In the Online Marketing Part 1 article we introduced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the best way to improve your site's search engine "ranking" - your position in the search results - when people search for topics related to your website content.

SEO is conducted in three major steps: Keyword Analysis, Website Modification and Search Engine Submission. The previous article discussed how to perform Keyword Analysis. Now let's look at the process of Website Modification. (We'll also be discussing the details in the Search Engine Optimization forum in the Marketing Your Website category of the Web Studio online forum. Please join us there!)

Step 2 - Website Modification

The second step in the SEO process is Website Modification, which may take you anywhere from a couple of hours to several days to complete. This step involves changes to every part of your site. But don't worry; as with Keyword Analysis, you can do the work in small increments as time allows.

Because of the number of changes, we recommend you perform this step on a copy of your existing site. You can always use the original site to make changes that need to be published quickly but are unrelated to SEO. You don't want to hurry the Website Modification process; it's best to complete the job before publishing the results.

Your Vital Statistics.You'll also want to take several "during" measurements of Keyword Density to see how you are doing during the Website Modification process, and an "after" Page Rank measurement that shows you how much you improved your site's visibility.

Starting to sound like a lot of work? It can be. Just remember that you can't manage what you can't measure. Search engine marketing is a numbers game.

To measure your initial Keyword Density, enter the URL for each page of your site into an online analysis tool (this one is hosted by J. Gaffney Associates and will crawl all the pages in your site). Save the resulting reports, copying and pasting into a spreadsheet or word processor for later reference.

To measure Page Rank, enter each of your ideal keywords one by one into the major search engines. For each keyword, page down through the search results until you find the first listing for your site. (If you don't find your site by page 10, just record "none" for that keyword.) Most engines show ten results at a time, so if you are the 3rd listing on page three, your page rank is 2 x 10 + 3 or 23.

I suggest you enter these numbers into a table, with the keywords as rows and "Before" and "After" columns for the page ranking. This will provide you with precise data on how much you site improves.

My, How You've Changed. OK, on to the site modifications - it's time to put your Ideal Keywords to work. For this phase, I recommend you work from hardcopy. Print each page of your site, find a comfortable spot away from distractions, and get out your red pen. (Do the printing from your browser so that each printed page includes the page URL.)

Your goal now is to ensure that each of your Ideal Keywords is well represented in as many of the following page elements as possible:

• file names
  
• page titles
  
• meta tags (Web Search Information in the Site Properties dialog)
  
• links to other pages
  
• the first paragraph
  
• emphasis text styles like "heading 1", "bold" and "italic"
  
• image "ALT" text (Graphics Tab of the Object Properties dialog)

Each of the above page elements can be seen by your visitors in some way, so try to integrate your keywords smoothly into the existing content.

Note: Google and other search engines detect and punish keyword "stuffing" (multiple repeats in close proximity) and "hidden" keywords (text that is invisible because it's the same color as the background). It's best to avoid these and other tricks. If you're caught, your page rank will suffer dramatically, and your URL might even be "banned" by certain engines. Not worth it.

For each printed page, start with the file name (as shown in the URLs) and work your way down through each of the "page elements" listed above. Mark your changes neatly so that they are easy to read later when you are sitting at your PC. When you are done, make one more pass through all of the pages to see if things you learned later in the editing process can be applied to your earlier edits.

At this point, I recommend you set your work aside for a day. Take a break and come back later with a fresh perspective. You may find that a few more changes are in order.

When your edits are complete, begin making changes to your duplicate site. As you complete each change, mark it off on your hardcopy so you can quit at any time and pick up again at your convenience.

When your edits are in, publish your site to a temporary directory (use Trial Hosting for this) and take another Keyword Density measurement for each modified page. Compare with your original measures: if you hit 3-7% density for each Ideal Keyword, you are good to go.

If your keyword density is on the low side, you may want to add additional keyword-rich headings, a second paragraph that expands on your topic and emphasizes the keywords, or even new images (in order to get the corresponding ALT text).

You may also want to remove text from pages where you are having trouble achieving the desired keyword density. For example, if you have a User Quotes text block on your home page, that text may dilute your keyword density dramatically. One approach it to make it a graphic - visitors can still read the quotes, but search engines can't. Now add relevant, keyword-rich ALT text to the image and you're cooking with gas.

For pages where your new keyword density greatly exceeds the above range, you may want to scale back a bit. No sense triggering a "keyword stuffing" alert!

That's it for Website Modification. You're ready for the final SEO step, Search Engine Submission, which is covered in next article.

In the meantime, please join us in the Search Engine Optimization forum with your questions, comments and suggestions.

The next article in this series is Online Marketing Part III