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If you've got the right product or service at the right price,
there is big money to be made by getting your business site
to the top of the search engines.

And the search engine experts charge plenty of money to get you there. But... you've read the books, you subscribe to Internet marketing newsletters. You think you know what you're doing.You decide to go it alone....

It hasn't worked has it?

You've spent weeks making a great web page that you want the
world to see.

You've spent hours online, filling in all those "add URL"
forms, registering your brilliant site with all the top
search engines. But no one except your mates and your mother
comes to look.

You can't understand it. You think you've done all you can.
You've gone all technical like the books tell you. You've
added " meta tags " which help the search engines search.
You've come up with an interesting title which describes
your web site well.

And it's not worked. So what's gone wrong. You've followed the
rules, done what you're supposed to, but you're not getting the
hits.

Why?

The answer's simple. It's because, even with all your hard
work, you've not placed high enough in the ranking's. If you've
not made it into the first 30 or so, forget it. No one will ever
find you. Be honest, how often do you keep clicking on "get the
next ten?" Never. Right?

Try searching for your own site. (If you've only submitted your
site in the past few weeks make sure you're in there somewhere
by searching on your sites name - and remember the quotation
marks eg "all the secrets".

Now search by the keywords your visitors are most likely to use
when looking for a site like yours.

Think carefully about this, it's important.

Say you've got a similar site to mine (the home of All the
Secrets internet marketing newsletter).

Why would visitors come to your site? They're not likely to be
looking for newsletters. They could be after something free,
so maybe that's a word you should search on.

<free>

But they're more likely to type in "internet marketing"
So now we've got

<free internet marketing>

But that's probably not what they'd use. They'd be looking for
internet marketing sites because they've got a business of there
own they want to learn how to promote better. They want to know
how to increase their business. Add it in. So now we've got

<free internet marketing increase business>

What else would they be looking for? Probably how to make more
money.

<free internet marketing increase business more money>

Let's try some of these words looking for your own site. OK,
open up your favourite search engine. Type in the search box:
"make more money internet marketing"

Do you come up near the top of the pile? Are you even in the
top 50? If you followed the rules you're not. No way! You've
vanished. People can't find you.

Why?

Because the "paid experts" break the rules. That's why.

So here's how to beat them at their won game and get your site
to the top of the pile.

(please note that these "tricks" aren't going to work all of the
time, and some of you might think that a few are a little on the
dodgy side, almost like spamming the search engines. But that's
the name of the game. It's how the tough play it. They tweak at
the rules, grabbing an inch when and where they can, sneaking up
that list. Each method described here should move you further up
towards that valuable top ten spot.)

ATTACK YOUR WAY TO THE TOP OF THE SEARCH ENGINES

Tip 1 - USE YOUR WEB TITLE TO PULL IN TRAFFIC. Far too
many web site owners name their sites badly. Use a selling title.
Sometimes the title is all that people see when you come up in
the search engine hit list. So don't just use something like:
"Sol's Surfboard Shop. Ride the waves with Us."

Give people a reason to come inside. Think of your title
as a short classified ad. It's got to lure people in.

So intrigue them. Use action verbs. Make them want to step
through your door.

Think about when you're using a search engine. You don't
necessarily click on the top two or three. You click on the one
with a title that appeals, that sounds useful or interesting.

Tip 2- HOW TO GET BETTER POSITIONING THAN YOUR
COMPETITORS EVEN WHEN THEY ARE USING IDENTICAL
KEYWORDS TO YOU.

Make sure your important keywords are used more than once one
on the page you're submitting to the search engines. Some of
the major engines will rank your site based on the relevancy of the
keywords used.

For example if you sell surfboards, and the word surfboard is listed
as a keyword on your page then your site will come up in a search.
And the same for your competitors site with the same keyword.

However if you use the word surfboard several times throughout the
pages content, your site is more "relevant" to the users search, and
you should get a higher positioning than the competitor who has
listed it less than you.

Many professionals list their keywords as many times as they
possible can throughout their site. One way of doing this is to
list your keywords several times way down at the very bottom of
your page where no one is likely to come across them. It might
take your page a few seconds longer to download, but think of
all the extra hits you'll receive. I keep reading that search
engines now penalise sites who repeat their meta tags or keywords
too many times. But when I search Alta-Vista, in the make money
internet marketing field, the number one site repeated them 8 times.
And in Infoseek the number 2 site repeated all the meta tags 7 times.
(number one site wouldn't open)

Meta Tags are important with most engines. However they're not the
be all and end all. A search on <make money> in Alta Vista brought
up at number two a site with NO KEYWORDS (or at least no
visible ones) and at number 2 a site offering <sex> among other things,
but again not a keyword in site, though it appeared to have used a
Java script to hide them.

And another high ranking site used these keywords to achieve
success. Notice the use of lots of famous names - all people
who have made lots of money:

<meta name="keywords" content="marketing, online marketing,
cyberwave, mizel, jobs, jonathan mizel, internet marketing, opportunity,
classified, mall, mlm, multi-level marketing, network, pictures, games,
employment, search engine, bulk, e-mail, mail order, publicity, direct
response, advertising, peterborough, toronto, sell, selling, www, how
to books, audio, video, newsgroup, spam, money, information, page,
floodgate, netcontact, shareware, net-creations, netcreations, rosalind
resnick, michael jordan, dave taylor, gillian anderson, david duchovny,
cindy crawford, jim lanford, tag powell, judi powell, ted nicholas, mike
enlow, robert allen, jay abraham, tony robbins, jeffrey lant, john kremer,
dan poynter, cyber promotions, sanford wallace, paul hartunian, gary
halbert, bill gates, c-net, cnet, bill myers, michael kimble, allan antin,
brad antin, guerrilla marketing, sales, profit, entrepreneur, success">


Tip 3 - BEGIN THE TITLE OF YOUR SITE WITH AN "A" OR NUMBER

All other things being the same "Amazingly Way Out Cool Surf
Shop" will come up before "Sols Surf Shop". This is why we
called our site All the Secrets. But beware,  many search
engines don't consider a single letter or number as part of a
title.

So "A Wild Surf Shop" will not necessarily come up in front of
Sols Surf Shop if both pages are using the same keywords. The
search engine will probably drop the A and go with Wild, placing
it after Sols site. Though "A1 Wild Surf Shop" would come up
first.

Tip 4 - DON'T USE COMMAS BETWEEN YOUR KEYWORDS

If "Sols Surf Shop" use the keywords "surfboards, boards, surf,
sea, wax, waves", and the searcher uses some of these keywords
but doesn't use commas,  Sols shop won't come up. It's also
important to use the plural for your keywords whenever you can.
If someone searches for "surfboards" and you've used "surfboard"
your site won't come up.

Tip 5 - HOW TO BE FOUND BY CUSTOMERS EVEN WHEN
THEY'RE NOT LOOKING FOR SITES LIKE

Suppose you're running "Sols Surf Shop". Naturally you would use
keywords related to surfing.

And these will work fine as long as your potential customer is
actually online looking for surfing information. But what if
they're just cruising around? What else are your target
customers likely to be looking at?

In Sols case maybe swimwear, grunge music, certain band names
like Pearl Jam, Blur, Silverchair, certain brand names. Surf s
hops might also appeal to people to anyone looking to visit a
surf beach. What else might they do there? So add in "fishing,
sailing, swimming, shark, etc".

Yes, using all these keywords will put your site in front of a
lot of unqualified people, but what matters is that you will
catch the eye of people who are interested but weren't looking
for surf shops at that time.

Tip 6 - BUILD PROMOTIONAL MINI SITES

And place them with the free web page sites like Angelfire, Geocities,
Xoom, and Freeyellow.

A great way of attracting customers is to build a small
informative high profile site which will appeal to your target
customers. And on each page make the only link a banner to your
own site. Suppose you run a music store. Pick some of the
current big names in music, maybe whoever has the number one hit
single of the moment, and quickly put together page of
biographical info and gossip about them. (be careful with
copyright). Submit the page to all the search engines using one
of the quick multi submit sites. Everyone coming to your high
profile mini site will see your banner. A certain percentage
will click through. If you get a geocities site they give you
2mb to play around with.

You could use that space to have dozens of these mini sites all
unlinked to one another, but all funnelling people interested in
music to your music store.

Tip 7 -  CREATE LEAD PAGES.

Pages which only exist to lead customers into your main site. This
technique is on the controversial side but it works.

People click first on powerful benefit packed headlines.

So what you do is create headline only pages which entice people
into your site. Your main pages don't link to these headline
pages, but the headline pages themselves do nothing but lure
people in and then link them to your main pages. Similar in
concept to the previous tip, but these are much simpler and
quicker to produce.

* Brainstorm all the possible keywords for your site. Make
a list of them.

* Now rewrite those keywords into attractive benefit packed
headlines. If you have trouble grab a tabloid newspaper and read
through it. Not everything, just the stories which grabbed your
attention, pulled you in. When you've finished to back and copy
down the headlines of the stories you read. These are the ones
that did their job by pulling you into the story.

* Give each powerful headline you create a page of it's own with
nothing else on the page but a short intro paragraph for
whatever business offer or information you want to direct
the surfer to. Have nothing else visible on the page but links
into your main site. But, several screen down list all the
keywords you brainstormed and all the headlines you came up with.
The surfer will not see these because he/she will already have
clicked her/his way into your main pages.

Another trick of course is to fill all the empty space with your keywords
in the SMALLEST POSSIBLE TYPE and in the SAME COLOUR as
your background. But be warned, a number of smart search engines
can now detect this and will penalise you for using this technique.
Though it does still work in many cases.

Another thing you could do with the above tip is to add the
Refresh tag to your HTML header to automatically move the surfer
onto the page you want the to go to..

Tip 8 - USE THE ALT IMAGE TAG.

You want to get as many keywords as possible onto your page, right.
One sneaky trick is to list them in the descriptions of every image on
your page. The alt image tag is for used for people who surf with the
image option turned off. Instead of calling your image "Sol riding a
wave" call it "Sol surfing surf wave board surfboard" and so on.
Do this for every image on your page and you've legitimately
used your keywords many times.

And there you have it. Follow these techniques and you should see
a dramatic upswing in the number of visitors the search engines
send your way.

(c) Phil Wiley 1998