Ten Tips for Search Engine Marketing Stephan Spencer President, Netconcepts

Tip 1: Check how many pages of your site are in each S.E. Check Google, Inktomi, FAST, AltaVista, and Wisenut simultaneously using a free tool that my company built It’s at

Tip 2: Minimize Extraneous HTML Particularly above the body copy. No ‘in-line’ Javascripts or cascading style sheets Eliminate superfluous HTML code. Microsoft FrontPage, for example, adds a lot of unnecessary, repetitive HTML code It pushes the keyword-rich content down the page, reducing relevance

Tip 3: Make your HTML “sing” H1 tags get more weight than the rest of the body copy. So use them for section headings rather than images or tags Use “alt text” (what you see when you hover your mouse over an image) Make sure H1s and Alt tags include good keywords First image alt tag has special significance in relation to “snippet” displayed in Google search results

Tip 4: Good PageRank™ is critical Google PageRank™ - Google’s importance score Links from high PageRank pages have a fundamental impact on your Google rankings Check your PageRank with the Google Toolbar (download it from toolbar.google.com) Sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper by Googlebot

Tip 5: Identify good link targets Check Google for which pages link to your competitors. Use the format: “link: Ask for a link from webmasters whose pages are listed in the link search results & that have a high PageRank The text of those hyperlinks makes a big difference You can check for links in other SE’s too, using the free tool at

Tip 6: Text Navigation Your navigation bar should be text not graphics Breadcrumb navigation is especially helpful Text navigation links should be keyword-rich

Tip 7: Get your site spidered daily by Google Googlebot spiders the Web every 30 days or so Google’s Freshbot spiders 3 million pages daily Getting changes picked up and live in Google within a day or two is a real competitive advantage How to do it? Change a substantial amount of the page’s content and have a high PageRank™

Tip 8: Custom Error Page File Not Found errors should not lead to an ugly standard 404 error page Customize the error page Include a site map (gives spiders something to crawl) Include a search field (for users who come in to a defunct page via a SE)

Tip 9: Make your dynamic site spider-friendly Eliminate ?, &, =, and ‘cgi-bin’ from your URLs Can be done with a server plug-in or module, like Xqasp, IsapiRewrite, modrewrite, etc.

Tip 10: ROI Tracking on SEO Grab the referring URL upon entry into your site and store it in a session variable Upon checkout, lodging an inquiry, or whatever - store the referrer along with the rest of the form data

Sales volume attributed to each keyword buy on Overture Sales volume delivered by each search engine } }

A non- ecommerce example. Number of booking requests delivered by each search engine and directory

Questions? Feel free to me at If you’d like an electronic copy of this slide presentation and accompanying worksheets and checklists, me or give me your business card Thank you!