wm search engines - winematch.com · top 10 secrets to getting higher on search engines tools you...

Top 10 Secrets to Getting Higher on Search Engines

Tools you can use to help you out (same ones we use):

• Google Analytics - free and very high quality traffic analytics. See what pages are popular and what methods users used to find your website to evaluate how well your site is being found. (free software)

http://www.google.com/analytics

• Google Webmaster Tools - Gives tips to guide you through how to fix problems with your website and ensure your site gets indexed by the search engines most effectively. Looks at performance, html errors and other factors affecting how the site gets indexed. (free software)

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

• WebPosition - Allows you to continually track your progress with certain keywords to show how high you are on the different search engines for the keywords you have. Also provides tips on how to get higher for those keywords. (small monthly fee)

http://www.webposition.com/

• Keyword Tool - Tool to let you see how much traffic your keyword currently gets and offers suggestions on other keywords that may provide substantial traffic for. (free)

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Establish what you are going to use for your target phrase, which is what your site or page is primarily about. Use similar keywords to your target phrase.

i.e. wine tasting, winery direct, wine club

Select relevant keywords that apply to your website topic. Use phrases of at least two words in your content and use them frequently to increase your chances of search engine crawlers picking up the content.

WineMatch . 26238 Enterprise Court . Lake Forest . CA . 92630 . 949.273.5300© 2010

Place these keywords in the HTML title tags for a better chance of recognition. The Title is probably the most important place for these keywords.

Only use two or three phrases. More is not always better for keywords. Place the keywords close to the top of the page.

Create a site map for your page -- a page that includes all the links on your website in one, easy-to-find location. A search engine can easily pick this up and index all the linked pages. Use your keywords in the site map as well, ensuring that the links use the terms as much as possible. Use relevant words. Avoid using terms that have absolutelynothing to do with the content on a page simply for the link text.


The goal here is to get your website links on as many other relevant websites as possible. This will increase your “Google PageRank” and give you better search engine rankings. Associate yourself with individuals who have websites with similar content. Join groups or message boards that relate to your topic. Contact other site owners through e-mail or a forum message and ask them if they would be interested in a link exchange, where you place a link to their website on your page and they do the same for you.

Submit your completed pages to each search engine manually. An automatic detection may be easier but increases the chances of mistakes happening. Only submit two or three main pages on your site or you may get targeted for search engine spamming and be penalized heavily. Most, but not all, search engines have a site where you can submit your site link to be listed with them through a simple form.

Submit your site to DMOZ.org. This is an open source directory which is used by the large search engines for their directory. It takes 3-4 months to get listings on here and there are no guarantees, but it helps a lot with your search engine rankings if you can get listed on this site as several sites use this for their directory.

Also, it is a good idea to submit to directories related to your company. For example any wine directory sites you find (“can type wine directory on Google”), you should make sure you have a listing. You may want to make sure you are listed correctly on Yelp, Yahoo, Google local search, yellowpages.com, CitySearch, TripAdvisor.

A lot of you are probably already listed here, but you may want to make sure your address and information is completely filled out properly to enhance chances of people finding your company.

Another factor is the URL. If you have a wine called Santa Maria Valley Pinot Noir an optimal URL could be http://www.winematch.com/profile_1063-2009-Byron-Winery-Santa-Maria-Valley-Pinot-Noir.html which places all of the words for this wine including the vintage and winery in the URL.

Avoid tables, which can push relevant content further down the page. Tell your developers you want to use CSS instead of tables.

HTML adds a lot of code within your web pages that causes the search engines to sometimes overlook valuable content. It also pushes the keywords further down on the page to them and the higher on the page that your keywords can be, the better.

Also, for images make sure you include “ALT tags”. This is a way to describe the image to the search engine and the search engine factors this into the rankings.


On a web browser page, you can right-click on the page and click “view source”. Then do a search for “img” and make sure your images have the “alt tag” included as below.

If you are familiar with HTML, it also helps to have your keywords in the header tags <h1>, <h2> and in text throughout the page.

However if you go overboard with putting your keywords too much throughout the page, search engines will see this as trying to trick them and penalize you.

Posting links related to specific pages of your website on FaceBook and Twitter are helpful. You can post a link for example of an upcoming event you are having on both sites and this gives people the opportunity to “like” the event and also gives the search engine .

You can also optimize your FaceBook presence by focusing on search engine optimization for that. Read this:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=86945032176&topic=7268

We suggest you post things daily to your facebook/twitter accounts to let people know what is going on with your site and keep in close contact with your audience.


wm search engines - winematch.com · top 10 secrets to getting higher on search engines tools you...

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