Boston Update (March 2003) – The Boston update focused on incoming links and unique content. The result was that many webmasters reported a drop in backlinks and a corresponding drop in PageRank.

Cassandra Update (April 2003) – This update focused on domain name relevance. The idea was that companies should choose a name that reflects their domain name.

Dominic Update (May 2003) – This update was named after the pizza restaurant in Boston that was visited often by PubCon attendees. The update focused on making the search process theme based, and linking a data center to a particular search. The update made it clear that each data center was meant to do different things.

Esmerelda Update (June 2003) – The third in a series of updates that gave preference to pages that gave more specific information to a visitor. The update revealed that internal pages within a website may have better relevance for the Dominic update, which seemed to give the homepage preference to even searches that were aimed at a specific query. Users reported that spam was considerably less than after the Dominic and Cassandra updates.

Florida Update (November 2003) – The update reflected Google’s shift from simple filters to an attempt to understand contextually the scope of the search and potential search results. The update cleaned up spam with simple linking and other features that gave more weight to well optimized and cleanly linked sites. Webmasters welcomed the update and it showed that Google was giving top priority to the searchers’ interests. The update was an attempt to encourage white hat websites, which adhered to the quality requirements.

Austin Update (January 2004) – The update focused on a practice called Google Bombing, where people manipulated the system to produce misleading results. The focus shifted to sites with minimal keyword density and good internal linking. Relevant links were given more weight in that sites that linked to other sites in a similar industry did better in the search results.

Brandy Update (February 2004) – Google placed more emphasis on words like trust, authority and reputation. Update showed that providing relevant information is the key. There was greater importance placed on the quality of content on a website. Google also stressed the importance of Latent Semantic Indexing.

Allegra Update (February 2005) – This was an attempt by Google to identify spam sites that still managed to rank high in the search results. Google asked users to give feedback about sites that actually deserved higher rankings but did not receive them. Users complained that their sites disappeared from the search results and that some spam sites still ranked well.

Bourbon Update (May 2005) – Google launched this update in response to spam complaints and re-inclusion requests. Strategic changes in the process were implemented to make it more effective. The update also focused on moving from old data centers to new ones.

Jagger Update (October / November 2005) – Google encouraged users to give feedback concerning websites that used black hat SEO strategies to rank well. Sites which were found to be using such techniques were removed from the search results. Google cleaned up canonical problems and focused on relevance in reciprocal linking.

Big Daddy (February 2006) – Google focused on inbound and outbound links. Sites that have very low trust in links, or linked out to many spam sites saw pages disappear from the index. Spam sites were moved into a supplemental category in the search results. Users noticed that even after complying with Google’s “help” that their websites were still going “supplemental.”

Pluto Update (August 2006) – Update focused on backlinks reported by Google. There were no significant changes in search engine results.

Caffeine Update (August 2009) – Update focused on infrastructure to allow Google to better index information online, and do it much faster. It enabled deeper processing, which allowed Google to deliver more relevant search results. This update eventually allowed Google to introduce page speed as a ranking factor.

Mayday Update (May 2010) – Google launched update that focused on long tail traffic.

Panda Update (February 2011) – Google cracked down on content farms and sites that had low quality, thin or scraped content. Focus was placed on unique content and content depth. Many websites were affected by the update. Most content farms got hit hard. The Panda update has been rolled out in several steps throughout the year.

Major updates from Google were typically focused on improving search results and the ability to index information on the Internet. Google has also launched updates to give more information to users and improve the overall experience. These updates include:

Universal Search (May 2007) – Universal Search ranked images, videos, news websites and other results into the same search results pages. The feature allowed people to search everything on a specific topic.

Real-Time Search (December 2009) – Google incorporated information from sources like Twitter, Facebook and blogs into its search results, giving users the ability to find the most recent information on trends about a certain topic.

Google Instant (September 2010) – Google Instant took what users typed and completed it with the most likely string of words. The result was a smarter, faster search engine that was interactive, predictive and powerful.

Google Places (October 2010) – Places were Google’s new local search results that organized information based on location. The results allowed users to easily decide where to go.

Bees are marvelous insects. The first thing that most people think of when talking about bees is honey, which is perfectly normal since bees make honey, hence the name “honey bee”. The other thing that we associate with bees is pollination. Bees are responsible for about 80 percent of all pollination. Fruit trees, flowers and all types of vegetation rely on pollination to grow, so besides making honey, the honey bee also has a very big impact on the ecosystem. Similar to the bee and pollination, optimization for one or many main keywords has a very big impact on many other keywords and the rankings of all other pages of the website.

Long Tail Keywords

At the start of an ongoing search engine optimization campaign there is normally a list of keywords chosen to optimize for based on the keyword research that was done. Rankings and return on investment can be tracked for these targeted search terms over the duration of the campaign. What is often not tracked is the related long tail keywords that also benefit from the SEO strategies used to improve rankings for the main targeted search terms. Because the keyword phrases are closely related and are often found in the content of the targeted landing page, the related long tail keywords also receive a boost in rankings. This boost will not be apparent in reports focused on the primary keywords alone because these terms are usually not tracked with the main targeted keyword phrases.

Example Main Search Term (Bees)

1. Related Long Tail Keyword (Honey Bees)
2. Related Long Tail Keyword (North American Honey Bees)

So then what should you do if after several months you are not seeing an ROI for your main targeted keywords? Look at the website traffic from a broader perspective. Look for long tail keywords that relate to the main targeted search terms and find revenue generated by those keyword phrases. That revenue is also part of the ROI for your SEO campaign.

Parent and Child Landing Pages

Similar to the process of researching and choosing main search terms to target, landing pages will also be chosen and have selected keywords mapped to them at the start of an SEO campaign. Progress of these pages can be tracked in ranking reports and through analytics. Over the course of the campaign the targeted landing pages will move up in the search engine results pages and traffic to the pages will increase. What’s typically not noted in these reports is the improvements in rankings and search traffic to the pages that are linked to from the targeted or parent landing page.  The linked, or child pages, receive a boost in page authority and rankings because the increase in page authority from the parent landing page gets passed through the links to the child pages. So even if I am not directly seeking out links for the child pages with my SEO strategies, with every link to the targeted landing page, additional page authority is also passed on to each of the linked landing pages.

Targeted Landing (Honey Bee) Page

1. Linked (Honey) Landing Page
2. Linked (Orchard Pollination) Landing Page
3. Linked (Alfalfa Pollination) Landing Page

As you monitor the progress of your SEO campaign, keep in mind the effect that SEO is having on the website optimization as a whole. Look at other pages that are linked to from your main landing pages and see what type of revenue they are generating. That revenue is also ROI that you are getting from the SEO strategies being implemented for your main landing page.

Remember that just like the honey bee affects many things directly and indirectly through pollination, SEO affects many keywords across the entire website. Your keyword focus may be on a specific set of chosen keywords that have been mapped out to specific landing pages, but SEO is going to have an impact on the entire website. Don’t get attached to those main keywords and ignore the full value that your SEO campaign is producing for you.

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<a href="http://www.seo.com/blog/buzz-long-tail-keywords/?source=embed"><img src="http://www.seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/The_Buzz_on_Longtail_Keywords_Infographic.jpg" alt="The Buzz on Longtail Keywords Infographic" width="575" class="" /></a>

With a single click you can recommend that raincoat, news article or favorite sci-fi movie to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time your connections search, they could see your +1’s directly in their search results, helping them find your recommendations when they’re most useful.

Webmasters may use the tool illustrated in the image below to create a customized +1 button for their websites. The tool provides code based on your customizations. After that just copy and paste the code onto the pages of your website. You can see what the +1 button looks like now on our blog.

With the launch of the +1 button for websites, Google appears to be telling us that they like the results they have seen from other versions of the button. But how will this button impact the way Google ranks websites? In an earlier post, David Scoville examined the +1 button and asked the question “How could it change SEO?” If Google is moving away from strictly algorithm-based search results, to results that are influenced more by social media, will that provide higher quality results?

A Well Targeted Keyword Focus

Keyword research is the groundwork for a successful SEO campaign. Doing keyword research in a way that will bring long-term success requires in-depth analysis around all keywords that may be relevant to the products or services of the targeted website. Start with the most general keywords and find long tail keywords relating to each of them, then search for other long tail keywords relating to each of those. This pattern can be repeated many times to find many keyword opportunities. This strategy will also uncover some highly targeted keywords that will convert well and could be fairly easy to rank for. Remember that long tail keywords are often less competitive and typically convert much better. Be sure to search for lateral keywords as well. Lateral keywords are those that have the same meaning as other targeted keywords. So if I am optimizing a website about “aquariums”, I would also want to optimize it for the term “fish tanks.”

Strong Page Element Optimization

The optimization of the HTML elements on each page of the website is a critical factor in search engine optimization. Targeted search terms should be included in various places in the HTML code to tell the search engine crawlers what the page is about. The following elements must be optimized to allow for a successful SEO campaign.

Page Title: The page title (title tag) should include the targeted search terms and be a well written sentence that is 64 to 70 characters long. It should not be a string of keywords or one keyword phrase repeated several times. Remember that a good page title will not only be keyword targeted but also will entice a person to click on it in the search results.

Page Headings: The page heading (and subheadings) should be formatted properly using H1, H2 and H3 tags and include the targeted search terms. Cascading Style Sheets can be used to format the heading to fit with the content of the webpage. H1 tags are meant to be used for the main page heading and should only be used more than once on a page where it makes sense. H2, H3 and other header tags can be used for content subheadings and headings to site navigation.

Image Alternate Text: Optimize Alt Attributes of images by including targeted keywords where the keywords have some relevance to the image. Alternate text should tell a website visitor what the image is. When optimized, the alternate text can help with keyword rankings for both the webpage and the image in image searches. Do not make your image Alt Attribute extremely long and keyword stuffed. Alternate text should be brief and relate well to the image.

Link Anchor Text: Site content should include links to other pages of the website that have keywords in the anchor text. Adding two or three keyword links into page content of 150 or more words is ideal. Do not fill the page content full of keyword links. Remember that linking in the content more than once to the same page will not give any additional SEO benefits.

Good Quality Page Content

A website with good quality content will be one step closer to getting top search engine rankings. The search engines are constantly trying to improve the quality of the search results. The one way to be sure to always be relevant when algorithms are updated is to provide content that search engines will consider high quality. That kind of content is not copied from other websites. It is unique and provides value to a site visitor. Writing guides, fact sheets, frequently asked questions, common misconceptions and practical use articles are all great ways to add good content to a website. Keep in mind that having great content will not only give the search engines a good idea of what the website is about but will also give other webmasters a good reason to link to your website.

Blocking the Search Engine Crawlers

The Robots.txt file is a file which contains instructions for search engine crawlers telling them where they can and can’t go on a specific website. Crawlers look for this file when they first hit the website. You can prevent crawlers from visiting certain pages or folders on your website by using the Robots Exclusion Protocol in the Robots.txt file. The error occurs when the webmaster accidently blocks the root folder of the website in this file and prevents the crawlers from crawling the entire website. If your Robots.txt file has a line which looks like Disallow: / then you are blocking your entire website.

JavaScript Navigation

Many sites use JavaScript to create drop-down, accordion and other styles of navigation. These types of navigation can help make it very easy for visitors to navigate large websites. However, for search engine crawlers it can look much different. The problem with JavaScript is that while there is a fully functional menu for website visitors, there are no links in the actual source code. Search engine crawlers rely on links in the code to navigate the website. Disable JavaScript in your web browser and then look at your website. If you can’t see the site navigation then crawlers won’t see it either.

Too Much Flash

Flash can take a plain website and make it into an extraordinary one. Complete sites created in Flash can contain videos, images, animations and other features to result in a fantastic user experience. The downside to it all is the type of crawler experience it gives. Because all the elements of a website created in Flash are contained in the video file, those elements are not visible to search engine crawlers. Content and links in Flash do not exist to search engine crawlers. If your website is built in Flash, consider moving some elements outside of the Flash video. Include content on your website and some type of HTML navigation to help the crawlers navigate your website and know what each of the pages is about.

301 Redirects and Canonical Tags

301 redirects are used to tell crawlers that a page has been permanently moved to a new one. Canonical tags are used to tell crawlers that out of a series of similar pages, one specific page should be included in the search results. Canonical tags should not be used as 301 redirects. When not used properly, canonical tags can prevent proper indexing of a website. If you are using canonical tags you should evaluate what they are being used for. Does your website have multiple categories generated dynamically by the same script, which are all similar to each other with the only difference being the products that are displayed? Do you have pages on your website which can be displayed with several different URLs? Both of these situations would be ideal for using canonical tags.

Duplicate Content or No Content

Good quality content is critical to ranking well. Google has stressed the importance of having lots of good quality content on a website and their focus on content was made even more apparent with the Farmer / Panda Update. Crawlers rely on content to determine what a page should rank for in the search results. Because Google wants to give the best user experience, they are making a big push to show only websites with high quality content. Duplicate content, shallow or poorly written content was the focus of the Farmer / Panda Update. Sites that had problems with content quality saw a drop in rankings when the update was pushed live last month. Look at the content on your website. Do you have enough of it? Is it original or was it copied from another website? Expand on your content where the webpage has very little and write your own content for pages where it is copied from another source.

1. Meta Keywords:

The Meta Keywords tag used to be the main tag for telling search engines what keywords were most relevant to the content of a website. A webmaster could include this tag in the head section of their website and fill it with the keywords that they wanted their site to rank for. Eventually spammers caught on to the fact that repeating keywords over and over in the Meta Keywords tag could cause their website to rank better. Google and other search engines eventually caught on to this and made a major change to their algorithms. The major change was to shift focus to links rather than Meta tags. The Meta Keywords tag no longer has an impact on search engine rankings.

2. Keyword Stuffing:

One technique used to rank well with the Meta Keywords tag was to stuff it with the targeted keywords. When algorithms were changed to go away from using Meta tags, the keyword stuffing technique migrated over to other html elements. Keyword stuffing titles, headers, alt attributes of images and page content became popular techniques for gaining improved search engine rankings. Search engine algorithms eventually caught on to keyword stuffing techniques and it is no longer an effective method for improving rankings.

3. Keyword Density:

With changes to search engine algorithms and the crack down on keyword stuffing, keyword density was soon born. It was determined by webmasters and SEOs that if the keyword density of the content on a specific page of a site was in a specific percent range, that higher search engine rankings could be attained. Webmasters began adding keywords into the page content to try to get the keyword density to be what they thought was the best percent. The problem with this technique was that everyone had a different idea of what the density should be. Page content started getting written to try to include keywords in the content to get the right density which caused content to drop in quality.

Webmasters and SEOs today don’t view keyword density as it was viewed in the past. Today the best strategy is to write content for the person who might visit the site and not to attain a certain keyword density. If content is written in this manner and keywords are included in the different html elements of the page then top rankings typically follow.

4. Hidden Text:

Because content has a big impact on search engine rankings, webmasters and SEOs determined that top rankings could not be achieved if enough content was not found on the pages of a website. Modifying content to include keywords or adding content to a page can require cosmetic changes so adding hidden text caught on as a good way to get the keywords on to the pages of the website. The most common way to hide text was to make the text the same color as the background. This technique was quickly labeled as a way to deceive search engines. Using this technique today can hurt rankings rather than helping them.

5. Footer Links:

One way to get hundreds or thousands of keyword targeted links was to include a list of links in the website footer. A footer could include 20, 30, 40 links or even more. Footer links don’t have the same impact on rankings today as they did in the past.

6. Site Wide Links:

The concept was that if one link from another website could improve search engine rankings then how about many links from that same website? The concept did work for awhile and getting a couple site wide links from just a few websites did have a significant impact on rankings. Now it is no longer as effective. Getting two links or two thousand links from the same website has the same impact on search engine rankings.

7. Forum Post and Blog Comment Links:

I am always amazed to see the people continue to expend their link building efforts on these types of links. There are so many better options to spend link building efforts on. Forum posts and blog comments used to be effective ways to get links. Now websites use nofollow attributes and are much stricter when deciding on what to allow and disallow where links are concerned. Posting short and pointless comments just to drop a link back to your site often results in forum and blog accounts being banned or removed. This type of link building today is just not worth the time spent on doing it.

So there are my Seven Ghosts of SEO. I am sure that there are other SEO techniques that also could be classified as Ghosts of SEO. If you would like to add one you consider to be a “ghost”, please leave me a comment.

You have been waiting for it all summer and now it is finally here! My follow up post to SEO for eCommerce Part One: Content Woes. Before I go into details on the next biggest problem with eCommerce sites and search indexing, I will take a few minutes to reply to some of the questions that were asked after the last post.

Question: Can you copy website content and then edit it?

Yes you can copy website content and edit it. If you edit the content that was copied enough, then it will become unique content and can be used on your website.

Question: What do I recommend for link building to eCommerce sites that don’t have real linkable content?

The trick to getting links is to generate content that is “linkable.” Content can be generated through blogs, articles, buyer’s guides and knowledge bases. These types of features on eCommerce sites are great for building “linkable” content and they can also help you stand out as the expert in your industry.

Question: How different do the descriptions have to be?

Sometimes all it takes is some rewording of a couple of sentences to make product descriptions unique enough. One easy way to get unique content is to read the manufacturer’s description and then write it from your memory. In most cases you will not be able to remember everything word for word and your version will be different enough from the manufacturer’s.

Thank you everyone for your questions and comments. Now I am going to describe the next problem that occurs frequently with eCommerce websites: poor site structure.

Poor Site Structure

The problem of poor site structure occurs with eCommerce sites when the navigation of the site makes it difficult for search engine crawlers to find the product pages of the website. Standard eCommerce website designs will employ a category and subcategory system that helps the visitor to browse by narrowing their options until they find what they are looking for. The flaw in such a system is that it requires that a search engine crawler travel too deep into the site to find the product pages.

How do You Know if a Crawler is Traveling too Deep?

One indicator is the Page Rank score of the page. You can find the Page Rank score of any page on a website by simply visiting the page with the Google toolbar installed on your browser. Pages that are not too deep will usually have a Page Rank score. There are other factors that could cause a page to not have a Page Rank score so this indicator isn’t 100% reliable. My rule of thumb for determining if a page is too deep is to count how many pages I have to visit before getting to the product page. If it is more than three pages deep then it is too deep for the search engine crawler.

How do You Correct the Site Structure?

The simple answer to the question about correcting the site structure is to tell you to make your product pages no more than 3 pages deep. But I know that this isn’t always a simple fix. Some websites are huge with millions of products. Creating a site structure that consists of one level of categories and then the products would create pages with thousands of links. This is where it will require a carefully planned link structure.

• Code the main site navigation using SEO friendly CSS so that you can include expanding sub-navigation menus.
• Include featured product links on the homepage and main category pages of the site to promote better indexing of popular products.
• Use blog posts, articles and buyer’s guides to link to specific product pages.
• Add a quick bookmarking widget to your product pages so they can easily be bookmarked and shared on social networking sites.
• Include an HTML sitemap (or multiple sitemaps depending on the size of the website).

The main thing to remember with site structure is that you want to make it easy for both a search engine crawler and a customer to find any product you sell on your website. Go through your site and see how easy it is for you to find your products. Ask friends and other family members to do the same. They can give you good feedback and help you find places you could change to make your eCommerce site both user and search engine friendly.

ECommerce website optimization and search engine optimization strategies are very similar to other types of websites. However, there are some common mistakes that prevent eCommerce sites from achieving top search engine rankings for their targeted search terms. The focus of my next few blog posts will be on these common mistakes starting with the biggest one: too little or no unique content.

We’ve Heard it Before — Content is King

Search engines rely on website content to determine what search terms a specific page of a site should rank for. The search engines use “crawlers” to read content in various elements of Web pages, and then use an algorithm to rank the page based on that content. Problems occur when the only content on the site is the generic product descriptions that have been copied from different manufacture sites.

The Conflict

ECommerce sites that lack unique content cause a conflict for the search engines try to rank the pages of the website. The conflict occurs as the search engine crawlers discover several pages that are very similar, with the only difference being the type of products displayed on the page. The images and brief generic descriptions simply don’t offer enough information to help the crawlers know what the pages are about. In the end, the similar pages of the site cause the website to never get top rankings for any relevant keywords.

An end to the Conflict — Unique Content is the Real King

The way to end the conflict is to add unique content to the pages of the website. If you have a product category page with several sub-categories linked from it, a couple of paragraphs of content will be the only thing that will let the search engines know that page is different from the sub-categories.

Don’t be afraid to push the products down to allow space for a couple hundred words of content. Pushing the products down will have little to no effect on conversion. Without the content, the page will not be able to rank well and there will be no visitors to convert.

If you have featured products at the top of the page and don’t want to push them down, then break up your content. Include a couple sentences at the top and place the rest of the content below the products.

Final Thought

It is very easy to copy product descriptions from manufacturer websites and past them on to the product pages of your site. However, if you take the time to write your own product descriptions, the end result is well worth it. Copying product descriptions is quick and easy, but the search engines know which website had the content first. If your competitors write their own descriptions, and you copy the manufacturer’s descriptions, you will never rank better than your competitors for the best converting keywords — the product specific keywords.

Why do Visitors Bounce?

Recently, while visiting my family in Canada I was looking for a specific Toronto Blue Jays baseball hat. I visited three sports apparel stores. The first two were similar. I spent only a few minutes in each store after finding out they didn’t have the hat I wanted. Then I found a sports store that sold only hats. I spent more time in this store browsing over the large selection of hats. But they didn’t have the style of hat I was looking for, and a similar style wasn’t available in my size. So I left.

We can compare this experience to searching online. If I was searching online for the baseball hat and I visited three sites similar to those stores, the first two sites would get a high bounce rate from my visit, and the third site would have a lower bounce rate but still not convert into a sale. I would “bounce” from each of the websites because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in the same way I left each of the stores when I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

How can you Reduce Your Bounce Rate?

If you consider my example of shopping for the baseball hat, each store could have reduced the chance of me “bouncing” from the store by expanding the inventory that they carried, or by not being listed on the mall directory as a store that would possibly have the hat I wanted. If we take these concepts and apply them to a website, you will get a similar affect with the bounce rate of the site. You can lower the bounce rate of your website if you:

1. Provide more products or services relating to what was being searched for: Expand your product line to include all products available to sell that are relevant to the keywords your website is ranked for and make sure your products are easily found on your site. If you sell services you can break down your services into some that are more specialized. If I offer Internet marketing services, I could offer different focused services like organic SEO services or PPC management services that both relate to Internet marketing.
2. Target the most relevant search terms: I have mentioned the importance of targeting relevant search terms in a couple other posts and I will mention it again. You might have a business selling tropical fish online but that doesn’t mean that “tropical fish” is going to be a good term to get your website ranked for. I could be searching for “tropical fish” because I want to take my kids to see tropical fish at an aquarium. If I found your site that sold tropical fish, I wouldn’t stay at your site for more than a second because it isn’t relevant to what I was searching for. Think of the most targeted terms that relate to your products or services and optimize for those terms.
3. Incorporate a clean and user friendly site design: The bounce rate can be reduced by using easy navigation and a clean, appealing design. Make the products easy to find. Links to service or product pages should be clearly labeled. Include prominent links on your homepage to top selling products or most popular services. Check your products or services pages to see how easy it was to find them and make sure it doesn’t take more than two clicks to find them.

If you have a New Year’s resolution to lower the bounce rate of your website in 2010, then these tips will help you to accomplish that goal. May 2010 bring you success in your online business ventures.

You may also feel some of that Christmas magic hoping for a miracle of your own. Perhaps you are a business owner who has launched a new website this year and that one thing you want for Christmas is to see it rank on page one in Google for some targeted search terms. Here is some advice to help you see that Christmas miracle come true.

Create an XML Sitemap and Submit it to Google Webmaster Tools

Google has given webmasters a great way to tell Google about their website. In Google Webmaster Tools there is a place where you can submit a sitemap in XML format. The sitemap will tell the Google crawlers about the pages on your site and help them to index everything much better. I have seen brand new sites get indexed within a week of submitting an XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. Just be sure to update the XML sitemap whenever you add or remove pages from your site.

Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites

There are several social bookmarking sites on the web that can give your site a quick link and help others discover your website. Create accounts on sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit then submit your website to them. Include a social bookmarking widget on content or product pages of your site so visitors can quickly and easily bookmark the pages of your website on their social bookmarking profiles.

Submit to High Quality Paid and Free Web Directories

Submit your website to DMOZ and a few high quality paid directories like Yahoo, Business.com and Best of the Web. Since these directories have been around for a long time and have established a good reputation, they will give your site some good credible links. When you submit to DMOZ try to find the most relevant category that has an editor. Getting a submission approved in DMOZ can take a long time but the waiting time can be shortened if you submit to a relevant category that has an editor.

Optimize Content Using the Most Relevant Search Terms

Make sure the pages of your site are optimized for the most relevant search terms to the content of each page. Don’t get distracted by high volume search terms that might be partially relevant to the site content. It is the content that will help Google to determine what keywords to rank your site for, so consider the long tail search terms when optimizing the content. The long tail terms are often the ones that are most relevant and will have better conversion rates when the site ranks for them. Include the keywords in the HTML elements like the title, Meta description, heading tags and the content body.

Allow Google to Index the Site

Often people might block Google from indexing their website without knowing they did. Check your robots.txt file and make sure you didn’t disallow the entire site. Check the pages of your site and if you are using noindex Meta tags, make sure they are only on the pages you don’t want to show up in the search results.

Getting more organic search traffic to a website might be the one thing that many business owners are wishing for this year. If you are one of those business owners then this advice will help that wish come true in 2010.