5 Simple Steps To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization
Written by admin on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 in SEO.
Anyone who is trying to make their mark online and achieve a solid measure of success understands that traffic is the key to making your website or ecommerce business work. The first thing you should look at is how much traffic you are getting from your search engine ranking. That means the natural, organic traffic that comes from search engines. There are therefore, two highly important reasons why this is the case. Firstly, this traffic is very targeted to your particular site, and secondly, this type of traffic is FREE! What makes most people unable to secure this all important traffic is confusion about how to do this and what it is exactly that gets you the top ranking. The belief is that this is hard to do – but is it? In this article, you’ll discover some straightforward, effective and above all, search engine friendly tips on you how to boost your search engine rank and hence increase your traffic.
1. Meta Tags. Let’s start with these all important tags that allow search engine bots to correctly identify your site and what it contains. Hopefully, you’ve already heard of these and are using these tags on your webpage. The most important thing then is to be sure you use them for maximum effect. To keep things simple, let’s look at the 2 most important tags – the “title” tag and “description” tag. Since the major search engines now place less value on the “keywords” tag we’ll skip this, however it is worth taking this into consideration if you wish to as there is no downside to using this as well.
To get the most from these tags, look at placing your keywords near the beginning and more than once in the “title” and “description” tags. If you have ever come across sites that simply have “sitename.com”, “Page 1″ or “Welcome ” in the “title” tag – then you can be sure they are doing themselves few favors in terms of increasing their rank for particular keywords. A good point to also remember is to try and avoid words like “and”, “or” and “the” in “title” and “description” tags.
**A crucial thing to understand is that when the search engine bots visit your site they will consider keyword prominence, keyword weight and keyword density. These things are all included in the logarithms used to give your site a position in the search engine ranks for those words. The search engines view your page by looking at the title tag, the description tag and other text on the page. If you are not sure about what constitutes keyword prominence – essentially it means how close the keyword is to the start of your page. The term “keyword weight” simply reflects how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. When you hear about “keyword density”, this simply means the ratio of the keyword in comparison to other words included on your site page. You need to keep the use of the keyword natural, as an unusually high keyword weight or density can in fact do your ranking more harm, appearing to the search engines that you have been “keyword stuffing” – for which most search engines will penalize a site.
2. Once you have selected keywords and placed these in your text and tags, then you should consider the placement of any navigation links and JavaScript. ) The important thing in this case is to understand that search engines “read” your site starting at the top left and working down to the bottom right. When doing this, the search engines main emphasis is placed upon the first 100 words of site text. What you want to avoid then, is having these first bits of text being the navigation links and JavaScript; so aim to include these on the right of the page or at the bottom. Your goal should be to have the heading tags which contain your keywords at the start of the page so that search engines give more weight to what is most important on your site, then look at what is contained in the links or JavaScript when they reach the end of the page.
3. Make sure after this that you include “alt” tags with each of the images on the page. Search engines don’t “read” photo and images. The reason you include an “alt” tag is that this is the only way the search engine bot knows what the picture or image is about. Using these tags correctly is another way to boost the keyword weight/density of the page and getting more keywords into the HTML of your page. “Alt” tags are simple to create and they can really make a significant difference to how your site ranks for your particular keywords. A basic “alt” tag will look like this: alt=” your keywords phrase.” These are part of the series of things the search engine bots will include in their calculation of your sites rank, so make sure you include “alt” tags along with considering keyword prominence, density and weight.
4. Aim to also include your keywords at the bottom of your web pages. The last words on your page seem to hold equal weight with the first words included on your page. It is thought that if the site is about a particular subject (summed up on the keywords), then that focus on the main points, or keywords, will not only be at the beginning of the page, but also throughout the page and shown prominently in the page ending. If you have placed the navigational links and JavaScript at the base of the page, then the keywords should be included before the HTML conclusion. One of the simplest options for including the keywords at the bottom of your page is to incorporate some use of them along with the copyright wording. An example, if you have an poker room page is by placing something like the following at the page conclusion:
copyright 2009 yoursite.com
World’s best poker room
At the time this was written, the search engines are not penalizing web sites for doing this, and really in terms of natural keyword usage – there is not much reason why they would do so.
5. Look carefully at the use of anchor text when you do any linking both on and off site. Anchor text refers to the words in which links to the site are embedded. On site, these maybe the words you use to navigate to an off-site page or another page on your website. Many people fail to include onsite linking, but in fact this is one of the easiest ways to drastically boost your site’s search engine rank for keywords. This is an easy way to boost your rank, and all that you need to do is to place links in anchor text with the target keyword or phrase. When the search engine evaluates your site and finds links externally and internally with the keywords “poker room” it then concludes that your pages must be about “poker room”. Whatever you do aim to avoid using anchor text phrases like “Click Here” or “yoursite.com”
One final thing to consider is how you manage any reciprocal linking campaigns and be careful about using variations in your text. Keep in mind that search engines will tend to see naturally occurring links as being more “weighty” than if there is a clear case of reciprocal linking. Should a search engine pick up on the fact that all the incoming links on your site are identical it is likely to give these links less weight, or even penalize your site for this. Select several keywords and phrases for more ‘natural’ linking and you will have much more impact on your targeted keyword rankings, simply by having links that are more organic or natural.
Effectively managing your SEO may seem daunting when you first get started, but as you learn a few of the ins and outs of the processes involved, you will see that it needn’t be overly complicated or require any programming knowledge. Following a few of these tips will really make a big difference on your website’s keyword ranking.
