Search Engine Optimization for Beginners

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem complex and as a result, you may have avoided dealing with this issue. However, it’s not rocket science and anyone can at least incorporate a few SEO (search engine optimization) techniques into their website.

The great majority of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be interested in your products or services. The higher your page comes up in the search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

Begin by examining the title bar on your homepage. The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases that you expect someone will search on when looking for a site similar to yours. I wouldn’t necessarily include your company name, unless you feel that people will be searching on your name.

You should also include a clear and inviting page description. This is the short description that people will see in the search results. If it’s unclear or not very compelling people will skip your site and just move on to the next.

Then apply the above to all the pages in your site. Provide them all with a keyword rich title and a compelling page description. Each title bar on each page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next area to examine is your website content. Search engines will examine the text on your pages and look for keyword relevancy. The text on your site should contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site or page. Make sure that you also use your keywords in H1 and other headings.

Aim to have around five hundred words on each page. The search engines are looking for content and pages that only have a few words of text with a lot of images or advertising will not generally rank very high. Remember that the search engines can not interpret the text on graphic images.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula. Meta tags appear in the head section of your html and are in the format: meta name= "keywords" content=.

Anchor text, the visible hyperlinked text on a page, is another important and easy SEO strategy. Anchor text is the text that is used to refer to the subject matter of the page linked to. For example, the text “Search engine Optimization Tips” could be hyper linked to the hidden URL: http://www.online-marketing-review.com/tools.html The search engines have picked up on this, as this way of describing the link enhances the relevance of the target page. Try and include important keywords in the anchor text. Use this technique often as it increases the page rank of the target page.

Finally, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quantity and quality of websites that link to your site. The more websites that are linked to your site as well as the quality of the linking sites (popular sites or government and educational sites rate high) will increase your ranking. You can try using sites like http://www.linkmetro.com./index.php to begin your link campaign.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

Recommended Online Resources

http://www.online-marketing-review.com/tools.html

http://www.submitexpress.com/tools.html

http://www.linkpopularity.com/

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