How to score better on Search Engines

Introduction.

In today's online business the best way to find new customers is to let them find you.

How?

If you know how the search engines works then the answer is pretty simple: you need to be listed on the Top search engine's database and you need to be on the first 10-20 listed sites so that people can see your entry and visit your site. Of course this is needed but it is not enough to let you sell your products. You also need to well design your WEB site pages so that your visitors will find the information and products they really are searching for. It is really foolish to optimize your site for keywords not related to your products.

You need to be listed in the search engine's database and, more important, you need to score better than your competitors. In this article we will present a quick tutorial on how to achieve this goal using our software tool GRKda.

GRSoftware's Keyword Density Analyzer (GRKda or simply KDA) for Windows will save you the time and frustration of "counting" words on the web pages you want to analyze. It will allow you to analyze the top scoring pages on the search engines and then design your own pages with the correct keywords / text ratios.

Another useful tool from GRSoftware is GRSeo. This is a search engine optimizer software for Windows that can check your HTML pages against the well known rules of the major search engines and tell you what is wrong or what you should do to make it better. A monthly subscription service will keep the search engine rules of the program updated.

Quick Tutorial.

To get the best out of the GRKda software you need to follows these fundamental steps:

1.    The easiest way to design a competitive web page for a given search engine is to start by entering your product related keyword / phrase into the selected search engine and find the top rated pages in your category.

2.    After you get the report from the search engine, one by one, click on the links of the top scoring pages -- generally, the top 10 pages will give you sufficient information regarding the correct keyword mix to apply to your web page. Be sure these highly scored pages are recent. Some search engines shown you the link date so that you can skip older links.

3.    Now save each visited web page (you need to save the source html code) to your hard drive so that you can analyze them later. To do this simply select File / Save As ... in your browser and choice to save as HTML only; alternatively select View / Source Code and then save this text file as .html. Give to these files a file name that help you sort them in the order of score and also put in the file name the search engine name.
For example :
    1_Altavista_keyword.html
    2_Altavista_keyword.html
    3_Altavista_keyword.html

If you place all these files in a folder whose name is the search engine then you can simply name the files as 1_keyword.html 2_keyword.html and so on.

4.    Next, run GRKda and load all the "saved" top pages into the "Compare" dialog. Enter your keyword / phrase in the edit box of this dialog and then press Enter or push the "Refresh" button. The better search mode is "Whole phrase (logical AND)" because it is the default search mode that many search engines have. GRKda at this point give you a "statistical count" for the keyword density on the top pages. Pay particularly close attention to the highest relevancy scoring pages. You can enable the HTML tags you want to analyze in the "Analysis Options" dialog and this must be done based on the particular search engine you are considering. You need to find by experience (or experiments) or information you may find on the web what tags each search engine consider to score the pages in their database. If you do not know this information the best is to enable all visible HTML tags (title, body, link text, header).

5.    Next, you must design your web page as close as possible and with the same percentage of "keyword density" as the top scoring pages. For example let us use the keyword "coffee". If the top scoring page has a 2.51% keyword density for the keyword "coffee" in the BODY TEXT then you can design your page's BODY TEXT with a 2.51% (or as close as possible) keyword density for "coffee" as well. Keep in mind that in some engines also the position of the keyword is relevant: if you place your keyword on top the score is better. The same applies for the TITLE tag: the most important tag of all. Be sure not to repeat the keyword in the TITLE tag because often this is considered a bad thing by many search engines. Repeat these same steps for the other available categories/tags. Once your page closely matches the keyword density in all categories/tags you have likely designed a page that will most probably score in the top of the search engines... maybe even number one -- provided that there is a separation in "relevancy" scores for the top pages in your chosen keyword / phrase categories. With a little experimentation, you will find the Keyword Density Analyzer a very helpful tool to make your job of scoring well on the search engines much easier than you ever imagined possible.

6.    Be sure to experiment a little with the program so that you will learn how all its options works. For example, if you "click" the compare list header the program will change the sort order of your results into "ascending" or "descending". If you double click on a listed item you will go to the Statistical dialog to see all words in that page. A final option that can also help a lot is the one that allows you to skip words smaller than N characters. Normally this option is set to 3 to skip words like: and, for, I, or and the like.

7.    Be sure to also check the "Analysis Options" dialog. The options here can be easily changed and will allow you to change your "Compare" criteria. The "Analysis Options" dialog will allow you, for example, to toggle the "case sensitive" option on or off. There are search engines that are case sensitive and other not so if you set this option poorly you will get wrong results! From this dialog you can include or exclude certain components of the web page (HTML tags) in your comparisons. This is the most important option.

8. Last note is about the HTML page of your competitors. Sometimes, and more often when you download older html pages, the pages you download for the comparison aren't the same that the search engine robot has checked when it added that page into the database. This means that sometimes you will not able to score better because the page you are comparing with are not the same that the search engine robots used. In order to correct this situation you can resubmit that URL to the search engine so that the robot will update the database and you will see more correct and reliable results.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

As Search Engines are continuously moving and changing there can be no guarantee that the simple explained technique will work with all of them. Every Search Engine has its own techniques for scoring pages and you must first learn what analysis options are important for your selected Search Engine before designing your page and get a successful scoring. Please refer to every Search Engine rules before starting your analysis. For example, at the time of writing, one of most important parameters the search engines take into consideration is the link popularity of a web page. The more links out of there that point to your page, the better your page will score.