Keyword Tips, Tricks & Strategies

I am going to preface this section with a DISCLAIMER: I am including the strategies below in an honest attempt to cover all bases, but by no means am I advocating the use of them. Most are pretty old hat by now anyway. My feeling is that if you have to rely on tricks and chicanery to achieve a decent search engine ranking, you can't be too proud or confident of your Website. And if this is the case, then your time and effort would best be spent on polishing up the content of your site, rather than on trying to fool the spiders and indexers. 

This said, there is one honest new method of jumping to the head of the class that I do highly endorse and that is Stephen Pierce's Smart Page strategy that he details in his blockbuster bestseller, Under Oath: The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth About Internet Marketing. The method is too complicated for me to try to describe here. If you're interested, I highly recommend that you get the book - it's a great read. 

And if you decide you want to use the strategy, Armand Morin and Raymond McNally carried the process a bit further (and done us all an immense favor) by putting together a nifty piece of software, the Smart Page Generator, that can instantly generate dozens of these secret search engine boosting pages in minutes. Finally, there is a viable solution to the search engine dilemma for the average small marketer. Using the Smart Page Generator will provide you with all the laser targeted, motivated traffic you need by getting your site listed at the top of Google and the other important search services.

A Word About Doorway Pages & Sites

A doorway site is simply a collection of targeted doorway pages on one domain. Your visible links go to your main site. You'll use invisible links on your index page to each of your doorway pages on that site so all pages will be indexed. You can have as many of these sites as you like, bearing in mind that you'll have to promote each and every one of them for them to be effective.

TIP: If you're thinking about going this route, you'd be best off going with a hosting service that allows you to add many domains or sub-domains to your account without charging additional hosting fees. You can also use free hosting services for this purpose.

Other "Secret" Keyword Strategies

These techniques are more common than you might think, probably because they are very effective and are not considered "spamming" by most search engines, so there is little risk involved.

1. Deliberate Misspellings: Grammar doesn't count when it comes to listing keywords. Using a common misspelling of a keyword will sometimes get you more traffic than using the correct spelling, because you'll nab all those who spell the word incorrectly

2. Derivatives & Variations: It's also a good idea to use as many derivatives of the same word as possible. So, for example, rather than just using the word "success," you could use "successful" and "succeed." You can also use phrases like "how-to" that may be typed in the search engines, but bear in mind that they ignore many common words such as, "a,"" the," "and" etc. 

3. Alphabetical & Numerical Text Order: If possible, try to choose a <TITLE> that begins with a letter toward the front of the alphabet, as some search engines list sites in alphabetical order. Better still, begin your <TITLE> with a number or ASCII characters like "!" or "#". Using quotation marks is also an effective way to improve your ranking.

TIP: Here's the normally accepted order of ASCII characters, numbers and letters used by most search engines: ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ? @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ' a b c d e f g.....etc.

4. Making Your Keywords Plural: Many people use the plural form of words when searching for information, so in order to cover all bases use the plural form of your keywords whenever possible. This way, your page will be found for both the singular and plural searches, whereas if you don't add the extra "s" it will only turn up for singular searches.

5. Semi-Relevant Keywords: You need to exercise good judgment in using these, but it can help to reach a broader audience if you pick words that are in some way related to what you are offering or to something that a person looking for your service or information could use. For instance, as this site happens to be a "gateway" to other sites, I could use words relating not just to this site specifically but to those other services I am referring people to, such as "Website design" or "hosting services."

6. URL Address Variations: A simple way to get around page submission limits and enhance the effectiveness of your submissions is to slightly alter your URL address. For example, if the first URL you register is: http://www.yourdomainname.com, you can create three other URLs simply by dropping the www. and adding your homepage default name, usually index.html. So you could register http://yourdomainname.com, http://yourdomainname.com/index.html and http://www.yourdomainname/index.html in addition to your originally registered name! Now you have four addresses to register that all point to the same page. 

TIP: If you use this technique, only register one name a week. The search engines that respond best to these address variations are: Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos and Web Crawler.

7. Mirror Pages/Sites: The next step up from URL variation is page duplication. This is done with the creation of "Mirror Pages." This technique has long been used to in attempts to boost website rankings. When you mirror a page, your create copies of it and give each copy a unique URL or http://yourdomainname.com/title1.html, http://yourdomainname.com/title2.html, http://yourdomainname.com/title3.html and so on.

8. Re-Direct URLs: You can have as many listings as you have unique URLs. And this way you can design unique pages, tailoring them to fit the listing criteria of each individual search engine! If you want to take this a step further, you can go to URL Redirect Services and get several entirely different URLs for your site. You can register all your redirect/doorway pages right along with your main pages, without having to space submissions.

TIP: If you are going to use any of these multiple page submission techniques with more than one search service, you will have a difficult time keeping track of all your different addresses, not to mention which addresses you used and when you used them, so you should make sure to keep accurate and up-to-date notes. It might help to use sub page titles that have specific codes or meanings. For example, rather than simply using: http://yourdomainname.com/title1.html, you might choose something like: http://yourdomainname/reav-917.html. This tells me that I submitted this redirect page to AltaVista on September 17. Just remember, each page you submit must have its own name, title, URL and keywords for this technique to work.

All this may sound like a lot of time and trouble, and it's not for the feint of heart, but remember the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to drive as much targeted traffic to your site as possible, and in the long run, search engines are most cost effective way of doing this.

Of course, there are some ways around all this. You can either use one of our highly recommended Search Engine Optimization Services, or you can look into Ken Evoy's remarkable new SiteBuild-It tool, that handles just about every aspect of your Web presence and promotion for you. 

Risky Keyword "Tricks"

I am including this section because my intent in these courses is to be as thorough as possible in letting you in on all the information I have gathered about online marketing and promotion. This being the case I would be remiss in not letting you know about these less than above-board strategies because they are in use and may be the reason some competing sites are being ranked higher than yours.

By imparting this knowledge to you, however, I am by no means endorsing it. I neither advocate nor advise against the use of these techniques. The decision is up to you. I will tell you, however, that search engine programmers consider these strategies to be a form of spam, and you know that when you use spam you have to expect serious consequences. In this case, the penalty is often de-listing from a search engine - for life! So, before you consider using any of these "tricks," I seriously advise you to weigh the benefits against the risks. 

1.  Keyword Loading, Stuffing or Spamdexing: To get more mileage out of your all important site titles, you can try keyword loading. This simply means that you add lots of important keywords to your title to give them more relevance. Some people omit the title entirely and only include keywords, such as: <TITLE>Home Business, Internet Marketing, promotion, advertising online, wealth, success</TITLE>.  Keyword stuffing or spamdexing is also used in headlines, such as <H6> home business, home business, internet marketing, internet marketing etc.<H6>

2. Tail Tagging: Basically, this is just another form of keyword loading, but the keyword repetition is at the bottom of a Web page. The additional keywords are intended to increase a page's keyword density.

TIP: It's relatively simple to determine which search engines are allowing this practice. You can do so by going to the top listed sites and viewing their "source" codes. (In Netscape you do this by clicking "View" and then "Document Source" or" Page Source." In Microsoft Internet Explorer, you click "View" and then "Source.") If you find more keywords than show up on the viewed page, then you know that the webmasters of these sites are using this technique.

3. Title Repetition: Although more than one <TITLE> tag isn't proper HTML, some people have been known to try title repetition to boost their site's rankings. They just take a standard title and copy it several times, like this:

4. Invisible Text: While the above techniques might fool some of the search engines some of the time, they detract from the overall appearance and credibility of your site's content. One way to get around this, to load up your page with additional keywords without detracting from its appearance, is to hide or camouflage the extra HTML by making the text the same color as the background for the page. For example, if your background is yellow, you add hidden text by setting the font color to yellow. You can also reduce the font size to <font size=1>.

This is considered spamming (keyword stuffing) by most search engines, and if you get caught you will be severely penalized. One way to lessen your risk is to use a color that is close to your background color but isn't a perfect match.  Another technique to avoid penalty is to use a background image with colors that your hidden text can blend into. If you choose to try these techniques, however, be very selective in your choice of search engines. 

5. HTML Comments also let you hide text from readers. With HTML comments, you place text (your keywords) on the page that the search engine can see but your readers can't. Anything placed in <!BRACKETS> that starts with an exclamation point (!) is considered a comment and is invisible to your viewers. This might work with a few search engines, as long as the loaded comment fits the content.

For example: <!-- Home Business, Internet Marketing, promotion, advertising online -->

6. Hidden Input Fields: Some search engines also read values associated with input fields. This allows you to use hidden input fields to boost your rankings. For example, you could use the input type HIDDEN and add a VALUE attribute that contains your descriptive text or keywords:

<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" VALUE="home business, work at home, internet marketing, etc.">

In the End, Content Counts the Most

When push comes to shove, you're best off simply packing your site with as much quality, relevant content as you can, interspersing your primary and generic keywords as often as naturally possible and then letting the search engines make of it what they will. 

Here are Jim Daniels' thoughts on the subject: 

A quality website with solid, reliable and substantial content will always do better than sites trying to "trick" their way to good ranking. Think about it for a moment. Why do the top search sites have such a huge market share? Simple. They provide quality search results. That's how they got more people to use them to find what they were looking for. 

Therefore, websites offering lots of quality CONTENT are usually the first sites presented in their search results.

The Web is ALL about information. Let's face it, nearly ALL people online are here to get information... If you are a website owner, this translates into a simple strategy. Create content for your niche market and the search engines will make it available to the public. Grow a website that is information rich and the visitors will come. It may take some time, but they will come.

Here's what SE expert Stephen Mahaney has to say on the subject:

"Just like fishing, the more hooks you have in the water, the better your chances of catching something. Same deal with search engine optimization. The more pages you have on your website, the better chance you'll have of hitting those ever changing "correct" formulas for keyword density, keyword combos and so on."

"Of course, your pages should contain quality information so the visitor doesn't just click back to the search engine when he or she arrives. Fast click-backs are noticed by many engines and can work against you. In such cases the engine figures the visitor didn't find what they were looking for so your page must not have been relevant to their search."

TIP: Many search engines are now outsourcing their results and using the indexes of services like Direct Hit, which measures how many times a specific page has been hit and how long the visitor stayed at the site, and Open Directory Project, which is a human reviewed directory. With these services, keywords and META tags play no role whatsoever in determining how your site is indexed. They rank and rate relevancy based solely on content.

As a rule of thumb, keep your content focused to a single theme per page. Focus on one specific keyword, blend in a few general keywords and synonyms (not so many that they dilute your primary keyword) and let it go at that. Try to add one new page to your site per week, perhaps highlighting some special feature of your product or service. Or you might do a weekly Q & A where you single out and explain the benefits of your product in greater detail. And of course, there is always the option of writing articles, which can then do double duty in a newsletter.

The ultimate trick, of course, is to provide quality content that is designed in such a way as to take advantage of spidering engines as well as human reviewed directories. If you can accomplish this, you are guaranteed to come out on top!

Of course, this is what SiteSell's Ken Evoy has been preaching all along....

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