1. Optimize your websites
2. The Shotgun Approach: use a lot of keywords
3. Use Google optimized pages in addition to your regular website
4. Make gateway pages that do not look like gateway pages
5. Use gateway domains to push back your competence
6. Use Viral Marketing to build PageRank and obtain thousands of incoming links
7. Manually submit your important pages to the best indexes, for fast, valuable, free incoming links
1. Optimize your websites for maximal Search Engine traffic
Site promotion is a wide field with many different tools: online advertising, direct mail, SE (search engine) optimizing and positioning, link-building and several others. All those methods are different. Some are faster and short-lived, like online advertising or mailing. And some are slower but long-lasting, such as search engine positioning.
Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking for by visiting search engines. Even a few good positions on even one or two important keywords or phrases can drive thousands or hundreds of thousands of quality visitor traffic to a Web site per day.
Research has shown that people hardly ever go past the top 30 search results for any one search. The top 10 results receive 78% more traffic than those in position 11 to 30 do. The top 30 results get over 90% of the search traffic. The search engines are mostly over-flowed. They have too many pages in their indices and they do not do a very good job of giving the users what they are looking for. Often, a good Web site may be ranked low by a search engine, and a very bad Web site in the same subject area ranked high! That is why you need a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), either a human expert or a software package. Most companies that position websites in the search engines act by optimizing the existing website. Look under "search engine optimization", or "SEO" under Google and you will find many companies. There are some usually quite expensive and their methods are full of technicalities. You definitely need to know some facts before dealing with any of them.
The most important factor for website positioning is that Google ranks pages according to relevance and PageRank. Relevance is related to keyword density, calculated as the ratio between keyword number and total word number in a page and domain. Optimal keyword density is probably between 3 and 5%. PageRank is a measure of link popularity as read in Google navigation bar. Link popularity is the number of popular pages in the whole WWW that link to a certain page.
Notice that optimizing the website has its limits. There are so many pages that can be optimized for so many keywords. Also, since dynamic pages are difficult to index, Google does not like Javascript code, .asp, .php or other modern page types. Thus, optimization is an enemy of good design.
2. The Shotgun Approach: Use the maximal amount of keywords that can possibly describe your site.
There are many ways to arrive to any website thru the SEs. If your server logs the requests, you will be surprised to know the strange questions people ask. Instead of searching for "flowers", they write "best way to cheer up girls", or "standard woman gift", or "cheap solution for a conflict". If you sell flowers, use all of those keywords for better results. Besides, positioning your flower web shop in front of 45 million competitors is harder than competing with only 300,000.
Why not to use a shotgun instead of a rifle? We do not concentrate our effort in the top, highly competitive keywords. Every keyword or keyword phrase we can think of, we use. We have enough disk space for them all. Our imagination is wild. Hosting is cheap enough. We then use software to make enough content, SE optimized content pages that accommodate our army of keywords.
Our "Shotgun" approach involves selecting hundreds of relevant keywords for each promoted website.
There are several keyword research methods. Some suggestions:
• use your keyword in other languages
• use synonyms and plurals
• use the keywords more frequently demanded by the users (Overture and Google have that information)
• use the brand name of your competitor (not completely legal, but it works)
• copy the keywords from the pages that are well ranked in SEs. Our GGG software has an automated method of extracting them ("Keyword Thief").
• purchase frequent keyword lists
• when the site is alive and receives visits, a good statistics package can reveal the keywords that people use to find it on the search engines. It is good to reinforce their presence in the site.
• use many keyword phrases, not just keywords.
• add the word "free" to your keywords. It makes miracles.
Few people will use the same logic as you, the keyword selector. Only a "shotgun" campaign will cover most possibilities.
Notice that not all keywords have similar relevance. We make keyword families, with 1st and 2nd level keywords, thematically arranged. GGG can manage that.
3. Use Google-optimized pages in addition to your regular website
Most websites do not have enough pages to optimize for any possible keyword. Thus, many keywords must be left out. The alternative is to create new pages to accommodate the extra keywords.
According to most experts, pages that rank well in Google share these features:
• 3% to 5% keyword density in the whole page, 25% in the Title.
• use of keywords in the domain name, in the title, in the H1 and H2 headings, in the page filenames, in the graphics filenames, in the metatags, in the image ALT tags, in the link anchor text
• use of keywords in the first words of a page
• use of keywords inside theme-related content, not randomly inside unrelated text
• use of keywords related to categories in the DMOZ index (dmoz.org)
• use many cross-linked pages optimized for related keywords
There is very little chance that your current website follows all these rules. Most likely you need special, doorway pages, in order to describe your website AND have high relevance for each of your keywords. Each page is optimized for a single keyword, pointing to the main page in the target website.
Doorway pages, which are designed for top SE placement, are not a novelty. The fact that they are also called gateway pages, pointer pages, anchor pages, entry pages, landing, bridge, crawler, jump or supplemental pages reveals their age and popularity...
Several systems exist for automatically generating these Gateways. However, they are not easily found while searching: either SEs easily spot them and exclude them from their listings, or they lack the necessary elements for being effective.
To avoid repetitive pages we start obtaining enough content, either taking it from the main website or by making standard changes in the existing text. We then build a database of as many keyword phrases as we can find, content text, file names and other data. The last step is page generation, following the accepted rules for good positioning. We make and publish at least one page per keyword.
4. Make gateway pages that do not look like gateway pages
When webmasters discovered the rules of Google positioning, they started making pages following those rules. Hundreds, thousands, even millions of them. The search results were soon overcrowded by those gateway pages, and Google took action: they acted against abusive gateway pages, forbidding them. That is why gateway pages are a bad word among mainstream website promoters.
Some webmasters copied hundreds of times the keyword inside a page, making the text the same color as the background, to avoid annoying the reader. This simple trick was rapidly detected and forbidden by Google.
In the same vein, many webmasters produced pages with a thousand links to the target page, in order to build internal link popularity or PageRank. For that reason, Google now does not like pages with more than 100 links.
Abusive gateway pages are currently defined as "many pages that have little useful information, have repetitive keyword-stuffed text, are pointing to the same target page, are mostly orphan (no incoming links), reside mostly in the same directory".
Ok, someone will claim: "You can not make hand-made pages by software. It is like the antique-maker paradox: either they are antiques, or they are made...". That is true. While choosing a gateway generator tool, look for one that does not leave any trace in its pages. Make them look unique, information rich, useful and nice looking.
Sites without doorway pages can be "politically correct", but have no presence in the SEs.
Only a few of the gateway generators in the market are prepared to bring traffic from Google, without triggering any alarm.
GGG (www.GatewayGenerator.com) allows the user to include a lot of content and relevant keywords, to spread pages across several domains or subdomains, to link to different target pages, and not to exceed a reasonable page number limit. This way, the pages can be called informational and there is no SE abuse.
GGG uses 2 levels of keywords. The 2nd level keywords or subkeywords are "nested" in the 1st level keywords, building sub-themes within the main theme. This is simple math. If you have a limit of 100 links per page, and you want more than 100 pages, they cannot be completely interlinked. With 2 levels of keywords you can have 10,000 total keywords: 100 main keywords, with 100 subkeywords each.
We call "indirectly interlinked" to pages that are interlinked with a minimal amount of links. Thus, from any page to another you might need more than one link. This results in a low total link count, which does not abuse the SE. Webmasters that use many keywords and many pages with "direct interlinking" risk being banned from Google. Another reason to avoid many links, is the fact that SE allocate a limited time, bandwidth and number of links to each site, depending on PageRank. If you offer too many links to the SE spider, some of them are not followed. Indirect interlinking is another unique feature of GGG.
"Random" pages are an important, additional component in this strategy. We must admit that nobody knows how to make perfect top-ranking web pages, except for the SE algorithm designers themselves. Thus, it is good to make lots of pages with randomly chosen parameters: keyword selection, density and order, page length, image selection, metatag wording and others. Upload them all, submit them to the SEs by means of a hallway or sitemap page, and wait until the next Google dance. Quantity might beat quality.
It usually works quite well. But there is one problem remaining: the pages that get to the top ranking are usually ugly and only indirectly point to the target website. They are not keyword-stuffed, but they still have more keywords and links than a normal page, and they would not resist an abuse denounce and a review by a human Google reviewer. The solution is simple: after we promptly identify the pages that came to the top, we make a little retouching: colors, logo, structure, content. We leave title, metatags and a few other critical items intact: colors, logo, structure, content. Like in most favoured positions in life, it seems that staying in the SE top is easier than arriving there...
5. Use gateway domains to push back your competence
In the same way that gateway pages capture visits from Google, gateway domains get always well positioned. If you look under any popular keyword, you will see those keywords in the domain name. Also, the domain names with pure keywords in them are scarce and valuable. For that reason we registered GatewayGenerator.com and DoorwayGenerator.com.ar. The additional advantage of gateway domains is the fact that each domain is allowed only 2 entries in SE´s result pages (SERP). Thus, even if you have a SE saturation (number of pages of a given domain that are indexed in the SE) of say 100, you will have only 2 of them in the results.
More domains let you have more places in the first SERPs, pushing your competence back in the results.
GGG has a unique feature that lets you host gateway pages across as many domains as you have. They are all interlinked and point to the target site. This also helps avoid the abuse label.
6. Use Viral Marketing to build PageRank and obtain thousands of incoming links
Viral marketing is a powerful technique that allows fast, efficient dispersal of an idea around the marketplace.
When people use the Freeware version of GGG, discrete links to our sites are included in the generated pages. This helps our sales because of direct clicks, and also improves our ranking in Google, Altavista and other search engines.You can use a branded Freeware GGG to include your own brand and link in the pages generated by your customers or site visitors.
For $99 we will compile a Freeware version for you to offer to your visitors or clients. This version will create Gateway pages with a link to your promoted site. Link popularity is a key factor in attaining high search engine ranking. This way, all the final users will indirectly generate link popularity for your sites. It will be their pages, their servers, they page registration and other promotion efforts, all working for you day and night. And they will be grateful to you because of the superb free tool you gave them...
If you also want to collect a commission from every sale that we make with your branded version of GGG, you just need to sign up in the Affiliate Program:
Earn 30% commissions selling GGG in your website
This affiliate program is free to join, and it is open to every webmaster, even if they did not purchase any product from us.
You can even use this e-book, with links to your website, as a Viral Marketing tool. As you probably know, people like ebooks. The content/advertising rate is higher than in regular pages. They spread easily thru its own channels. Ask for a quote.
7. Manually submit your important pages to the best indexes
To be well ranked in Google, Altavista and other indexes that use a similar ranking algorithm you need many good incoming links. The fastest and cheaper way to get them is to submit to other indexes.
Good indexes only accept manual submissions. Only human operators can understand the rules of each index and add quality content. Of course, only humans are receptive to advertising, the force behind most indexes. For that reason, many sites ask for proof of humanity (like Altavista´s time-consuming quiz).
Many softwares perform automatic SE submission, but most of the sites that accept free automatic submissions are worthless. None of them has PageRank over 2. Their only purpose is to collect your email to spam you forever.
Being listed in other indexes helps your Google ranking, unless those sites are not indexed or they are labeled as "link farms" (PageRank 0). Considering the effort that requires to get a listing in any site, reserve your time for those with a decent (5+) PageRank.
Some good indexes demand a reciprocal link or banner, before listing you. This can be worth the effort, but it also time-consuming and annoying.
Finally, some very good indexes like Yahoo demand significant payment (U$D300).
There are thousands of good indexes in the web, but not all of them match your needs. For instance, some require link exchange, some are restricted to English sites and some are subject or geographically limited. To help list the indexes that are useful to submit any given site, we created a matching system with over 350 PageRank 5+ indexes. It is located at www.FoundFirst.com . There is a free service to try the system, and a paid one.