Search Engine Secrets

PSST Want To Know A Secret?

You have probably seen advertisements for books promising to reveal search engine secrets. A special secret technique for getting high search engine rankings.

I am going to let you in on the secret to great search engine rankings. I am going to share all the search engine secrets.

Ready?

Listen closely.

Here come the Search Engine Secrets no one wants you to know.

There Are No Search Engine Secrets

Promises to reveal Search Engine Secrets are just HYPE. Advertisers use the word secret in order to capture your attention.

They scream...

Search Engine Secret!

Then promise to let you in on the secrets. Sometimes they even throw in the word free.

They scream...

Free Search Engine Secrets!

They expect you to act like a sheep and shell out your money because you want to know the secrets.

Don't fall for the hype.

Search engine optimization is easy. There aren't any secrets. Just simple techniques you need to know.

If you have a web site, a few days of research and you can learn to optimize your websites for search engines.

You can find lots of great information about search engines on the web for free. A few days of your time and a few weeks building pages will get your skills up.

Note: Google is now the biggest search engine. If the search engine secrets are not about Google they are OLD. If you learn how to optimize for Google, you will get great rankings on the other search engines

Since you are here looking for answers, it wouldn't be right to leave you with sharing a few search engine secrets. So keeping with the theme here are a few...

"Search Engine Secrets"

Good search engine rankings come from designing your pages. You need to know how search engines work. You need to know how search engines view your pages. Basically Search engines read text. You must give them text to read

Search engines can't see images. You need to tell the search engine what the image is with an alt tag. Search engine spiders cannot see Flash animations either.

I have a friend who had very poor search engine rankings. He wasn't even listed on most search engines. His webmaster told him he was in a competitive environment, and they would have to find the secrets to search engine rankings.

His webmaster had also converted all the text on the site to images so it would display the same across all browsers. Read Search Engine Secret # 2 again.

You must use the keywords you are targeting in the text. This page is optimized for the phrase "Search Engine Secrets." Notice how I keep using the phrase over and over again. Use variations of the words, but putting them together is best.

A sentence like, "Here are the secrets of search engine rankings." contains the keywords. A better way to phrase the same sentence is, "Here are the search engine secrets." Or even better, "Search Engine Secrets Revealed."

The last sentence is smaller and tighter. It contains the keyword phrase and has few other words.

More Search Engine Secrets.

Search engines navigate by following links into your site. If you don't have any links into your site, you need to get some. The easiest way to get links is to put a links page on your site and then trade links. NEVER post your site on a Free For All links page. FFA sites will damage your rankings.

Search engines don't read JavaScript links. This means if you have fancy roll over images on your site, the search engine will miss most of your pages. You need plain text links for the search engines to read. If you must use an image for a link, use an alt tag so the search engine spider can read it.

Search engines have a hard time with frames. A search engine follows links, (Search Engine Secret #3) unless it is your navigation frame, each frame is a dead end.

My friend with the site above had all his links in roll over links. It looked great. You point the mouse at a link and it changed color. WOW. Unfortunately, the search engines missed his links. His entry page was a really neat Flash Splash page. Great graphics- or that's what he tells me. With my dial up modem, I wasn't waiting around for them to load. He also used frames. He broke every one of the "secret" search engine rules.

Still More Search Engine Secrets.

Search engines give weight to links with the keywords in them. The links to this page on the rest of my site are titled Search Engine Secrets. The inbound link helps the search engine define what the page is about. Even if you don't have links from other sites, you should use the keywords in your links.

Search engines read URLs to see what the page is about. This page is called search-engine-secrets.shtml. The search engine spiders read the URL and decide the page must be about search engine secrets.

Learn More Search Engine Secrets

You can learn much more about search engine optimization by surfing the web. I did just that for years. Six months ago I came across a book about search engines. I bought many books but this one was different. Maybe it was because I had amassed a large amount of knowledge and was ready for an AH HA moment. Maybe it was just well written.

Anyway Sean Burns' Rankings Revealed opened my eyes. Most of the pages I am constructing now go right to the top of Google. I have over 200 pages that rank in the top five on Google and add new ones every week. For some keywords I have pages on different sites that rank 1-2-3 on Google.

This is because I read Rankings Revealed. I tell all my clients they have to buy the book and read it before I will advise them on their sites. It makes it easier on me when they understand the search engine secrets.

Internet marketing can be very rewarding. It's a lot of fun too. You can spend months or years trying to unlock the search engine secrets. Or, you can learn everything by reading a single book. I'll leave the choice up to you.

By the way, Sean is a great guy. When you buy his book you get access to him and he really does answer questions. He also has a great newsletter about search engines. Even if you don't get his book you should sign up for his newsletter.