From: Bharath Rejeti

Hi Jill,

Congratulations on this winning newsletter. From the time I was introduced to your newsletters by one of my colleagues, I learnt quite a lot.

For the past 3 months, we have been submitting our URL to Google for the spiders to crawl and index the website. It may be too early to expect to see that results, however I notice that there is little improvement. What frequency do you think I need to resubmit our website to Google?

Based on your newsletters, I revisited my site in optimization perspective. As a popular product company, we have so many links that are pointing to our website - many of these are from our customers' websites. The content, look and feel of the website is acclaimed across the board and we had a good feedback from the visitors. With so many backward links to our website and depth in the content, I do not understand why I should not appear in non-commercial results of Google!

I find that there are a few things that are not clear to me at this point of time. Firstly, we have our competitor keywords in our keywords tag. These should have been there for some time without my knowledge. I am unsure if we are getting penalized for this with every request to index our website. Secondly, we appear for just two of our important keywords in Google (after 5/6 pages though) and I do not understand why we might not appear for rest of our keywords too.

Moreover, I recently approached an optimization company that claims to drive traffic from a different domain name. This appears to be redirection of the traffic and I am not sure if I will get penalized for such practices. It would be helpful if you could tell me now on what's right and what's not, especially with Google.

Please advise on where I could start on optimizing our website.

Bharath Rejeti

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Bharath,

Thanks for your questions, and I'm glad you enjoy the newsletter.

Regarding your submissions to Google over the past three months, you should actually stop doing that immediately! There's no reason at all to submit to Google on a regular basis, or even at all. It won't help your site move up in the rankings. If your site is already indexed (and by your message it sounds as if it is), why would submitting it make it move up in the rankings? The only reason to submit a URL is to let a search engine know of its existence. As with all of the major search engines these days, you don't need to *ever* submit.

The search engine spider bots are constantly crawling the Web, and since you have many high-quality links from your customer sites, your site will not have a problem remaining in the databases. Your customer links will definitely help the engines to understand that you have a popular site, but that doesn't necessarily translate into high rankings for your keyword phrases.

For instance, if you have very little (or no) keyword-rich copy on your pages, there will be no way for the search engines to know how to classify your site. And what about your Title tags, do they contain your most important keyword phrases? All the links in the world won't help you if it's not readily apparent what your site is about.

You mentioned that you're using competitors' names in your Meta tags. Although the keyword Meta tag won't help you obtain high rankings for the keyword phrases you have placed in them, you definitely need to remove your competitors' trademarks as soon as possible because it could open you up to a lawsuit. It's doubtful that you're getting penalized for it because the tag is generally ignored, but it's not a good idea to have competitor stuff in there, regardless.

You also said "...we appear for just two of our important keywords in Google (after 5/6 pages though) and I do not understand why we might not appear for rest of our keywords too."

I think that sentence sums up the crux of your problem; it appears as if you are thinking that you should be ranking highly for keyWORDs as opposed to keyword phrases. You've got to erase that idea from your memory banks immediately! Your search engine success depends upon your doing appropriate keyword research for your site to determine the most relevant keyword phrases that people are actually searching on. Once you've determined these, you'll need to start from scratch and re-optimize your site for them, as opposed to the one-word keywords you may have previously optimized for.

You should get a subscription to WordTracker, or if you are too confused by that, then pay the good people at SEO Research Labs to do your keyword research for you. (Both of those links are my affiliate links.)

Until you do proper keyword research, high rankings will always be elusive. I cannot stress this enough.

Once you have your list of highly relevant phrases, you'll need to incorporate 2 or 3 of them within each page of your site. Not in the Meta keyword tag, but on the pages of the site. Then you wait, and wait and wait for the search engines to find and index your spiffy new pages. If you do it right, it will be well worth the wait when your site finally starts getting found when people are searching for your products and services. If you don't feel like waiting, most search engines (except for Google) have paid-inclusion programs that will ensure your pages get indexed very quickly. This is really only necessary if you want in *now*! In most cases the engines will find your pages even if you don't pay them. Remember, they all want to have the most comprehensive databases, so it's in their best interest to keep them up to date.

Regarding your last question about a company that will drive traffic to your site through a different domain name -- I would be very wary of that kind of offer. They may bring your site some traffic, but just remember that they will *own* the traffic. As soon as you stop paying, your traffic will stop. If you are okay with that, then there's probably nothing inherently wrong with it. However, if and when you do stop, you need to also be aware that the company could start selling that traffic to your competitors. To me, it makes much more sense to fix your own site up so that it brings traffic and sales in its own right, forever and ever with no additional fees! That's what a good, professional search engine optimization will do for you.

Jill