Improving search engine rankings in competitive topic areas does require a good deal of knowledge and expertise and search engine optimization experts are needed, but most websites aren’t in very competitive areas. Many of them can achieve top rankings by applying just the search engine optimization basics.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is the process of achieving top rankings in the search engines for a website’s most relevant search terms. The most relevant search terms are the phrases that people are most likely to type into a search engine when looking for what the website has to offer. These are the search terms that it is essential to rank highly for, and these are the search terms that search engine optimization targets.
The first step is to choose the most suitable search terms for your site. Then allocate one or two of them to each suitable page within the site. One search term per page is preferable, but two per page is not so bad. Sometimes it is useful to split a largish page, that covers several closely related topics or several aspects of a topic, into two or more smaller pages so that a different search term can be targeted on each of them. Matching search terms to a page’s content is essential.
When you follow these simple tips your site will climb in the search engine rankings and you will significantly increase the possibility of getting your site ranked on the first page of Google.
Review you site one page at a time, starting with the home page. Once you become familiar with these simple steps, you will be able to apply them to every page of your website and significantly increase your chance of having multiple pages rank on the first page of Google.
Find keywords relevant to your niche. Go to the Wordtracker free keyword research tool or use the Google AdWords tool to check the popularity of the keywords you are using and discover other related keywords that hadn’t occurred to you.
Avoid targeting very popular keywords. You will find it much harder to get your website ranked on the first page of Google if you target very popular keywords. You are looking for keywords that are searched for enough but don’t have lots of competing web pages.
Keyword research is an important key to top search engine ranking, so don’t rush this step. Spend a few hours researching different keywords, and while you are researching keywords make sure you check out your competitors by doing a search using those keywords. It’s important that you know how well the top ten sites are doing.
Be sure to keep a record of website addresses and related information so that you don’t waste your time repeating the same searches later.
Decide which keywords you will target and make sure you put them into the Meta tags of your page. You’ll find Meta tags in the head section of each web page.
If you go to any web page, right click and select View source, a notepad will open and you will see the HTML code for the the web page. The Meta Tags are near the top. The two most important meta tags are the Title Tag and Description Tag. Don’t just leave them blank.
You can list your keywords,separated by a comma, in the keywords meta tag, but it isn’t absolutely necessary as most search engines ignore them now because they have been abused so much.
Put you keyword phrase in your Title Tag. The text you use in the title tag appears in the title bar of the web browser and forms the first line of search results. The key to success is to create a meaningful title using your keyword phrase. Don’t just list all your keywords here.
The meta description is your opportunity to sell your site. Use your main keyword phrase for the page and and include a benefit to encourage browsers to click through to your site.
The title tag and your meta description will be displayed in many search engine listings. So, take time to time to make sure these elements are keyword rich, interesting, and relevant to your site.
Use your keyword phrase in the headline for your page and make sure the headline is in a headline tag. You can also include your keyword and related keyword phrases in sub headings.
You can use bold and italics to highlight your keywords in the body text but don’t overdo it. It must seem natural. It’s recommended that you don’t do this more than once on each page.
Use your keywords in the alt tags of images. This is text that will be displayed if the images fail to load. Get into the habit of always using alt tags for your images, The search engines like to find them here.
Encourage people who are linking to your website to use your keywords in anchor text and when you link to your own pages make sure you use variations of your keyword phrase in the anchor text.
Spend time each day building links to your site. Ideally you want a lot of links, but don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Look to get links from authority sites. You can do this by getting your site listed in quality directories, submitting articles to Ezine Articles and commenting on high page rank blogs.
If you apply these simple tips every time you write or rewrite a web page you will find that your stream of free search engine traffic will gradually increase and that your site will find its way onto the first page of search engine results.
