Search Engine Optimization Rules – 5 Rules

June 26, 2009 by Butterfly Filed under: SEO

If you are considering starting an SEO campaign, you may be a bit stuck in terms of where to start. Sure, you can buy or borrow a few books on the topic or do some online research in terms of the nuts and bolts of how to do good SEO. But, that amounts to jumping right to the how without starting with the what and why.

By contrast, I believe that the best way to approach SEO is by first getting an understanding of the basics. Whether you elect to do your own work or to have an expert do it for you, it will help you tremendously if you become well-informed of the basic search engine optimization rules. Here are 5 SEO rules:

1. Backlinks are king (now, more than error):

There are two main components to good SEO: optimizing your site itself, and getting lots of backlinks from other relevant websites. Increasingly, research is showing that search engine bots are weighting the value of backlinks even more heavily than they are keywords on the site in terms of their influence on how well your site ranks for certain search terms. (Backlinks, for the uninitiated, are simply those links from other websites that point to your site).

To be effective, you must be doing well with backlinks to your site in terms of both their quality and quantity. Quality links are those that are from sites that have content relevant to that of your site, as well as that enjoy a strong Google PageRank score.

2. Remember the anchor text:

Anchor text, as odd as its name is, is simply that text which is embedded in a link leading from one site (or page) to another. In other words, it is the text that people actually click on when trying to follow a link from Site A to Site B. Apart from just displaying a plain URL in a backlink, it is now common practice to include anchor text in the link. Reason: the anchor text serves as a built-in description of what the person who created the link in Site A thinks of Site B. Search engine bots “read” this text in order to determine the “reputation” (what people think about) of Site B.

3. Keyword density is still important:

While less important than it was a few years ago, it is still important to make sure that the keywords for which you want to optimize your website show up relatively more frequently than do other words featured on the site. In other words, if your target keyword is “goldfish” and this keyword appears twice on a page with 100 words on it, the keyword density for that keyword would be 2% (2/100). Your goal should be about 3-5% for each target keyword.

4. Position your keywords properly on each page:

Not only is keyword density important, but so is the specific positioning or location of each of the keywords on the page. Search engines tend to weight more heavily (i.e., perk up and take notice) of keywords positioned higher up on the top, left of the page, as well as of those embedded in section or sub-section titles.

5. Target a maximum of 1-2 keywords per page:

Once you have determined for which keywords you want to optimize your website, you will need to optimize each page of your site for a subset of those keywords. For example, you may have a list of 6-10 keywords for which to target your entire site. Still, I recommend focusing on only 1-2 of those per page of your site. Unless you have a whole lot of content on the given page (more than 1,000 words, for example), targeting more than 1 or 2 keywords for a given page risks the search engine losing site of what your page is meant to be about.

By learning these search engine optimization rules, you will be better-equipped to conduct a successful SEO campaign and attain better search engine rankings for your website.