My Grandfather ran a small Grocery Store and when you wouldask him a Question about his Business he would laugh andreply does Macys Tell Gimbels. (At the Time Gimbels wasa major Competitor of Macys in the New York DepartmentStore Market.) Well if Macys were on the Internetback then they could be telling Gimbels a lot. If Gimbels knew which tools to use and what steps to take to spy on Macys.
All Examples are based on the search term buckwheat pillows I do not sell buckwheat pillows,but I did recently order some online.
1 - Who is Number 1 for the Best Keyword.
Go to Yahoo, MSN and Google Type in buckwheat pillowssee who your Top competitors are. You may want to look atthe top 5 or 10 for results for Yahoo, MSN and Google, Do they overlap, Is someone number 1 in all 3 Searches or are they different. Which result Appears most often in the Top 3, the Top 5, the Top 10. Pick one of your Top competitors and see what else you can learn. Lets use http://www.l-oma.com/ for this example.
2 - What Keywords does use http://www.l-oma.com/ and how often.
The Meta Tag Analyzer tool will tell you which keywordsappear on these pages and how often. Just go tohttp://ewguru.com/tagtool and type in www.l-oma.com andclick submit. You will get a Report. The Top of theReport contains information on the Title, Description andKeyword Meta Tags we will use these later now scroll downuntil you see the Report Heading [The Keywords Found onPage]
This Heading tells you the Keyword Density for the Keywordsand Keyword Phrases on this Page. You will noticethe Keyword Pillows appears 3.76%, Buckwheat 3.29% andPillow 1.88%. You will also see that the Keyword Phrase buckwheat pillows appears 2,88%. A Keyword density of about 3% is just about right for your Target Keywords and Phrases.
Now Scroll up a little you will see the Heading [Keywordsfound in the IMG Alt tags] The Alt tag of an image is thetext a user sees when the Image cant be displayed. Inthis case they are not using Alt Tags. They could improveslightly by adding Alt Tags to their Images. Maybe for thePillow they could place Enjoy this Comfortable BuckWheat Pillow in the Alt Tag
Scroll up a little more and you will see the Heading[Keywords found in the Anchor tags] This tells whichKeywords are being used with there Hyper Links. Keywords in the Anchor can help your ranking. Perhaps they could have said Order Buckwheat Pillows instead of just order.
3 - Title Meta Tag
Lets keep working with the Report from the tagtool. Scrollup the page a little and you will see [Meta tags analysis].and [Meta tags report for:http://www.l-oma.com/index.htm]The First Entry under Both these Headings is Title. Thisis the Title that appears between the title and /title HTMLTags in the Header. The Report tells you the actual titleis Quality Buckwheat Pillows Handcrafted in Maine by L-OMA
The 2nd Heading tells you The Title relevancy to pagecontent is 89%. Yahoo, Google and MSN like this to be fairly accurate. 89% is pretty Good 95% or higher is Ideal.See http://ewguru.com/hbiz/perfectmatch.html for a Quick Lesson on how to get that number to 95% or Greater
4 - Description Meta Tag
The Next Entry under [Meta tags analysis] and [Meta tagsreport] is Description. Think of this as a Summary of whatis contained on the Page. This is also what Google, Yahooand MSN Display when youre listing appears. Ideally theDescription should match perfectly with what is on thePage, in this Example this tool wont measure theDescription because it is over 200 Characters Google, MSNand Yahoo use between 150 and 200 characters in there Listing for this result.
Look over there Description it uses the Keyword PhraseBuckwheat pillows 3 Times. It uses the Company NameL-OMA. Notice too that it uses lots of word like Neck,Spine and sleeping that appear in the Keyword DensityReport. The Description is Excellent as it is aims squarely at their target Market.
5 - Keywords Meta Tag
Keywords is the 3rd Row in both the [Meta tags analysis].[Meta tags report]. You get to see the actual Keywordsthey want to be indexed under and how well this pageMatches. They got an 84% match which means out of the 19Keywords they chose only 84% or about 16 Appear on thisPage. Look at their Keyword List
[buckwheat pillow, loma buckwheat pillow, l-oma, back pain,pillow, headache, snoring, neck pain, migraine headache,sleep apnea, tension, muscle pain, stress, buckwheat hull,Maine]
You may want to type in some of their Keywords into Yahoo,MSN and Google and see how they did for those keywords and phrases.
6 - Link Tool (http://ewguru.com/linktool)
To Find out a Little more about www.l-oma.com go to theLink tool and Type in www.l-oma.com and then click.You will Notice that they have 16 Backwards links fromGoogle, 312 from Yahoo and 3 from MSN. Click on 312 underYahoo and you get to see who is linking to them. Likewiseclick on 16 under google and 3 under MSN to see who theylist as Back Links. Can you get links from these web sitestoo.
7 - What Other Keywords to use
The Keyword Suggestion Tool is another Source ofFantastic Information. (http://ewguru.com/kw-suggestion)Just Type in your Keywords buckwheat pillows and find outother Keywords you can use.
Go back through the steps with these new keywords andsee what else you can learn. You may want to target someof the Less Popular Keywords first to get your own High PageRank.
Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001.
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Copyright 2005-2006 Mike Makler: all rights reserved.
Googles calling your name...
Hi, Google here. We want to index your website...
Is anyone there
This article has a free corresponding online video tutorial that shows you how to summons the magic Googlebot to spider and index every page on your website, and it will only take about 10 minutes of your time.
Go here now to watch exactly what to do, step-by-easy-step...
http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm
What you have access to with the new Google Sitemaps program is truly a gift from the Google gods. Theyve offering you a tool that you can use to keep your site constantly indexed and updated in the search engine database. With Google Sitemaps, webmasters can now take charge and make sure that their entire site is crawled and indexed.
One important note to make is that the Google Sitemaps program will not necessarily improve the ranking of your sites pages. It only ensures that Google knows what youve got online for them to look at.
Before reading the following statement, promise yourself that you wont stop reading if you see a term that seems a little scary. OK Promise Good. Go ahead and keep reading then.
The format specified by Google for their sitemap is XML (extensible markup language). Did I loose you yet No Good again.
You do not need to understand how to code XML to participate in the Google Sitemap program. There are plenty of free online tools that will create your XML sitemap for you with no XML knowledge required on your part. More on this in a second.
What information is including in this XML sitemap
1) The URL for every file on your website.
2) A relative priority rank that you can assign telling Google which pages on your site are most important for them to look at.
3) The date last modified for each page.
4) Anticipated change frequency per URL. This again is a variable that you control.
According to Google, your XML sitemap can include up to 50,000 URLs. If your site is a real monster and has in excess of 50,000 URLs, then youll need to create a hierarchy of sitemaps with one leading to the next. This way youll be able to lead Google to all of your pages.
The options for generating and maintaining your Google Sitemap range from complex systems that are highly automated to very simple systems using online sitemap generators that require nothing more than clicking a few buttons.
Google now keeps a list of these third party suppliers of generators on their site. Find them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html
The program thats demonstrated in our free video tutorial (http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm) is found here: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
In a nutshell, here are the steps involved with using online generators:
1) Start the program.
2) Enter your sites URL
3) Click the Start Crawling button
4) Customize URL priorities and change frequencies
5) Save the site map to your local hard drive
6) Upload your new Google XML sitemap to your website in the root directory (where your home page resides)
7) Validate your new sitemap (can be done here: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/)
8) Submit your XML sitemap to Google.
You can access the pages for the Google Sitemap program here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
8 steps in about 10 minutes. Thats all there is to it.
One question that you might ask is whether or not you still need an HTML sitemap, and the answer is Yes, you still need your conventional sitemap. XML sitemaps are not intended for human visitors. To see what I mean, take a look at the two following sitemaps:
HTML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.html
XML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.xml
Which version do you prefer Your visitors will like the HTML and Google prefers XML.
When you add pages or new content to your site and you want Google to go back to have a fresh look, just log in to your Google Sitemaps control panel, select the sitemap to revisit, and click Resubmit. Its never been easier to get Google to spider and index a website. Dont miss your opportunity to use this tool to your advantage.
Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton
Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to GoThrive Online, for big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings. Free Video Tutorial Archives Here: