A PTS Optimization White Paper

Web Site Optimization
                     

What Is Optimization and Why It’s Important

Nearly 90% of traffic to most Web sites comes from search engines. When someone queries a search engine for a keyword related to your site's products or services, does your page appear in the top 10 matches – or does your competition's? If you're not listed within the first two or three pages of results, you lose, no matter how many engines you submitted your site to. Virtually everyone begins their Web browsing at one of the eight major search engines. Your rank within these search engines determines how many people will find and visit your Web site. How do you achieve a top ranking? You “optimize” your site by making sure that your site pages conform to the unique ranking rules of each search engine.

Example of One of My Typical Optimizations
 

I recently completed an optimization for Scott Hospitality Consultants (www.scotthospitality.com),
a resort and conference center consulting firm. On google.com, one of the eight major search engines, if you type in “resort consultant” in the search field, Scott Hospitality Consultants is NUMBER ONE out of 277,000 returns. Type in “Conference Center Consultant” and Scott
Hospitality Consultants is once again NUMBER ONE, out of 684,000 returns. These results
speak for themselves.

Optimization Issues

To determine which Web site to return for a particular keyword search, each search engine has its own method of ranking your Web site. Optimization is very complex and there are a number of techniques that I will use to achieve a top 10 position for your site. Many of these techniques involve using the right key words in the right way on each page in your site (mostly in your pages’ hidden text). Each search engine has its own rules about where and how often key words should be used. Here are some key word issues that I will address as I optimize your site for each search engine.
 

Key Word Issues

·     Prominence of the keyword - How early in a Web site's title or description a keyword appears. For example, did the title of the site start with a particular keyword or was that keyword the fourth or fifth word of the site's title?

·     Frequency of the keyword - How often a keyword appears in a site's title or description. Each search engine has its own formula for how many key words should be on the page.

·     Site popularity - The number of other Web sites linked to your site. This ranking measurement is sometimes called a site's significance ranking because it is believed that one measure of a site's value is the number of other Web sites that felt your site was sufficiently important to link to.

·      Weight of the keywords - The number of keywords appearing on a Web page compared to the total number of words appearing on that page. Some search engines consider this when determining the rank of your Web site.

·     Proximity of keywords - The placement of keywords on a Web page in relation to each other or, in some cases, in relation to other words with a similar meaning as the queried keyword. Each search engine has its own formula for where key words should appear on the page.

·     Keyword placement - Where on your page your keywords are located. For example, in most engines, placing the keywords in the title tag of the page or in the heading tag will give it more relevancy. On some engines, placing keywords in the link text, the part that is underlined on the screen in a browser, can add more relevancy to those words.

Title and Description Issues

There are two elements to every Web site listing in the search engines:
 

·      The site title, which will be blue and an active link to the site
 

·      The site description

The title and description MUST BE COMPELLING in order to get good traffic to your site. If your site has reached a top ranking, lots of people will see it, but if the title and description are not compelling, people will not visit you site. Your title and description should accomplish four things:
 

·     Solve a problem
 

·     Solve that problem quickly
 

·     Solve that problem for what appears to be a small or reasonable
amount of money
 

·     Make the reader curious to learn more
 

My Optimization Services
 

·     Using special software, I will optimize your Web pages based on keywords within the parameters of each search engine's unique ranking algorithms in order to create top ranking pages.

·     Working together, we will create compelling titles and descriptions for the pages in your site.

·     I will submit your optimized pages to all of the important search engines and follow-up to verify that your site was indexed by the expected date. (Search engines can take from two weeks to three months to index your site.)

·    I’ll show you how you rank on every keyword or phrase, on all the major engines, and I can provide nine different management reports analyzing your rankings. I’ll run the reports regularly so you’ll know immediately if your site stays on top, or falls in rank. In addition, I can track your site visitors, tell you where they came from, and answer questions like: "What keywords are people searching for to find my site?" or "Which search engines send me the most traffic?"