There are some general rules you can follow to get your website to appear on the lesser known engines, as well as Google.  Here are the best ways to organize yourself and your website when putting it together.

Where does SEO begin?  ”on-page” and “off-page” criteria.

The first thing that one must realize about search engine optimization – for any search engine - is that to be implemented correctly it must be broken down into 2 distinct factors “on-page” and “off-page” criteria.Always remember that search engines do not consider “websites” they consider the “pages” of those websites. There should never be a debate as to which is more important between “on page” and “off page” characteristics as the truth is both are equally as important. However once one defines the two there is a logical order in which they should be considered.

On page/Off page characteristics defined

‘On Page Characteristics’ are anything you can effect within the construction of a single page. This includes everything that is placed in the headers, body, and on-page links (both internal and external). Special attention should be given to: Title and meta description, Keyword proximity, keyword density and relevance… Off Page Characteristics refer to all links (both from pages contained within your own website and from pages of other websites) that point to your specific page(s).

ON PAGE Characteristics

Every search engine defines a sites’ importance or page rank and we’re going to examine how to boost this with regard to any of them.

What keywords are people searching with?

This is the basic question that needs answering before you can start constructing you site. Best way to start is to ask yourself “what would I type in if I was looking for my listings, products or service?”. Type in the terms you use and see what comes up, If the sites you see at the top of the search results are offering similar products and services then you are right on the money. First -  try putting together a quick questionnaire 5-10 answers based on 2 questions:

Describe the top 5 products/services on my site?   What would you type in a search engine to find these products/service?

 Second – This can be done as you do the first step. Try to reverse engineer the keywords those at the top are using – for Internet Explorer users, click on View à Source -  pay particular attention to what they place after the <title> tags and tags and the tags with the word ‘meta’.  You don’t need to be an HTML guru, because the title tag and the meta tags are normally at the top of the code. Topics and Keywords:You have done all of your keyword research and you know what keywords people are using to find your products and services. Now you need to build a site that will not only reflect those product and services but will raise to the top of the search engines for those terms, so that the people will be able to find them.

Plan on grouping your keywords

For each page of your website you will want to target different keywords. To maximize the potency of each page for its targeted keyword search phrases plan on optimizing for a “maximum” of 3 keyword terms. Also group “like terms” so that you may increase your keyword density with much less effort.Example:
Keywords: south austin, cherry creek, shady hollow, travis heights,  central austin, barton hills, tarrytown In this list I have two very obvious groupings – if you lived in Austin, you would know that the first four I listed are plainly in South Austin and the rest are in central. The proper way to optimize is to assign “Page 1″ to the first group of South Austin keywords and “page 2″ to the central Austin keywords. If these 2 pages and subjects were your entire site then you’d probably want the more competitive group to be optimized for the home page as it usually has the highest page rankLocation, Location, Location…and FrequencyOne of the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Each major search engine has developed a different algorithm. All the algorithms are looking for a combination of relevance, trust, and community value. But they don’t share the same databases or criteriaSearch engines operate the same way. Pages with the search terms appearing in the title are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic.It’s a good rule to include main keyword phrases as high up in your body as possible – if you’re including a lot of other text this is again for a logical reason, the logic being “the higher up a word or phrase is in the body of a document the more important it must be.” Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.

OFF Page Characteristics

Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better rankings. Because of this, all major search engines now also make use of “off the page” ranking criteria.Page RankThe term “pagerank” – the tool can be turned on in the Google Toolbar - which isn’t the actual pagerank, but can give you a good idea- is specifically designated to evaluate and weigh “off page” criteria.

From Google – PageRank – summarized

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

A page “votes” an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.So the pagerank of the site that links to your own is important – in other words – the more popular a site is that links to your site (the higher the pagerank), the more popularity rubs off on your site.

Link Analysis  - Off the page factors are those that a webmasters cannot easily influence. Biggest among these is link analysis. By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be “important and relevant“ and thus deserving of a ranking boost.

Example - A home warranty site that links to your site will be better for your page rank than one that sells shoes. To a spider, www.domain.com, www.domain.com/. Domain.com, domain.com/index.php are all different domain names. Standardize the way your site is linked to, by standardizing the way you give others your domain name or the domain name you use to link to pages within your site.

Clickthrough  - Another off the page factor is clickthrough measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren’t attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors.

Get Linked This process hurts a lot of the time. The most important aspect of ranking in search engines is about getting good, solid links around your Web pages. You can only achieve that if your content is strong enough to induce it.Ask yourself, “Why would anyone want to link to my site?” Be brutal. Write down as many reasons as you can about why other sites should link to you. If you can’t convince yourself why another site would want to link to you, you seriously need to question what your value proposition is and how your site promotes it (or not, as the case may be).

The goal of a website

The best converting websites are those that have:·       Clearly marked navigation ·       Well laid out access to order pages ·       Obvious and logical click choice ·       Esthetically pleasing design Make sure you clearly lay out what it is that you have to offer and how the visitor can obtain it and your done. – remove all of the default text

Being Frank about Search Engine Rank, by the FTC - http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt119.shtm

Add URL to Yahoo Site Explorer - https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit  - can validate and submit the .xml feed.

Add URL to MS Live & MSN Search URL Submission - http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx

for more information and ideas visit www.southaustinteam.com