It is critical that you identify the best search terms and keywords used on your competitors' sites (Step 1). To help in this keyword analysis effort we offer tips, advice and tools to research the competition and query history information available through several sources.

It is worth mentioning that sometimes your competition does something deceptive and hides their keywords. Cloaking is a server technique designed to hide keywords and actually deceive search engines into granting rankings that the sites do not deserve. This server technology submits alternate pages when the search engine looks for the page. These stealth techniques were designed to offer content to the search engine that is exceptionally keyword-loaded in an attempt to bias the spider into giving the page a higher ranking position. Some people submit pages that present the spiders with content that differs from what browsers will see. We strongly discourage the use of this type of technique — that is spam.

SEO Tip: You should also search for your domain name in the major search engines. While this is not obvious, it is very informative. Search both Google and Yahoo! using the following search format: ".bruceclay.com" -site:bruceclay.com. Replace bruceclay.com in the search query with your domain name.

It is important that you do NOT take the HTML source (and thus content) from a competitor's page. Not only is it a copyright violation, but it will result in duplicate content and will cause SEO optimization difficulties. All that you really need are sample keywords used for search engine ranking. Using brainstorming techniques you should re-combine the words to make a complete list. Be sure that you do not target trademarked words since that could lead to legal action against you. Copyrights on a site protect contiguous character strings and include displayed and hidden text (including keyword strings), so you cannot take a large portion of a site's content and use it to compete against the site. Even if there is not a copyright, the content is considered intellectual property, and there may be asevere negative effect from taking it.

The use of trademarked or registered names is illegal without appropriate notations and statements in the page. If you intend to use a word or phrase that legally belongs to a competitor, you must follow accepted fair use publication and legal credit guidelines. This applies to all of your internet marketing projects, so please beware.

As an additional note, use different keyword patterns and titles for ALL of the major pages in your site, and submit each individual URL to get all of the different keywords and titles added to the search engine. The goal of search engine optimization is to be found for many keyword searches, so have each page cater to different keywords!

SEO Tip: The Meta Keywords tag may work for some search engines, while Google, Bing and Yahoo (and many others) emphasize content and titles. As a result, it is important to have the most common words also appear at the top and throughout your site if it can be done without hurting the appeal of the site. If the search is for "search engine optimization tips," put that string in the title, description, keywords, headings, throughout the content and in inbound links.

Need More Keyword Help? - Search Terms and Keywords  What Makes a Good Keyword?  How to Choose Keywords  How To Use Keywords

In regards to competitors, it is also helpful to find out how many pages your competitors have indexed in the major search engines. This will help you figure out how much content with competitive keywords you will need on your site. The Search Engine Optimization/Domain Report tool below will check Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing to see how many pages for each site are indexed in each engine.

The SEOToolSet® is a Bruce Clay, Inc.-authored collection of indispensable SEO tools designed for search engine optimization by SEOs. This product set includes keyword research tools, competitor research tools, Web page analyzers, ranking monitors, ranking report modules, link analysis tools and more. Exceptionally robust and feature rich, this is a system of interrelated SEO tools designed to be one of the best tool collections on the market. It combines a great many search engine marketing tools not commonly connected together in this intuitive manner, facilitating deeper understanding and control of the SEO process. If you intend to promote your own Web site, then you MUST try our search engine optimization tools.

Review our tools, then try them: [ Free Visitor Versions | SEOToolSet Subscribers | Subscribe to our SEO tools now ]

Be sure to mix up the sequence of the keywords if (and only if) appropriate and they still make sense, for example: "word1 word2 word3" then "word3 word1 word2" then "word2 word3 word1," etc. Keep searching until you are satisfied that you have most of the keywords relevant to your site. Simply put, you can never have sufficient search engine ranking. If you think you do, simply add some more keywords appropriate to your site.

Up until now you have been brainstorming — trying to determine what keyword phrases people are using in the search engines that will help them find your site in the results pages. You should have a lengthy list of keywords and phrases at this point, and you should be ready to test them. Regardless of your list please consider that searchers do not necessarily think like you do, and so you get many "long tail keyword queries" that are in addition to those in your SEO project. Properly done, you will qualify for these words as well.

Sort the keywords and phrases in descending order of their perceived importance (i.e., how likely it is that they will be used by visitors as search words and hence, generate traffic). As a sidebar, traffic that seldom converts may not be of value, and you might not want to focus on those words unless branding is important. If uncertain, leave them in the order used by the highest ranking competitor pages. Be sure to identify two-word or three-word (and sometimes longer) phrases, if used. It is also important that you add words to help clarify the use of your keywords. For instance, "capital" can have very different meanings — such as intellectual capital, state capital, capital letters, venture capital, etc. So a keyword or two that helps the index builders learn the context of your keywords will help raise your search engine rankings. SEO Tip: Each keyword in your Meta tags must also appear within your content to avoid spamming penalties. Also, consider common misspellings [sic] as additions to your keyword lists. To get a clearer picture of keyword statistics and to aid you in your search engine marketing efforts, try our Search Engine Optimization/KSP tool!

Search Engine Optimization and Ranking Advice: Excessive use of keywords in your site content (known as keyword stuffing) is going to cause a search engine to ignore or decrease the value of that keyword within your page, and perhaps identify the page as spam. Also, using multiple keywords with the same root, like "word, words, wording, worded" (called stemming), will generally not cause a problem if the text reads naturally. Things are definitely getting tough though, and it is advised that you use extreme caution when creating your Meta tags. If you are indexed by any engine, and remain indexed for a week, then you have probably passed their test. Run our Page Analyzer tool (Step 2) on your own pages before submitting them to the search engines. The guidelines below are accurate and will help a lot.

It is also important to discard potential keywords that are not likely to be used in a search, especially if they do not contribute to your content. Properly done, you might end up with as few as 10 or as many as 100 major keywords. If you add all of the words, it will dilute the importance of each keyword, so select well. In general, you will have a hard time keeping the keyword analysis list short if you include plurals and various combinations of words to maximize your frequency counts. This site has many keywords in various forms and combinations, but we felt each word was important when we designed our keywords. The last keyword should be your site identification taken from your URL (ours is bruceclay.com), for SEO ranking and placement reasons discussed later. Be sure that this string appears as content to avoid spamming (can be in a URL string or mailto at the bottom of your page).

As for spamming technologies, there is evidence that the major search engines look across pages within their index for long-string repeats, essentially a plagiarism test, so mix up your keywords in the ALT attributes of your image tags to be sure they are not identical in sequence to words used elsewhere (text or Meta tags). Duplicate content is a very bad thing, and it can cause site-wide penalties. SEO Tip: Be very careful not to replicate content on or from other pages or even sites, and if that replication happens (as with affiliate sites) you have a serious problem. Duplicate content is a real management problem when doing SEO optimization.

Also, repeating your keywords in the content, as long as it is within a reasonable sentence construct and has appropriate context, will not be considered spamming. A search engine usually cares about spamming outside of the normal sentence form when reviewing content, rather than sentence spamming issues. Using "hidden" text techniques will usually get you penalized as a spammer, so avoid doing that as part of your search engine optimization efforts.

You are about to discover your real issue — you have insufficient or weak content. It takes a lot of words to convince colleagues and the search engines that you are a subject matter expert. Also, most sites do not use video and proper images (some of the Engagement Objects) to relay their messages to humans and search engines, but we are now discovering that search engines are not totally blind to video and images. It is very likely that you do not have a sufficient number of Engagement Objects on your pages. Or the site content may come from a database, and the database has little unique content. Or the site accepts feeds from other expert sites, but this makes all of its content someone else's, and it either gets no credit for it or is penalized for duplicate content. In any case, the design and content of your Web site may very well need to be restructured and expanded. [If this does not describe you, buy yourself a drink — you have earned it!] Avoid mistakes, use clean optimized video and graphics and do it right. Avoid pop-up windows, restrict the scope of forms except where really needed, make JavaScript and CSS files external to the source code, always have a natural amount of content, always use a site map, solve obvious problems first and by all means, keep it simple. Web page layout problems really hurt search engine marketing and SEO projects.

So where do you add keywords?? It is important that your page Title tag be as descriptive as possible of what the page is about, and that it contains your best keywords (generally fewer than 12). Listings that include the best search terms in the Title and Meta Description tags have a better search engine ranking and a higher click-through rate (often more than double the traffic) than those that do not! Use these keywords to make up your search engine optimization targets. Also, review your content to add these keywords, especially two- and three-word phrases, into the content without losing the message. This is important for a search engine that does not reference Meta tags. You want to use these phrases time and time again without spamming. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta Description fields. Such a search engine will exclude some appropriate keywords unless you use them throughout your content. And try to keep the Title and Description tags as short as possible to prevent you from diluting the keyword impact.

There has been a lot of discussion about the continued use of Meta tags. Meta tags (specifically the major Head section tags) in our opinion are important to search engine optimization. What is not known is what is meant when it is said that search engines "ignore" a Meta tag. Our research shows that they are not ignored, and that they actually do count. It is commonly known that the Title is vital and that the Description is often used as an abstract, but it is often thought that the Keywords tag is ignored. Knowing the history of spammer abuse for these tags, it would not be surprising to find them of lesser importance than before, and that words are ignored if and only if they do not appear in the content of the page — but they count if they are also found in the content. Is selectively ignoring words the same as "ignoring" them altogether? And if you were a search engine, wouldn't you tell spammers not to bother?

Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right, you should never be penalized for having them (unless you're a spammer), and not all engines will ignore them. Even if they do ignore them, they may not forever. You can never go wrong by using META tags, and you will only hurt yourself if you don't use them.

You must also unconditionally, absolutely, positively have your best keywords (and certainly sufficient content containing them) throughout your body section. For research-oriented content we recommend that you have at least 500 words of clean, grammatically correct sentence-structure content on every page. For shopping-oriented sites the content is commonly on shorter pages, so we recommend 250 words in these cases. You must also have your keywords appear as the most prominent (without excess) phrases on your pages. In many cases there are ways to do this that work well for whatever your page format or content, all of which is customized to the look-and-feel of the site and the nature of the content.

And you also need to link your own pages together. Use the keywords appropriate for the content of the landing page in the anchor text of the sending page. This is a must — use text links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are related. If the topics are not related, then use image links so the search engines do not see the text and get confused.

And never, ever create doorway pages, or information pages, or hallway pages, or similar pages as they are called today Spam by any other name is still spam. If you cannot make the real page into a subject matter expert, then hire someone who can. But do not try to make a pig fly!

Some search engines will allow you to submit (to replace or add a page to the index) a URL as often as you like and usually enable your changes to become live quickly (faster than on other search engines), so use the search engine with the fastest indexing process to "debug" your keywords and search engine optimization tactics. With the addition of XML Sitemaps, spidering is even easier, but you MUST still have crawable site maps. Unfortunately manual page submission spider frequency varies, so you might need to submit pages to all major engines, but certainly not to all 200+ search engines. It is important to understand that the time it takes for a search engine to actually respond to a submission and to place you into their index varies greatly from day to day. Search engine indexing was once a matter of hours, and now is often mixed from days to weeks. You would be wise to consider submission to other engines as well, to cover your bases. How search engines work is a wondrous thing, and every engine is different.

Once you have selected your best keywords, add the main words to your Title string, your Meta Description string, your Meta Keywords string, ALT attributes (image tag parameter), body Heading tags (such as <h1>) and especially embed them into your displayed content. Try to use as many keywords as you can in a natural and grammatically correct way in your opening sentences, since this sets the topic for the page and contributes to the theme of the site.

Keyword tuning for a search engine marketing campaign is an iterative loop; you keep doing it until you rank reasonably well on several search engines. At that point you at least have the right words and a reasonable Meta Keywords tag. But some search engines use different strings to determine keywords, and their algorithms downplay or ignore Meta tags. These search engines extract keywords from the content on your page, so you need to place your best search words throughout the displayed content for your page. An example (grossly oversimplified) would be:

Note: If you are not "programming" the design of your own Web site and are not familiar with how to add HTML code, please contact your Web designer and request that they add these commands.

We have a Page Analyzer that is part of our SEOToolSet search engine optimization tools that lists the top keywords plus all words used in your Meta tags. This report presents the density for each word in the various categories: Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, ALT attributes, Heading levels, and two categories for body copy. Following our specified SEO optimization methodology, you would review these reports and Web pages to see what you need to change or add to your pages. In the Page Analyzer, red and blue colors are "bad."

SEO Tip: Some engines process ALT attribute text for your images as keyword text as long as you do not spam these areas. Carefully reword your keyword list to read as sentences, and place them in the ALT attributes of your image tags as appropriate to the image and page. Do not stuff keywords into ALT attributes; they should be short and to the point.

This would also be a good time to perform a last minute check on the "spider-ability" of your site, and to detect any redirects or other issues that may prevent your site from being well ranked. Try our Check Server Page Tool:

Once the same words are in your Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tags, and also in other text (Headings and ALT attributes) and displayed content, and you are satisfied with your results, then, and only then, is it appropriate to submit your URLs to each major search engine. For search engine submission to just the top few search engines, you may use our URL ADD page with links to the add pages of the major search engines.

Allow two days to four weeks for each search engine submission to be indexed in each major search engine. If you do not show up (as is common), then resubmit. If you continue to miss the search engine ranking results you desire, then go back and review your keyword usage, either increasing or decreasing the keyword frequency until you have the desired results. If you desire search engine placement services to maintain your site and expand your search engine coverage, we provide a tutorial on our Internet Marketing Services page.

Need more information on the Submission process? Please visit our SEO site submission and submission discussion pages.

Need more information on the Yahoo! Directory and its effect on search engine optimization? - Yahoo! Directory

We strongly recommend that you install our toolbar (click the image above). The SEMToolBar™ was designed by SEOs for SEOs. It offers the important data you need, without all of the data that does not matter. Many search engine optimization toolbars give too much data, and while that would be easy to present, we chose to focus on what matters. If you also are a subscriber to the SEOToolSet (i.e., you have a valid subscription and login), then the SEMToolBar converts to a launch mechanism for the selected tools, putting the full power of the search engine marketing tools at your browser fingertips. The tools support many languages (more than 20), and offer information not found elsewhere, including proxy searches, customized search interfaces, search result annotation, highlighting, demographic data, page statistics, etc. And best of all, it is FREE!

There have recently been several important developments in the search engine optimization world that will significantly impact your SEO optimization efforts. The major issues are a result of changing technology in the area of behavior-based search, intent-based search and blended search (like Google Universal). These technologies collectively impact search engine marketing and SEO in significant ways.

Behavior-based Search — This is the tailoring of search results based upon the behavior of the searcher. If I search for "java," the search results are tailored based upon my search history for either programming, beverages or travel. And if I am into travel, the search results are biased by my interest in certain types of travel activities (such as scuba, fishing or sailing). This means that a given number of people searching for the same information will likely see different rankings or results pages. This mandates that the SEO keyword selection process consider the behavior and the community of the searcher in the overall keyword selection process. To accommodate behavior-based searching, SEOs should use keywords on the site that are common to their target audience.

Intent-based Search — This is the determination of the searcher's intent, categorized as commerce (shopping) or research. Certain SEO project phrases are obviously for research, and the sites do not need to be physically local to the searcher. In such cases, the most relevant sites can be located anywhere. But if the intent is shopping, or appears to be urgent, then local results are presented. Even without a Google sign-in, results are often targeted based upon the IP location of the searcher, and local results are given precedence. As such, sometimes a searcher from New York will see different results than a searcher in Los Angeles for the same query. In this case the SEO should use keywords on the site that are local to their target audience.

Blended Search — This is where Engagement Objects impact search. There are many items that can be added to a Web site. One job of the search engine optimization and Web design team is to mingle video, MP3 sound files, images, maps, blogs, news and books within the Web site. The search engines want to improve the engagement of the searcher with the resulting sites, and enhanced interaction requires the inclusion of what we have coined as Engagement Objects™. We believe that without these objects in exactly the right formats, your site will not rank as high as your competitors who engage their visitors. Those more engaging sites are expected to rank higher in the search results.

We have a search engine marketing tool we call Johnny Buttons™ that allows you to install the video buttons like the ones we have on this site. The code can be downloaded from the Engagement Objects™ section and installed onto your site without technical confusion. The download (coming soon) contains all you need to make it work for you.

Once you identify opportunities to add Engagement Objects to your site, be sure to use SEO selected keywords just as you would in any other content. It will contribute to content structure and theme, and it will certainly aid engagement. Adding Engagement Objects is a part of the SEO process and should be done.

It may take a few weeks for accepted search engine submissions to actually become effective with the major search engines. In some cases, it may take several submissions before you get registered. Considering that the Web is growing at an exceptional rate, it is a wonder that any search engine can keep up at all. Keep trying to get indexed. Visit the search engine that you care about most and see if you are registered by searching for your URL. SEO Tip: If you have our SEMToolBar, it will report the date your site was last spidered (cached date) on your results page. Your ratings will improve with time under our SEO optimization methodology.

There is a very specialized high-tech market for search engine marketing tools that convert raw data into SEO intellectual capital that you can actually use. There is a clear difference between data and wisdom, and that SEO wisdom is learned. Education is key. It is hard to have a great product, and those that do must charge for their tools in order to pay for the effort. The power of search engine optimization tools justifies the fee, so we recommend that you visit our SEOToolSet®. Our SEO tools (there are many) are straightforward, and the reports are easy to understand. If you like the free search engine advice in the visitor versions (under "Free Tools"), there is a much more powerful set of SEO tools available on a subscription basis. These tools are very fast and powerful, and they are recommended. But then, we are biased.

Once you have your SEO ranking results, you can easily identify where you need to go back and resubmit your site and fine-tune your keywords. Hopefully you will be placed at or near the top of your search results page.

In some cases the keywords are highly competitive, and the top positions are commonly held by different domains. In such cases the listed pages seldom see duplications. In other cases there are dominant sites. Do a query for the keyword "cisco" and see how many pages are from the same site!

Link tracking allows you to identify and choose possible sites that you will want as link partners once your site is content-rich and optimized. If these sites link to your competition, then you want them to also link to you. This is also done so that these potential link partners can be checked for Meta keywords that might be related to your site and that were missed by your competition. Who links to your competition may be a great indicator of the community that contributes to the ranking for your visitors as well. Add these URLs to the URL list from Step 1 that is used in Step 2. You might also try putting the http:// address in quotes and using Google.

SEO Tip: The number and authority of links to your site are factors in determining how well your site will rank with some search engines. Popularity is often measured by gauging PageRank associated with a particular keyword phrase, and impacts the ranking your site might have. You will want to begin to develop links as soon as possible, but we recommend that you add Engagement Objects and keywords before aggressively going after links from others.

On the subject of link popularity — we consider links vital to long-term natural search engine optimization and ranking. The objective is this: if you get a site to link to you, then you gain PageRank popularity points. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot more points, but if that site has few quality sites linking to it, you get only a few points. As such, for SEO ranking purposes a link from a major site in your industry with a high PageRank would be worth more than a link from Bobspage.com, provided that both had content similar to yours. In essence, if enough quality sites link to you, then your site becomes a quality site by association. So you want the best sites, not the most, to link to you. Likewise, if you link to other quality sites, then your site is assumed to be a quality site by association. However, the sites must be covering the same topics as your linking page in both directions. All other links are of minimal importance (or in the case of spam, they may be ignored or even penalized). And do not bother to buy hundreds of URLs and cross-link them or buy into an advertising network. The search engines can identify them and filter them out faster than you can perform submission on these pages. At best, they are short-lived and rarely have a long-term SEO benefit.

SEO Tip: you do not want to join a link farm or use spam in any way. You do not want to purchase "junk ads" that look like links but are not worth very much. What you want are links from quality sites where their content is supplemental and synergistic to your own. The links should be within the main body of their page, and contain YOUR SEO selected keywords in the anchor text (within the link where visitors click). We offer reports and search engine marketing methodologies on this as well, but that is not the topic of this page.

Need More SEO Optimization Information About Inbound Linking? - Link Popularity

This is a restated and clearer translation of a Google quote that we received a while back. We have made it "modern" in response to a forum thread request, so it is obviously no longer a quote but simply our interpretation of the quote. It says a lot about the Google desire to avoid deception and "hidden" code. To be well ranked in all major search engines you should avoid all hidden links, hidden text and cloaking, as these are usually forms of deception. Most search engines prefer that their spiders get the identical page that users get. In general, you can assume that most search engines are as conservative as possible. Avoid hidden links or text in divs/layers/iframes/CSS, and avoid links that are inconspicuous, as examples. Similarly, cloaking or sneaky redirects in any form, whether they be user agent/IP-based or redirects through JavaScript, meta refreshes, 302s or frames, frequently result in ranking penalties.

If you cannot tell if you have violated these rules, we recommend professional SEO help.

TIME FOR SEO TRAINING? — If you have followed the above steps correctly, and if you do not have good search engine rankings yet, then we recommend our classroom SEO training course or SEO services to go the final mile. We have given you what we could for the average SEO on the average project, and then some. But you may have something more difficult. Call us ... we can help: 866-517-1900. You may also want to check out the Search Engine Optimization All-in-One for Dummies. Bruce co-authored this latest SEO For Dummies guide and it is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

Need More Information? - Read about Link Popularity and give our LinkMaps™ tool a try. 

Server issues — You need a FAST, clean server. We recommend that you use a dedicated IP for your site only because that usually means that you will not be on a crowded or slow server, since that causes the spider to visit fewer pages (they do not want to crash your server). A slow server diminishes the number of indexed pages, thus cutting into your ability to have a broad theme. This in turn hurts your ranking.

  Finding Plagiarism — WOW! Great tool! Copyscape provides a free plagiarism detection service that lets people easily search for plagiarism online and identify instances of content theft. You can use Copyscape to find sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that are quoting your site. Simply type in the URL of your original content, and Copyscape does the rest.

Blogging for SEO — The art of blogging has been around for decades, but many businesses are just starting to realize the true impact blogs can have on their SEO optimization campaigns. The result: business-related blogs are popping up everywhere, proving to be a very marketable and valuable SEO tool.

Advanced Search Operators — Search engines find what you tell them to search for. A typical search will often return too many results or even results that are not relevant to the subject at hand. Therefore, search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing came up with tools to narrow the search to obtain the specific information being requested. They have also created several search commands that are very useful for SEO experts as well as searchers who want very specific information. These tools are calledAdvanced Search Operators and Combined Searches.

Bookmark this page and come back often! When you are ready, contact us for a FREE quote on search engine marketing services.

Go to Step 1 and start over — this never ends. We will be adding steps and additional search engine optimization tools to this page in the future. You will want to visit this site frequently to make sure that you remain ranked where you need to be.

Organic search engine optimization and better SEO rankings, although great, are not enough. There are many people who are too new to the Web and do not know how to find a search engine, let alone how to use one. To many, the Internet is e-mail and nothing more. You still need to consider the other forms of placement as discussed on our Internet Marketing Strategy and Philosophy page.

This site contains free advice that you need to use for higher keyword ranking results, although there are many other reference sites available. Do yourself a BIG favor and visit Search Engine Watch site on this topic.

SEO Placement Services are the finishing touches to a well-worked site. Search engine optimization services are offered for small and large firms. We have services for DIY through large accounts. You must at least review the next page to see if it is right for you!