head section and it will look something like the following:

<head>
<title>Your Page Title Here</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Your Description">
<meta name="Keywords" content="Your Keywords">
</head>

Your title should include your keywords or keyphrases and help describe your site, or the specific page, in a concise manor. When people are viewing a list of search results, they typically will scan down the list. Make sure your title tells them what your site, or the page, is about.

For the title, your keyphrases are more important than your company name, unless your company name is a well known brand.

Repeating keywords and keyphrases over and over is likely to be penalized and looks terrible in the search results.

The description  tags are also in the head section of the code of a web page and are not seen by the visitors of your site unless they happen to look at your source code. If you look at the code of a web page, the Meta Tags will look something like the following:

<head>
<title>Your Page Title Here</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Your Description">
<meta name="Keywords" content="Your Keywords">
</head>

Of the two, the Meta Description is the most important. In fact, many experts will advise that it isn't even necessary to bother with the Meta Keywords tag because most search engines ignore it.

For your home page, your Meta Description Tag should briefly explain what your site is about. Each page of your site should also have a Meta Description Tag that explains what that specific page is about. Keep it short and to the point.

Copywriting

This is the text on the page that your visitors see. This is an extremely important factor in search engine optimization because both the search engines and your visitors rely on the text on the page to understand what the page is about.

Integrating Keywords into Website Copy

Now you have your list of keywords and you know they are popular, you need to modify your site to incorporate them.

'Website Copy' is the text on the site. The website copy should back up the keywords you are trying to target on this site.<!--[endif]-->

Remember your website copy should be written for your visitors first and foremost, by targeting a page per keyword you are ensuring the page is focused on the keyword without being considered spam.

Now a few search engine don'ts:

• Don't stuff your keyword tag with unrelated keywords, the search engines know your page is not about ebay, free music downloads, etc because the text on the page doesn't back it up.
• Don't keyword stuff hidden parts of the page - image 'alt' tags, comments, etc.
• Don't keyword stuff, period - don't repeat the same keywords multiple times in a row anywhere on the page.
• Don't use page generation tools - the search engines know them all and can tell which pages are created by a tool and which manually.
• Don't duplicate content either within the same site or across multiple sites.
• Don't hide text by using white text on a white background, small fonts. Even if it’s unrelated to your keyword the search engines will see hidden text and blacklist your site!

Any of these can get your site banned, and once banned its extremely difficult to get your site back in the search engine results.

ALT Tags

Images are an important part of making your site visually attractive to your visitors. But, search engines do not understand the content of images on a page. This is true even if the images have text in them. For example, your logo may have words in it. The search engines can not read these words because they are not standard text. They are a picture.

This is why ALT Tags can be useful. ALT Tags are text descriptions that are used to describe an image on a page. These are not seen by the visitors to your site unless they look at the source code.

If you look at the code of a Web page, the ALT Tags will look something like the following:

<img src="imagename.gif" alt="image description">

Sight-impaired people using special Web browsers will appreciate them because these browsers can read the ALT Tags and tell the visitor what the image is about.

ALT Tags can also be useful to your optimization efforts when used with images that serve as navigation links to a page on your site. For example:

<a href="pagename.html">
<img src="image.gif" alt="image description"></a>

When set up this way, some search engines will factor in the ALT Tags for images that serve as links. This provides another opportunity to include keywords and keyphrases on your site. But, don't forget your site impaired visitors. The description in the ALT Tag needs to make sense to them in the context of describing the purpose of the image.

Site Map

A site map is a page on your site that lists and describes all, or at least the most important, pages of your site.

A site map is valuable for both search engines and your visitors. For search engines, it makes it easy for them to find all of the pages of your site. For your visitors, it is helpful in navigating your site and finding the information they need.

Dealing with FLASH

Although some search engines are beginning to implement ways to index FLASH pages, they generally will be difficult to get indexed. There are ways around this problem though. For example, instead of making the entire page a FLASH presentation, make the FLASH element smaller and use it as a feature on the page. This will leave you with plenty of room for descriptive text that the search engines can easily index.

Dealing with Dynamic Pages

Great improvements have been made by the search engines regarding indexing dynamic pages. But, there are still times when getting the content of dynamically generated pages indexed by search engines creates special challenges. Solutions are discussed in the recommended articles that will help the Webmaster overcome difficult cases

File Formats

Beyond simple HTML files, search engines are now indexing other file formats such as PDF files, Word files, Excel files, etc. These files can be optimized to improve the results when search engines index them. The recommended articles will discuss how this is accomplished.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> Framed Sites & Pages

Although they are used less often, there are still times when framed pages can be handy. Understanding how the search engines deal with these pages is important. The recommended articles will discuss frames, the drawbacks, and how to optimize them for the search engines.

JavaScript

JavaScript can create problems when trying to get a page properly indexed. The solution can be as simple as offloading the JavaScript to external text files to make your pages more easily indexed by the search engines.

What To Avoid

The primary purpose of search engines is to provide relevant results to their visitors. Some Webmasters try to trick the search engines into believing their page is relevant by using methods that the search engines discourage. It is important to understand what the search engines advise you not do.

Search Engine Submission  <!--[endif]-->

Learn the difference between submitting your site to directories such as Yahoo! and getting your site spidered by search engines such as Google.

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1. How Will The Search Engines Find My Site?

There are basically three ways to get your site listed in a search engine:

• Submit your site directly to the search engine using a free submit form.
• Let the search engine find your site through links to your site from other sites such as directories.
• Pay the search engine to index your site.

2. Submit Your Site Using A Free Submit Form

Some of the major search engines and most of the smaller search engines will provide a form that you can use to submit your site for free. With the smaller or thematic search engines, this is a good method to use.

For each search engine you'll just need to locate the submit URL form and submit your home page. There is no need to submit anything else. And, you don't need to keep submitting your site month after month. Re-submitting your site over and over after it has been indexed does nothing but waste your time. It will not improve your rank in any way.

Don't be surprised when you find that not all of the major search engines even provide a free submission form any more. Don't worry though. With the major search engines, submitting your site isn't even necessary. This is because the major search engines will find your site through links to your site from other sites. This is why it is very important to begin getting incoming links to your site as soon as possible. You should start by getting your site listed in the major directories.  

3. Submitting To Directories - Help the search engines find your site.

For the major search engines, if you get incoming links to your site from other quality sites, your site will be found. The best way to be sure your site is found is by submitting to the major directories that are crawled by the search engines. This is a good approach for the search engines to take because sites listed in directories have already been reviewed by an editor and been considered to be worth a listing.

So, in addition to the traffic that the directories can send to your site directly, getting listed in the major directories is also important for getting your site found by the major search engines.

To get started, be sure to get your site listed in the following directories that are crawled by the search engines. Your site can be submitted to these directories for free (some may require you to become an editor first)

When you are submitting to directories, be sure to take the time to find the best category for your site and read the submission guidelines provided by each directory. By following their guidelines, you will improve your chances of being listed and decrease the amount of time it takes to get listed.

Obviously, there are many more directories where you can submit your site. These three are provided to get you started. After you've submitted to these directories, then you can begin submitting to other directories. Don't forget to find local or thematic directories that are relevant to the topic of your site. You will be able to find many in our list of search engines and directories.

It will take time for the search engines to index your site after it has been listed in the major directories. So, be patient and expect to wait at least a couple more months before your site starts appearing in the index of the major search engines. 

4. Pay the Search Engines to Index Your Site

Paid inclusion is the process of paying search engines to index pages from your site. The primary benefit is not having to wait for the search engine to find and index the pages of your site on its own.

The topic of paying to be indexed is covered in our Paid Inclusion section.  

5. Services To Avoid

There are hundreds of "companies" that make claims about submitting your site to thousands of search engines. You've probably received an email message from one of these companies that had a pitch along the lines of...

We Will Submit Your Site to 500,000 Search Engines for Just $29.95!!

Don't fall for this scam - it is a complete waste of money.

First, there aren't 500,000 search engines.

Second, even if they claim to submit to just a few thousand, there aren't that many that will accept your listing because the search engines they submit to are thematic search engines. For example, if your site is about real estate, you won't be listed in a search engine or directory that is focused on sports.

Third, they will submit your site to Free For All links pages that no one will ever use. Plus, these free for all sites are notorious for harvesting email addresses so they can send you spam.

I could go on and on with the reasons why these services are a terrible waste of money. If you are contacted by one of these companies in any way, don't fall for their sales pitch, just ignore them.  

6. Services That Can Help

With the warnings about the submission services we've discussed, it is important to point out that there are some services that can help. They won't arbitrarily try to submit your site just anywhere. They will develop a linking strategy specifically suited to your site. If you hire a professional search engine optimization company, this will be part of the services offered.

A professionally developed linking and submission strategy won't be cheap. It takes a good deal of time and research to do this properly.

Link Popularity

Link popularity is a major factor when it comes to ranking well in search engines and drawing traffic to your site. Learn how to increase the number of links to your site, how to get quality sites to link to yours, and the overall effect link popularity has on your rankings.

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1. What Is Link Popularity?

Link popularity is the number of incoming links that you have to your site from other sites. These links can be from directories, articles, or web sites. The more links you have pointing to your site, the better.

The number and quality of links that you have pointing to your site are a factor that many search engines consider when determining the rank or your site and individual pages of your site. Also, the more incoming links you have, the greater the traffic to your site.

2. Getting Links To Your Site

The most important factor in getting others to link to your site is having a site worthy of a link. In other words, have a site or page that a directory editor or site owner thinks would be of benefit to their audience.

The best way to do this is by having great content. Great content will draw people to your site. Great content will make people want to stay at your site. Great content will cause people to tell others about your site by linking to it.

It doesn't matter if your site is an information source or is selling something, you can provide great content with articles, reviews, etc.

After you've created a site worthy of a link, start by submitting to the directories. Hit the major directories, regional directories, and thematic directories.

Next, look for quality sites that would be complimentary to your audience and exchange links with them. For example, if you sell patio furniture, look for sites that sell gardening supplies and contact them about exchanging links.

The best way to contact a potential link partner is by visiting a site and looking for ways the site owner could naturally include a link to your site in their content. Then look for ways to naturally incorporate a link to that site from yours. After you've done this, email the potential link partner with your idea. Don't use a form letter. Just send a short, personal note explaining what you have in mind.

When looking for potential link partners, always think in terms of how your site would be beneficial to the visitors of your partner site and theirs to yours. If you are selling patio furniture, trying to exchange links with a site selling medical supplies is not a good use of your time.

Another way to get links to your site is by writing articles about the topic of your site and allowing other sites to carry the articles for free provided they include a link to your site at the end.

 
3. Checking Your Link Popularity

Marketleap provides a very handy tool called Link Popularity Check. It is a great way to periodically check the number of incoming links to your site.

  
4. What Not To Do.

Don't use automated programs that send out form letters asking for links. If you use this type of program, only use it for locating sites that may be worth contacting. Then, visit the site and send a short, personal message in the manner described above.

Don't expect everyone to want to exchange links.

Don't expect a reply. If you don't get a response, you may want to try again in a couple of months.

Don't be impatient. Just because you don't receive a reply, it doesn't mean you won't get the link eventually. Many site owners will file link requests and come back to review them when time allows.

Paid Inclusion

If you would rather not wait for the search engines to find and index your site, you can pay to be indexed. Learn what paid inclusion is, what it costs, and if it is worth the cost.

1. What Is Paid Inclusion?

Paid inclusion is the process of paying search engines to index pages from your site. It is also often called PFI (Pay for Inclusion) or PPI (Pay Per Inclusion).

This option is becoming more popular with both site owners and search engines. Site owners that want to get indexed quickly like it because they don't have to wait for the search engines to find their sites naturally through incoming links and listings in directories. Search engines like it because it is a way to increase revenue by charging the site owners for this service. If you have the budget and you don't want to wait, this is a good option.  

2. Will It Help My Site Rank Better?

No. At least is isn't supposed to.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click search engines and pay per click advertising provides web site owners the opportunity to buy their way to better positions on search results pages. Learn about pay per click, the costs, and if it is a viable option for your site.

1. What Is Pay Per Click?

Pay per click advertising on search engines allows you choose keywords you would like your site to appear for when a search is performed. You decide how much you are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your site will appear in the results for the keywords you choose.

2. Which Search Engines Allow Pay Per Click Advertising?

There are hundreds of pay per click search engines.

Generally, the larger the pay per click search engine, the more you will have to bid to get to the top for your keywords. This is why it is worth investigating different search engines to find what it would cost to bid on your keywords and how much traffic they draw.

The largest companies in the pay per click industry are Overture and Google. Google is not a pay per click search engine, but it does provide pay per click advertising in text ad boxes to the right of search results it delivers. It also delivers pay per click ads to other content sites.

To find more pay per click search engines, take a look at those listed in the box in the right column of this page.

These pay per click search engines are not as large as Overture and Google, but they are worth a look. As mentioned above, one advantage these search engines can provide is they generally have lower costs per click to rank for a keyword than the larger search engines.

In addition to the general pay per click search engines, you may also be able to find thematic search engines that serve your industry or specifically cater to your target audience.

3. Important Considerations

A very important point to keep in mind with pay per click is you must test, test, and test some more. Don't start off with a major investment. Start with the minimum and see how the search engine performs in terms of the traffic it delivers and how well that traffic converts into paying customers.

An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on money invested.

For example, if your goal is to bring in new subscribers to your newsletter, you could direct visitors arriving from your pay per click link to a subscription form set up just for them. You can then monitor how many clicks actually result in a new subscription. As such, you will know how much you are paying for each new subscriber.

Before spending any money with a pay per click search engine, be sure they can answer the following questions:

• How many searches a month are performed at the search engine?
• What major search partners or affiliates does the search engine have?
• How many searches are generated each month by the search partners or affiliates?
• Is it possible to opt out of having your listing appear in the results of the affiliate sites?
• What fraud prevention mechanisms are in place?
• What is the procedure for filing a "fraudulent clicks" report?
• Will an account be credited for fraudulent clicks discovered?
• Is it possible to opt out of having a listing appear for searches originating from specific countries?
• Is there a posted terms of service for search partners or affiliates. Look for search engines that have very strict guidelines for dealing with their search affiliates. This is important because you want to be sure the search engine is working hard to prevent fraud among its affiliates.

4. Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs

Some pay per click search engines run affiliate programs that allow you to place their search form on your site. You are then paid for the visitors from your site that use the search form and click on one of the results.

Searchprograms.com provides information and reviews of the various programs available.

  
5. Pay Per Click Information Resources

The following sites provide information about pay per click search engines:

Pay Per Click Analyst - Pay Per Click Analyst is an unbiased review of the top pay per click search engines offering up to date pay per click news, fresh reviews and helpful articles by industry leaders.

Pay Per Click Guide - Pay per click search engines reviewed.

PayPerClickSearchEngines.com - Pay per click search engine reviews.

Log File and Traffic Analysis

Your site's log files contain a wealth of information about the effectiveness of your web site marketing program. With your log files, you can learn how your visitors are finding your site, what search terms they are using to find it, and which are the best sources of traffic for your site.

1. What Is a Log File?

A log file is simply a file that is used keeps track of all that is happening with your site.

For example, it records:

• Each time a Web page is requested.
• What incoming link a visitor followed to arrive at your site.
• What search terms a visitor used at a search engine before arriving at your site.
• Errors that may have occurred.
• And much more.

 
2. Why Is Log File and Traffic Analysis Important

Analyzing your log file and traffic will give you insight into:

• How well your web site is performing
• How visitors are finding your site
• What pages are the most popular
• The geographic location of your visitors
• What search engines are visiting your site.
• How much of your site the search engines are crawling

Analyzing your log files will let you know how well your various marketing programs are working.

  
3. Services and Tools That Can Help

If you look at a log file, it is a giant page showing line after line of data. Fortunately, there are programs that can take this raw data and turn it into meaningful stats for you. Here are some worth a look:

• Mach5 FastStats Analyzer
• The Webalizer
• NetTracker
• WebTrends

Google's PageRank

Although Google's PageRank is but one factor Google uses to determine its search results, it is a popular topic. Learn what PageRank is and where you can find more information about it.

1. What Is Google's PageRank?

PageRank is part of Google's method of ranking web pages. Google explains it best at their web site:

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.""

It is important to remember that PageRank is but one factor Google uses to determine the rank of a web page in the search results. This is why you can find pages with a lower PageRank listed above pages with a higher PageRank. Google also factors in the content of the page and the pages linking to it.

Don't become overly concerned about your PageRank. Focus instead on properly building a high quality site with loads of great content that serves your visitors well. If you do this, improved PageRank will follow naturally.

2. How Do I Find The PageRank of a Web Page?

One way to get a general idea of your PageRank is to download the Google toolbar. This is a search tool bar that works with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5 or later browsers. Included with the search tool is a small graphic display that shows Google's ranking of a page on a 0 to 10 scale - 10 being the best.

Monitor and Tweak Your Way to Great Rankings

Part 1 - Monitoring Your Site's Rankings

You need to know where your site ranks in the various major search engines for your keywords. Currently the major search engine spiders are GoogleBot (Google), Yahoo Slurp (Yahoo!), Teoma (Ask Jeeves).

Sites generally do not rank instantly - give it time for your site to appear. Sometimes one page will be indexed and appear in the search results before another - this is perfectly normal. Spiders generally index the home page more often than other pages.

Do not monitor your position on an hourly or even daily basis - search engine rankings fluctuate on a day-to-day basis. This is normal. You should be concerned with long-term trends. Therefore leave a minimum of one week between monitoring your position.

You can either check your site's positions manually, or use one of the various commercial or free monitoring tools. Contrary to popular belief there is no way a search engine can ban your site if you running automatic queries, they can however ban the IP address of the machine making the query. Therefore If you do decide to run an application to monitor your site's position ensure you run the checks from an IP address other than the one your site is running on: This is not

an issue when your site is hosted elsewhere but on a corporate site you may want to outsource reporting for this reason.

Once you have a report, check it against your previous report - it's the trends you're interested in not individual rankings. Is my keyword going up the rankings or down? Is one or more keywords under performing?

When monitoring your rankings, don't forget to check your log files. Your site might be found for keywords you never even thought of. Some of the keywords might be lower in the results than you'd like and can provide excellent secondary keywords to target.

Ensuring The Search Engines Can Read And Index Your Site Part 2

How To Get Your Complete Web Site Indexed

Search engines will only index sites that appear important on the web. In order to boost your site's importance on the web and to ensure it is indexed fully and often you will need to do the following:

• Make sure you have plenty of inbound links. Directories are a great place to start building one way, non-reciprocated links.

• Make sure you have static HTML pages for the spiders to index. If your whole site is dynamic there are programs and/or techniques that can make it appear static.

• Ensure there is nothing in the robots.txt file blocking access - a common problem is that blocked directories need a trailing '/' i.e. Disallow: /images/. Ensure there is no robots Meta tag on the page that could be blocking access.  There are programs available that emulate a spider indexing your site - use one of these to ensure your site can be read.

• Change your text often. Add pages as often as you can - aim for one new page a day, if you can't manage that then at least one new page a week.

If you are having issues getting only one or two pages indexed by the search engine, you should add a site map page to your site. A site map is simply a listing of all of the pages within the site and includes direct (not javascript) links to all pages. Adding a link from the home page to the site map will ensure your whole site gets indexed correctly.

Bear in mind that if a page was designed to be a popup, a visitor might hit this page directly from the search engine. Therefore a menu should be added so they can return to the main site

Part 2 - Tweaking Your Site's Contents

This is fine but what do if none of your site shows up - for anything. Pick an unusual phrase on your site and search for that with quotes around it. If you're not showing up for this unique phrase then it could be that your site is not indexed correctly.

If you're starting to show for some search phrases on some search engines then don't worry, it takes differing amounts of time for the different search engines to index your site and update the SERPs.

If only one(or a few)phrases are not showing in the search results it may be time to revisit the text on your site. For each search phrase that isn't ranking:

• Find the page that this targeted phrase is on.
• Check the Meta tags - is the phrase in the title, description and keyword?
• Check the page is the phrase in the <h1> tag.
• Check the text, is the phrase used once per paragraph? Does the page read?
• Nicely, if not reduce the number of occurrences.
• Check the images; make sure the phrase appears in the 'alt' tag of the site.
• Check incoming links (internal) - do you use the phrase in the link text.
• If this page is sharing focus with other phrases you may want to split this
• Phrase on to its own page. If you create a new page you will need to create
• 400-600 words specifically targeting that phrase.
• You may want to change the text you use for reciprocal links to include the phrase.

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Brendon Turner is a certified search engine optimization specialist