SEO Techniques Increase Your Website Search Engine Ranking
When we are talking about search engine ranking, the first thing you need to think about is the market place. Many people ask themselves, how many keywords should I put in my main text? What is the keyword density formula that I should be using on each page? Should I use 300 words on my articles or blog posts, or should I use 500 words? Can I use flash? How many keywords should I put in my "alt" text? Etc...
Here is a general statement: magic numbers do not exist! The most important thing you can understand as a search engine optimization expert is the following: algorithms change. So being an expert has a limited shelf life. Just when you think you understand what is going to make you number one for a search phrase in a search engine, something could change, and you might have to spend months or years trying to find out the exact engineering of the algorithm again.
It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm and go with something much easier instead - observe your competitors! All you need to do is to understand what elements are your competitors using that are making them rank on the top positions. Observing what others that are successful are doing well can only help you; and if you are not learning something from each website you visit, (that you should either try or test) something is wrong.
If you are not using a Google tool bar with page rank displayed on your browser, stop now and go get it.
Let's see what those things are:
Page rank
Number and quality of inbound links pointing to your site
Keyword density
Fresh content
The first thing to observe on any possible competitors site is their page rank. Note to self - you do not want to emulate a low page ranked site! Using your newly acquired Google tool bar now lets you see the page rank of every page that you visit and own.
Then the next thing to observe from your competitors' sites is their back link index. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to Google and type: link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com But it would be a mistake to do this only on Google, as Google is much more discriminating with sites than other search engines. Yahoo and MSN are much more accurate for measuring the back link index.
Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think about where the category is that the links come from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category. Some marketers use special software for robotic content creation. They generate thousands of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice can be dangerous, as Google may penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of service. And what happens is that those links do not look natural. One day one site may have 50 links and the following day have 2,050 links which all say the same thing and come from the same IP address.
If you understand how to observe, it will never happen to you. You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe how they are getting linked to.
The second thing you need to observe is the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should we repeat our main keyword? In which part of the web page should our main keywords be mentioned? There is no magic number, again it's all about observing and measuring against your competitors. But what should we measure?
Meta tags
Alt tags
Titles
Names of the images on the page
Headings: h1, h2, h3...
Frequency and position of the keywords on the body text
Each one of these items should be measured independently. There are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets of top rankings. Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail in over optimization. This is when you use keywords too often or too early. If you look unnatural, your page ranks will suffer as a result.
Do not try the stupid things you may see out there where over half the page is just stuffed with repeating keywords and different font sizes. This may fool the spiders for a while, but putting out an inferior product will eventually catch up with you! So if your thinking of going down the I am only in it to fool Google and make money mode, nothing on any of my sites can help you so just quit reading and go out and buy one of the programs that build you 10,000 very low quality sites and go watch TV!
The key to success is to understand what Google likes about their top 5 quality and well done pages, and to apply this to your own website promotion. Remember if you have the resources and can do 2 similar sites or pages with the same theme, do constant testing on one of them. Initially it can be just on how quick you get the new sites indexed, then to what page set up is generating the most Adsense income for you, for example. What you learn will benefit every site you have or will build.
The last thing to observe is how much fresh content do the top sites have. If they have many articles and they are continuously adding new content to their sites, then it is clear that the search engines like content and are ranking better those sites which have more and more updated information. RSS feeds are a great way to add fresh updated contact and I would recommend reading more on them. People that surf the web are usually searching for information. They do not know they're a buyer yet, so content is the fuel of internet traffic.
If you want to attract more potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests. Getting them there is half the battle, once they're at your site for the content, you can work on selling them your products or ads.
You can have the greatest product idea in the world, but if you're not putting it in front of the buyer it will do you no good!
posted by The Mulacs
at
8:51 PM
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