Kettering's Law: "Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence" --- Robert A. Heinlein
Successful
search engine marketing has been one of those subjects that has left some
of the best programmers, designers, and webmasters shaking their heads
in a mixture of frustration and bewilderment. Sometimes the things that
seem the most logical in essence are often the most complex. For example,
I am not going fire my mechanic and fix my own car, although I can understand
the concept of how it works and operates. Some jobs just require a specific
specialty to get it done right. The simple concept behind of search engine
marketing is to generate business to your website by getting it ranked
for related search phrases. Up until recently this was something FREE
to anyone who could accomplish it.
In recent times more
types of Internet marketing are being investigated. As more and more people
turn online for daily needs, search engines have had to become larger
to handle the sheer volume and competitive demands. They now have a more
pertinent need to generate a profit to stay in business and as a result,
pay per click engines and pay per listing directories are on the rise.
Before you begin your search engine marketing campaign plan to set aside
$500-$1000 for an Internet marketing budget to get your site thoroughly
indexed in all engines. Yahoo and Looksmart, two of the farthest-reaching
directories require a minimum $299 payment per listing (Yahoo charges
$600 for adult site listing). Inktomi, one of the farthest-reaching suppliers
of search engine results, now requires a per URL listing fee. Altavista
offers pay per URL inclusion via InfoSpider (starting at $39.00) as well
as a new feature called Trusted Feed (CPC model). Many engines still do
not require payment or have free listing options, but a well-rounded marketing
strategy is always preferred.
Search engine marketing
has now become a Niche in the Internet Marketing Industry. A Niche that
only experience and time will prove per individual. Not everyone wants
to make a career out of search engine marketing, they just want to get
ranked, and do so on a low budget. Now we all know today that the web
has become the global library for SEO information. But this information
is useless if you can't identify it to be good or bad as well as what
to do with it or how to interpret it. Many top SEO's know better than
to give more than basic information that is repeated everywhere. This
is for a good reason; they want to stay in business. Well this article
is meant to give you a somewhat different perspective on keyword and optimization
concepts as well as some new ideas for search engine coding to improve
the chances of getting your own site ranked.
The Truth Can Be
Hard To Swallow
Search engine
marketing for adult business and non-adult sites is attainable and worthwhile
pursuing. Any relevant niche or direct marketing approach usually
has a fair chance. Some people do it without even trying.
Adult x site search
engine marketing is HARD. You have to have at least a few domains and
build up as much quality Internet real estate (optimized pages) as possible
without getting too overzealous.
The competition for
x site keywords is through the roof! Hosting all those domains, pages,
and other required resources can get expensive while waiting, wondering,
hoping that your pages will pop up and begin generating traffic. Every
marketing campaign needs a plan; you have to think it though BEFORE you
start submitting.
Avoid the Curse of Sisyphus,
pushing that stone uphill again and again. Fruitless labor is cruel punishment.
Focusing on ONE keyword is a common problem. Get a global perspective
in terminology used to describe what you are selling. You need to build
a foundation that leads up to that ONE primary keyword goal. You may never
reach the top but the foundation will sustain you for a long time.
Variety is the spice
of life baby! Try new concepts and use varying methods when optimizing
your pages. Too much of a good thing now can have negative consequences
later.
Redirects Hurt! Find
other ways to get your audience where you want them like invisible frame
sets or replacing the page.
The Home Field Advantage
You know what
you are selling better than anyone else. Get into your product and decide
who you are going to market it to, and how. What senses will you
appeal to? What side of the human psyche do you want to grab the attention
of? It shows on your site, it shows in your content - it's your ‘Niche’
and you better get comfortable. Marketing within your niche is your home
field advantage, and it is what gives you an edge on the competition.
It is the focus that will generate you profit. Get specific, get intimate
with it, and let it drip from your web page. Identify your primary demographics,
your target audience, and lay the path that will keep them coming one
keyword at a time.
Indexing time VS.
ReIndexing Time
I laugh
when people give up on SE marketing when their site does not rank after
submission. Not only does it take TIME, the page needs to be OPTIMIZED
(not just meta tags, folks). Please do not get over-excited and go submitting
your site before you have completely optimized it! On a general scope
it can take 4-12 weeks to get indexed after submission. If your site is
optimized and linked properly it has the chance to be ranked as well as
spidered, whereas all your pages may be indexed in one shot. If you are
indexed already and are trying to replace that "Untitled" <title>
tag in the engines you may get the submitted pages in but spidering may
take time. By optimizing the primary pages of your site for the relevant
keywords per page, and creating up to (meaning no more than) 15 "doorway"
pages designed to hit certain keyphrases BEFORE you submit, you can save
yourself weeks of waiting in peril.
Key Concepts
Choosing keywords to develop content for promotion can either be fun
or grueling, depends on your methods. Some webmasters search related or
competitor sites to harvest keywords but the best way is to formulate
your own keywords and phrases is by looking at the content of the page
you are optimizing and attempt to blend or integrate those key phrases
into the actual text of the page. Oftentimes you want to rank for general,
or extremely specific phrases that go beyond the content of your page.
Rather than harvesting more keywords than you need and then sorting them
out, try this concept I like to call the "Keyword Pyramid":
1
X1
2
X2 X3
3
X4 X5 X6
4
X7 X8 X9
X10
5
X1 + (X2 + X3) + X1 + ( X4 + X5
+ X6) + X1 + ( X7 + X8 + X9 + X10)
Where
X1 is the primary keyword and X2-X10 decrease in order of relevant phrase
matches, competition, and priority. Building a pyramid structure of keyword
for each page really helps nail down phrases when writing general or descriptive
content. Let me re-phrase it as an example so that you can see where this
is going.
1
sex
2
xxx porn
3
free
adult pics
4
lesbian fetish
amateur hardcore
5
sex xxx porn sex free adult pics sex lesbian fetish
amateur hardcore
Notice
there is one primary keyword for every second, third and fourth keyphrases.
Content for your title, description, and promo page content is contained
in line 5. You simply need to construct sentences around your keywords.
Here are some examples:
Free
adult xxx porn pics of lesbian sex, fetish sex, amateur, and hardcore
xxx sex pics.
Vary your style, but
try not to over do it. Fetish sex and hardcore lesbian xxx porn pics.
Hardcore amateur porn for adults only. Get creative as it may or may
not be visible, it should be readable and make sense to your visitors.
Hardcore xxx fetish sex amateur porn pictures of hot naked lesbians
and free sex pics for you to enjoy! Use adjectives or descriptive
text to counterweight your keywords. Hot xxx sex pics of naked sexy
lesbians in hardcore amateur porn pictures. Design and vary your
keyword tags using this method as well, but do them last so that they
reflect actual written phrases and content in your page. Example:
<meta name="keyword" content="free porn pics, fetish sex, amateur pics,
hardcore sex pics, lesbian pics, hardcore amateur sex, xxx pics, free
sex pics, …"> Construct titles, descriptions, promotional content,
HTML content, and keyword tags using this method for relevancy throughout
your page.
Al-Go-Rhythm
Understanding
how the search engines rank pages and how algorithms work will help you
understand the importance of varying the way you optimize pages and why
coding tricks are important. Algorithms are basically controlled variables
search engines use to detect relevant pages and score them.
The
most common variables are Meta Tags. Meta tags consist of specific information
used for varying purposes and are contained in the <head> section
of the HTML document. There are Meta tags for everything; information
for the browser, information about the author, language, expiration date,
and more. Most common are Meta tags that are intended for search engines.
Title, description, revisit, index tags and more. There is no rule in
the books saying you need Meta tags to get ranked. Sometimes they can
work against you! Especially if they contain too many keywords or keywords
repeated too many time, irrelevant keywords, trademarked keywords, and
other misuses. Engines may or may not "look" at them when scoring
a page. Some pages rank better without them. So get over the Meta tags
and open up to the rest of your code!
Other
variables algorithms are known to use when scoring pages are: relevancy,
density, popularity, meta tags (title, description, keywords) including
number of characters, page size (k), placement of visible text on the
page, comment tags, form tags, alt tags, and more.
Rell-O-Vent-See
Relevancy
can be measured in several ways. How relevant is the content of the page
to its Meta tags? How relevant is your page in comparison to the other
pages of your site? How relevant are the incoming and outgoing links to
and from your page or website?
Popularity, the number of sites pointing to your website, does help support
the relevancy of your site and can often get your ranked even when keywords
or optimization is lacking. Achieving good relevancy extends beyond optimizing
a web page; it is built thought the Internet marketing and promotion of
your site with other webmasters. Create relationships where both parties
benefit. Adding a few outgoing links never hurt, visible or otherwise.
More importantly are the intralinking efforts within your website pages
that tie them together as a unified site to allow successful spidering.
Dent-City
Having good content with keyword phrases integrated into the text of your
page provides the best means of achieving good ranking. Engines may scan
the top, mid, or lower portions of the code for visible text to pull as
a description when listing the page or to score certain parts of the page
for keyword density. Seem like a big guessing game? Welcome to the club!
Being smart when designing your site and writing your content is half
the battle. Many people don't know that oftentimes fighting the density
of the CODE, such as huge JavaScript's on one side of the coin, to frames
on the other, can be challenging. Inefficient code can throw off the entire
weight of your page. When you keep pages and code short by using a smart
design not only decreases loading time, it makes it easier for the engines
to index the page, allowing the spider to crawl deeper. This is one reason
I think promo or "doorway" pages work so well when used properly. Prominent
keywords in specific places throughout the page allow for easy scanning.
What
is a What?
Ok, so we have Meta tags, relevancy, and density. As engines
get smarter you will find that it is not a matter of how many times you
repeat your keyword, its how you use your keywords. If what was
where, where would what be now? What was where before what
was here. Have fun with your words and use them in different ways.
The only way you're going to rank for a specific keyphrases is to use
them consistently with varying 3rd and 4th word phrases and you can hit
on keyphrases galore - adding that much more value to your page! The keyword
pyramid in Part One can provide you with hundreds of keyword phrases your
page could possibly rank for. Research the most common and build around
them. One of best tools I have found for choosing keywords and identifying
common search phrases is Wordtracker.com. Creating these sentences with
usage variations that reflecting the context of normal human speech is
a great start to develop promotional keyword content. Now where else can
you stick this content to counter code and keyword densities?
Other
Places to Stick It
Here are some tricks I know of that can't hurt and sometimes
help when used within reason. These are meant simply as options to enhance
your code for search engine ranking, not as primary tool or trick to get
ranked. Please don't try using them all at once or on every page. You
do not want to be suspected of keyword spam (which will result in the
ban of your domain) so keep it light and make it count. I suggest using
Macromedia’s DreamWeaver 4
when coding some of these tricks.
Alt
Tags: Alt tags appear when an image is moused
over. These are great for identifying buttons where text links cannot
be used. <img src="image.jpg" alt="Click this image
for keyword">
Anchor
Tags: An anchor tags in an HTML document is a tagged text or
image element that acts as a link to another location. You can use it
to place keywords by using the following code:
<a name="Insert promo content from your Keyword
Pyramid in sentence form or one keyword/phrase"></a>
Comment
Tags: Who hasn't tried the comment tag trick? Ever try it using
your primary keyword or keyword phrase outside of the <html> or
</html> tags? Comes in handy every now and then. Comment tags used
where code is heavy, such as in tables, is helpful. Engines have a hard
time indexing heavily nested tables. You can help get around this by inserting
some of your promo content from above in this situation or by repeating
the heavily nested text. The engines may or may not look at <! Comment
tags --> this algorithm but it's worth a shot.
Form
Tags: Search engines index form tags. Lists,
buttons, you name it, it can probably read it. Here is a tag I use every
now and then when my code gets a little dry of keys:
<input type="hidden" content="Insert promo content
from Keyword Pyramid in sentence form.">
Hidden
Text: Now this is one of the oldest tricks in the book and
when done incorrectly, the most common reason for banned domains. Be
smart when attempting this trick. Make a background image the color you
desire for your page approximately 50x50 pixels and make the image your
background source. The actual page background should be a color different
from the text you want to hide. Make your text is the color of the background
image and you should be OK. The engine looks for matching color tags
but it cannot detect actual colors of images. This goes for hiding text
links as well.
Invisible
Links: When you want to intralink your website, that is, link
together every page of your site to either one or all pages, you should
create an invisible link code to paste into all the pages of your site.
To do this use the List Maker tool found
at AdultChamber.com to generate a list of all the pages of your site.
Using a text editor you can convert them into URL’s (handy for submission)
and a link code. Start by creating a 1x1 pixel transparent gif and set
it as the image source.
Convert the list from: C:\mysite.com\page1.html
To: <a href="http://mysite.com/page1.html"><img
src="pixel.gif" border=0">
Replace "C:\" with "<a href="http://
" , "\" with "/", and ".html" with ".html"><img
src="pixel.gif" border=0">". You can throw an alt tag in to give
the link more relevancy and your page more keyword weight if you so desire.
Layers: Layers containing text and links
can be indexed and spidered by the engines. I do not know if this technique
has been ruled out or analyzed by algorithms yet. Dreamweaver is good
tool for inserting layers and moving them off screen so they are not visible
to the user. I'd try it but I wouldn't overdo it.
In
fact try not to over-do anything! Get inventive with your code! As long
as it functions who cares if you just made up an HTML tag? You may get
some funny looks from your designers or programmers, or you could get
some great ideas.
My
advice to those looking to generate traffic and business in the search
engines? Have a plan; be consistent in your efforts. Don't expect and
don't promise overnight success, and don't give up if it doesn't happen
right away. Patience and persistence is key. Be imaginative when making
promo pages and conscious when designing a new site or writing content.
Try not to copy densities or pages currently ranking. Get a good idea
of what they have in common and build on it, don't mimic it. By the time
you get indexed something new will be working. And most importantly, SUBMIT
you pages MANUALLY to the search engines! If you are going to spend all
that time optimizing it's worth the 5 minutes. Do not submit more than
2 pages per domain per day per engine. A search engine submission guide
can be found at Http://AdultChamber.com/members/searcheng.htm
for more submission rules of thumb.
Farming
it out: If these steps seem to be more than you want to handle
yourself, there are companies that promise to perform the work in exchange
for money. My experience has shown me that very few individuals truly
understand SE marketing and many resort to using automated software solutions
such as submission or page generation instead of pounding away the hours
to get it done right. Be careful when selecting an SE Marketing company
and be sure to understand the methods they use to provide you with targeted
traffic. A professional firm will optimize the actual pages of your web
site for ranking, submit them manually, and then provide ranking reports
to you so you will know how your money was spent. We at Online Technologies,
the developers and operators of AdultChamber.com, take on only 3 clients
at a time for this type of work. It’s not cheap, but when done properly,
it does work and it pays off for a long time to come.
