Internet Marketing Optimization Factor #1

The TITLE is the most important part of Internet Marketing Optimization. What is a search engine friendly TITLE Tag? An Internet Marketing friendly TITLE Tag should be 60 characters or less. Why? Because not all organic search engines are created equally. Some internet search engines will display 80 characters or more, but others only 60. Your goal is to create the ultimate TITLE tag that optimizes for all major organic search engines.

In order to do this we have to consider all search engines and what their limitations are. Through research we have found 60 characters to work well with all major search engines and directories.

Search engine friendly doesn't mean Internet Marketing Optimization. In fact a shorter TITLE tag is better with most all engines. The shorter your TITLE Tag, the more focused it is. Too short of a TITLE tag and it will have no keyword value. Too long and it could be cut off by another search engine making your TITLE meaningless to those visitors. Also the more words in the TITLE Tag the less keyword density that part of the Web page has.

When creating a TITLE we try to describe what the concept of the page is about in as few keywords as possible. Sometimes this takes the entire 60 characters, but if we can do it in 40 and still stay very focused and have this TITLE include our most important keywords, we win!

Think of your TITLE as if you were writing a book and had to TITLE that book. This is the same concept of creating a TITLE for a Web page. The optimum TITLE is not a full description.

It is the attention grabber so people want to pick up the book and open it and view the contents page or back cover to learn more of what the book itself is about.

Example of Internet Marketing Optimization in your TITLE tag;
Let's say you had a web site selling organic gardening supplies. What TITLE tag do you think would best capture this?

• XYZ Industries Incorporated

• XYZ Organic Gardening Material and Supplies for the Gardener

• Back to the Garden

Chances are you felt the TITLE "XYZ Organic Gardening Material and Supplies for the Gardener" to be more descriptive of what the page or site is about. While the others may certainly be something we might put in the site, it certainly wouldn't tell us anything about what the site has to offer. NOTE: This title tag is not the final version.  Normally we would not have all the "stop" words in it like; "and", "for", or "the".  The common words are not considered by the search engine and only water down your major words in the keyphrase.

We think about our TITLE tag as keywords someone (our target market) might search on at a search engine. You'll start to notice that when you type keywords at a search engine these keywords are most always in the TITLE tag. At least the top ranking pages will have this in their TITLE tag. You might create a sub page talking about the specific products so you can target those specific users as well, but for now we are promoting our main entrance page with Internet Marketing Optimization.

Another way to look at a TITLE tag is by picking up your local newspaper. The front page is all about HEADLINES. These are the attention grabbers (titles). They contain keywords to spark interest. They briefly describe what that section of the paper has to offer. That's what the TITLE tag is all about. It's about getting attention and briefly describing what that area is all about.

Internet Marketing Optimization Factor #2

META Description Tag
The META Description Tag should contain all 150 characters if possible. The reason for this all has to do with your ability to describe in detail what this page is all about using your most important keywords. The TITLE grabbed their attention, but the META Description needs to promote the click-through. You have to let the searcher know what you have to offer. You'll notice from our organic gardening materials example site
we used the following META Description:

"XYZ provides organic gardening supplies to professional and home gardeners. Providing fertilizers, tools, pesticides, seeds for the organic gardener"

This contains the entire 150 characters. We are marketing those looking for organic garden materials and supplies. And if we were to calculate keyword density on these main terms we would find this to have a very high and focused keyword density.

The META Description tells the searcher exactly what he wants. Our TITLE ranked high and was focused to the terms the searcher used and our META Description now confirms this. It also lets the search engine user know the different "main" products you offer.

Internet Marketing Optimization Factor #3

The META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords Tag is not as important as it once was. In fact Scrub The Web, Google and even AltaVista no longer consider the META Keywords Tag when calculating relevance. This doesn't mean it is not important however. Organic Search engines such as Inktomi still consider and use the META Keywords Tag when calculating relevance. So this Tag should not be overlooked. Inktomi (now part of Yahoo!) claims to reach more than 50% of the Internet population and that makes the META Keywords Tag very important.

The META Keywords Tag when used by an organic search engine when calculating relevance will rarely place extra value on the words found in this Tag. Because of this it is not necessary to put all your keywords in this Tag.

Instead only place your most important keywords and keyword phrases here. Then make sure you have these same keywords and keyword phrases in the viewable content of the Web page.

Internet Marketing Optimization Factor #4

The HTML Body
When a search engine robot visits a web page it will extract the text and will index that content and make it searchable by their visitors. But besides extracting content from a Web page, robots also need to figure out how "relevant" your Web page is in comparison to other pages that contain the same text. They do this by trying to figure out how important "you" the publisher feels this text is. You do this by creating emphasis on important keywords and phrases.

But how do you emphasize this text? Well, how do newspapers emphasize an article on their main page? They create "HEADLINES". These are usually BOLD face and have a much larger FONT size. They want their HEADLINE to standout from other text on the page so they catch the eyes of people walking by the newsstand. So how do you do this with your web site?

Without getting too technical we'll talk about how you can make your words jump out and be considered "important" to search engines as well as the human visitor.

While viewing your document with your browser, can you figure out which of the words on a web page would be the most important? Hopefully you chose the largest and boldest words. Now step back from your monitor 10 feet. Again I ask what jumps out at you? What do you think is most important here? Guess what? That's basically how search engine spiders work. The largest sized font is considered the most important.

There are ways to increase the size of your text and bold it using FONT and/or STYLE attributes. You can change the color, you can underline the text, you can bold the text, you can change the font style and even mix and match them if you want. If you want to learn how to do all that fancy stuff get a book, but remember robots are very basic. They look at font sizes, check to see if it is bold, the color of text and a few other basic elements. Robots don't do FLASH, Java, JavaScript, graphics or even care what font styles you use. They read the text content from top left to bottom right and don't really care how pretty it all looks.

Another Internet Marketing Optimization Factor to consider is the position within the document these words appear. The text closer to the top of the page is considered more important and this is why your opening statement needs to contain the most important keywords and keyword phrases you want people to find your Web page with.

So do you think we can improve our rankings for this other keywords found in our document? Yes you can! From our discussion you have learned that the larger the FONT size is, the more "important" the keyword becomes. We can increase the size of text using the FONT Tag. The FONT Tag is actually quite easy to use. Here's an example:

The text here will increase in size making each word more important

Internet Marketing Optimization Factor #5

Keyword Density
A good starting point for the percentage of your MOST important keyword terms is between 3% and 5% and these are the words that should be at the top of your density list. This is a "starting" point and is not necessarily good for the particular keywords you wish to market, but for the most part these figures should work very well for most of you.

Remember to check the density of each page individually and you want to have different words higher on different pages depending on what that page is about. The order of the keywords displayed should be in an order that would best present the keywords and keyword phrases you want to promote.

At this point we have not compared our Web page with our competition. To do this all we would do is visit a search engine, enter one of our keyword phrases and see who comes up. We would then run the top 5 or so pages through the Web Page Analyzer so we can get a feel of where their keyword density is for these same keywords. The more you analyze the more you'll understand where your particular keywords would best benefit although you will likely find that between 3% and 5% works well. We suggest you analyze your competition with a few different full text search engines so that you can get a better sample of what is optimized for all engines. It's better to rank in the top 7 or so of all engines than it is to rank number one in just one.

Internet Marketing Optimization Factor #6

Less use of frills
Frills like Flash and DHTML look cool but if they don't solve any purpose other than let you show-off how you can make geometric figures dance around the screen, you should avoid using them. The search engine crawlers like the plain-vanilla text.

Showcase frills only if you're selling them (if you're a Flash designer or a graphic artist). A company selling organic manure doesn't benefit much by having a Flash website that
shows bags of manure appearing here and there like apparitions. Internet Marketing Optimization follows the golden rule of K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple Silly)

Internet Marketing Optimization Factor #7

Update frequently
Both search engines and people like updated content. If your visitors expect to see new content on your website whenever they come, they'll come again and again, and they'll come with greater frequency. Internet Marketing Optimization shows content that is rapidly updated displaying the latest information.

Make it a routine to put something new every second or third day, even if it is one paragraph.

Internet Marketing Optimization Factor #8

Use clean HTML
Clean code loads quicker and gets crawled (this sounds weird!) by the search engines faster. If the success of your website Internet Marketing Optimization really matters to you and if you want to create your own web pages instead of hiring a professional web developer, you should spend at least a few days learning HTML. A search-engine friendly website doesn't need much HTML to learn and it will show clean content to your visitors without unnecessarily increasing the load time. Avoid using graphical tools and use a text editor instead. It sounds daunting in the beginning but once your realize its benefit, you'll be more than eager to write HTML rather than use a tool that produces lots of unnecessary junk code like FrontPage (the worst known to man!).

The Internet Marketing Optimization efforts mentioned above take time to show results, but they are long lasting and they fetch you the desired rankings.