How to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

by Kit Elliott

When people think of search engine optimization, they immediately think of time consuming very tedious tasks that are way beyond their capabilities. That might be true if they put no time and effort into it. I do agree that improving search engine rankings in competitive niche markets require a good deal of knowledge and expertise. It�s TIME to learn the basics of how to improve your search engine rankings. There is huge need for search engine optimization experts, but most websites don�t find themselves in a very competitive niche market. Many websites can achieve top rankings by applying my optimization basics. All you have to do is put in the time learning and applying them.

Let me lay out the basics of search engine optimization. You can find a professional to do it but some professionals charge thousands to even get your foot in the door. Others have you fill out lengthy quote requests and tell you they�ll be back in about three days with a quote. Then you wait for three days, and no email shows up. It might be worthwhile trying these basics out before paying an expert.

Please Note: If you feel you haven�t achieved the results that you want, then try some affordable SEO experts who have more knowledge and expertise in their field.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of coding a website to achieve top rankings in the search engines. You must concentrate on the website�s most relevant keywords. These relevant keywords are the key phrases that people are most likely to type into the search engine to look for websites. These websites must present their products and services within a twenty second period to ensure that the visitor locks into their site. Let me give you a scenario that happens far too many times. Let�s say you are looking for a great hosting company. You type in your favorite search engine and enter a few keywords: cheap hosting. You get thousands upon thousands of websites. What the search engine displays to you makes you decide whether or not to click on it. When you finally decide to click on it, how many times have you seen Google �adwords� throughout the whole left side in no particular format? How many times have you seen affiliate product advertising on the whole right side in no particular format? Goodbye! What could have been an easy sell turned out to be an easy click out of your website. This is not what you are trying to achieve.

The first step for search engine optimization is to choose the most suitable keywords for your site. Make a list of the most suitable keywords for your site and then split one or two of them to each suitable page within the site. One keyword per page is preferable, but two per page is not so bad. Sometimes it is useful to split a large page into two smaller pages so that a different keyword can be targeted on each page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Matching keywords to a page's content is essential. A search engine robot and spider has caught on to all the tricks. Don�t try to outsmart it.

Basic Search Engine Optimization Structure is vital to your success.

An obvious and overlooked aspect of search engine optimization is to make sure that search engine spiders can actually crawl to all of your website's pages. If the spiders and robots can't find them, then they won't get indexed, and we�ve wasted a lot of time on search engine optimization. Make sure that your navigation structure of your website is strong. Would you build a mansion on a one inch foundation? Probably not! Then why build your website mansion on a weak foundation. This means that all of your pages are linked together on every page. When the spider crawls throughout your website, it will crawl to all of the pages and back again. If there is one broken link, this could affect your search engine rankings!

Don�t forget the not so obvious:

�Robots and Spiders can't see links embedded in Java and most times Flash. When a spider and a robot crawls over your website, it only reads the text, and those embedded links are invisible to the spiders and robots far as search engines are concerned, they don't exist. Let�s make a promise not to use them.

�How many times have you clicked on a link and looked at the URL, and it contained about 32 extra letters and numbers in it? Google won't spider any URL that looks like this. Avoid using dynamic URLs.

�Make sure all pages link to at least one other page. Links to pages that don't link out are called "dangling links". Google founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, once wrote about Dangling links

"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet..........Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly." -

extract from the original PageRank paper by Google�s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

�It is good to structure the internal links so that targeted keywords are reinforced. For example, organize the links so that a topic's sub-topic pages link to the topic page with the right link text (see below), and vice-versa.

Off-page elements

Link-text ahref="url">Type in your link text

This is one of the two most important elements for good rankings. The link text can be on pages within your website or on other websites. Either way, it is essential. Your main keyword should be the text link or included in the text link. When possible, include the target page�s main keywords in the link text, but don't use the exact same link text for every link that links to a page.

I always use Google as the example since they are the number one search engine today. Google attributes link text to the target page and attributes it as actually being on the target page. It treats its presence as being an important element of the target page. Links carry more weight if the text around them is concerned with the target page's topic and keywords.

On-page elements

The Title tag title>Type in your title words here

This is the second of the two most important elements for good rankings. Make sure that the page's keywords are contained in this tag, and place it near the front. I like taking the actual main keyword and placing it by itself with a period behind it and then explain the Title Tag. For example, let�s say I own Google and I�ve reached the Adwords page. I would title it like this:

�Adwords. Google�s Adwords offers a pay per click solution for all your advertising needs.�

The target keyword is "Adwords". Each page's Title tag should be different to the Title tags on the site's other pages.

The Description tag meta name="description" content="a nice description"

Most search engines display the description of your website so it�s important you write an appealing description for your page and fill it full of the keywords that are contained within your actual site. Remember that list of keywords that you should have listed for your website. A search engine spider should see every one of those keywords in your actual page. Your Description tag should have most of those words. Google doesn't display the Description like they used to do but that�s what I love about Google. They always keep the SEO�s guessing what�s next? Just when you think the robots and spiders don�t care for the description, Google displays it.

The Keywords tag
meta name="keywords" content="some keywords"

I was just reading a popular keyword site that delivers the best possible keywords for your website. Then, they say enter each keyword and separate them with a comma. Do not separate these words with a comma. There is no need to separate them because the search engines ignore the commas. The words in the Keywords tag were never treated as keywords by the search engines; they were treated as text on the page. I keep hearing that the keyword tag is not as effective as it used to be, and then I�ll click a link and it says it�s an absolute. My advice to you is to put plenty of relevant keywords into the tag and include the keyword once at the front, and a second time further along the line. Do me a favor and do yourself a favor? Do not repeat a word more than 5 times. If you do, the search engines will think you are spamming them and they will drop you quick.

The H tag

Hn>Insert your headings or your titles of your text here

Notice the . The �H� stands for headings throughout your text and the "n" stands for the text size from 1 to 6. The smallest is 6 and the biggest heading size is 1. H tags are given more weight than ordinary text and, the bigger the H size, the more weight it receives. So include the target keyword in H tags at least once on the page, and two or three times if possible. Also, place the first H tag as near to the top of the page as possible.

Bold text

Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the keyword in bold tags when it appears on the page.

Text

The body should be easy to read with a very clean layout. Remember when I visited the hosting sites, and they have Adwords on the left, and they have the affiliate products on the right, and their actual text or body is 10 inches below. Let�s cut out all the extra stuff. Treat your website as an entity. When you do that, buyers will remain on your website. Perfect! You have achieved your goal of getting traffic to stay.

In your text, use the main keywords as often as you can on the page without messing with this clean user-friendly layout.. Use the term once or twice very early in the page's body text and as often as possible throughout. Reword small parts and even add sentences to make sure that the keyword is well represented in the text.

In all probability, each word in the keyword will be found on the page separate from the keyword itself. This is good. In fact, if they are not there on their own, add a few of them through the page.

Alt text
img src="url" alt="Type in text that will show up on images on mouse over"

Alt-text is simple. Blind people have speech synthesizers that read pictures. The only way the blind person will be able to �hear� the picture is if you included the Alt-text. This is the text you see on pictures when you mouse over it. Guess what? Include the keywords in the alt text of all images on the page. Not to mention that this could definitely help your search engine rankings.

Summary

Make a list of keywords for your site. Rank the popularity of the keywords because that�s what your visitor will type in the Search Engines.

Make sure each page of your website has at least one major keyword and split some pages if necessary

Make sure the links and link text contain your target keywords If possible, organize links from other sites to suit the target keywords and their pages.

Organize all the on-page elements to suit each page's target keyword.

Relax and shoot for number one rankings.

Kit Elliott is the author of The Traffic Toolchest. His ethical approach to marketing makes him one of the top experts in his field. His highly anticipated book Super Affiliates Guide to Riches is expected to launch by mid-August 2005 at http://www.superaffiliate.com . Check out The Traffic Toolchest at http://www.thetraffictoolchest.com to get over 70 valuable marketing tools.

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