Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Search engine optimization is an important factor for getting a higher ranking on search engines. SEO is a hard job and can be costly if you hire a search engine optimization company to take care of optimizing your website for you. Some large companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get their websites to rank higher in the large search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

You can choose to optimize your site yourself. Here are some key steps:

1. Title Tag
The title tag is the most powerful on-site search engine optimization you have, so use it creatively. What you place in the title tag should only be exact keywords you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have its own title tag.

2. Alt Tag
The Alt tag is the texts for a picture. When you roll-over your mouse onto a picture and it shows some texts, you're seeing an alt tag. You should put your main keywords in the alt tags but don't abuse it or you might be caught by the intelligent search engine indexing spiders and cause a big drop in your rankings instead.

3. Link Popularity
Link popularity is the most important search engine optimization technique you should emphasize on. You need to request links constantly to increase your page rank as well as link popularity - you also increase traffic this way. Make sure you have the correct anchor text from your link partners. When your website popularity increases, many people will want to exchange links with you. Make sure your potential link partners will not be having a website that competes with you, and never exchange links with link farms (websites with only links, without content).

4. Keyword Density
This optimization factor is rather important. To improve your keyword density, you should use the appropriate keywords once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and try to get a keyword density of more than 20% - of course, without resulting in your contents causing confusion just because it doesn't sound right.

5. Website Design
More and more people are getting onto the approach of using flash, movies, but index spiders (or robots) don't understand them. You need more content which outweighs HTML, use cascading style sheets or at least less java scripts.

6. Keywords Placing
You should include one keyword each at the top and the bottom of your web page. Other than that, it is most advisable to include one of them at the first and last sentence of your content. If you don't have an <H1> title, add it and include your keyword in it. Index spiders tend to place a large emphasis on Heading tags.

Search engine optimization rules can change anytime and often do. These changes will result in the increase and decrease of the rank of your site, so never depend on it fully. If you need a steady traffic to your site, try to get more links to your site instead - it's the safest way.

To Your Success,

Deb

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