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7 Free Search Engine Optimization Tips

Butterfly — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:55:26 +0000

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be defined simply as the art and science of getting your website to come up at a higher ranking on search engines than do most or all other sites that have similar content and a similar target audience.

With the billions of web pages and hundreds of millions of web sites live on the Internet today – and more going live every day – if you want your site to be found it is going to take more than luck. It is going to take a solid SEO campaign.

Some people who dabble in search engine optimization believe that they can never really crack the SEO code. “After all, isn’t it true that Google and other major search engines do not share their indexing algorithms (i.e., secret formulas for how they rank websites)?,” you may have heard people ask.

Of course, there are always rumors floating around on blogs about what little tricks you can do to catapult your site to the top of the rankings in a flash. But, think about it: if it were that easy, those tricks would soon stop working since everybody else would be trying them, too. And, at the end of the day, there are only 10 spots on the first page of any major search engine site.

In reality, cracking the SEO code is not a matter of following fads and trends. And, it is definitely not a matter of tricking search engines into ranking your site well. Rather, good search engine optimization is about understanding how search engine sites “think” and then faithfully following a set of consistent best practices to get you where you need to be.

If you are looking for free search engine optimization tips, here they are:

1. Start with the end in mind:

You need to start any SEO campaign needs by first figuring out which keywords for which you will be targeting and optimizing your site. Proper keyword selection is a must. You need to find keywords that are relevant, experience a high number of daily searches, and yet have few other sites competing for those keywords. Yes, there are still good keywords left in your niche or industry, no matter what anyone else says.

2. Provide quality, useful content and refresh it often:

Search engines love to serve up the right content to the right people at the right time. If you provide good, relevant content and refresh it often, search engines will love you – guaranteed.

3. Leverage meta tags:

Most people in the industry say meta tags – those invisible bits of text on your site that only search engines read – are dead. I say that’s not entirely true. Every little bit helps.

4. Keyword-optimize your content:

Make sure that every page of your site is well-optimized. Choose one or two keywords per page of your site and make each page all about those keywords. But, avoid “stuffing” your site with too many keywords.

5. Build a tool or widget that people find truly valuable:

This is similar to #2 above. Create a useful, unique online calculator, game, dictionary – whatever. Make it interactive. If it’s good, people will link to it and use it often.

6. Get backlinks to your site:

Speaking of links: SEO is all about backlinks. The more high-PageRank, quality, relevant and popular sites that link to your site, the better your site will do in the rankings.

7. Measure, measure, measure:

Good SEO is all about being able to measure how you are doing, week to week and month to month. Install a good analytics package to track visits to your site. Check your rankings at least once per month and note if you are improving and where.

Following these tips consistently and properly will push your site up the rankings for the keywords you have chosen to target. Remember, every thousand-mile journey starts with a first step. Learn these free search engine optimization tips, practice them, and get on your way to higher rankings.

For more free SEO tips, visit: http://www.jcjinteractive.com/blog/.

Article Source:

http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jed_C._Jones_Ph.D.

Search Engine Optimization Rules – Three Rules to Help You Top the Search Engine Rankings

Butterfly — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:01:10 +0000

Search engine optimization is probably the most important aspect of website development. No matter how much you pay for a fantastic looking site, you can still have no visitors for it if you do not address the basic requirements of search engines. You can, of course, get visitors by paying to advertise on other websites, but this is an ongoing cost and as soon as you stop paying, the visitors stop coming.

There are many different aspects to search engine optimization, but the following three rules will get you off to a good start and save you a lot of time and money.

Rule 1 – Get it right from the start

If you create a website first and then try to deal with search engine optimization, you will face an uphill struggle. This happens to lots of people because they often have not even heard of SEO until after they have built a site and found that no-one is visiting it. The most important thing you can do when developing a new site is to build in your SEO right from the start.

To succeed online, your website should be designed right from the start with search engines in mind. This will govern the whole structure of your site, the names and keywords you use for pages, the file names and alt text you select for images, the subjects you choose to cover on your site and even the whole theme of your website. Putting these things right afterwards is sometimes impossible, particularly if your site is not small.

There is one option open to you if you find that you have a site which you are happy with, apart from the fact that you have no visitors. In this situation it can be best to set up a new well optimized site which attracts lots of visitors and funnels them direct to your old site to deal with sales, etc.

Rule 2 – Learn From Your Competition

When you know what key phrases are most important for your website, check out which other sites are in the top ten positions for these phrases now. You need to analyse these sites carefully, because whatever they are doing is what you need to be doing too.

A good SEO tool will help you analyse your competing websites quickly and easily, covering all the different aspects of your competitors, such as who is linking to them, what keywords they use on each page, keyword density, etc. A large part of why the other sites are at the top of the search engine results pages will be the sites who have added links to them. You need to be able to quickly assess all of these links and pick out the ones that are doing the most good in terms of adding Pagerank, and target those to get links for your own site.

Rule 3 – Automate as Much As You Can

The problem with SEO is that so much of it is a time consuming business. There are lots of separate jobs that each require careful research and then many repeated actions on your part. I am thinking of keyword research and analysis, submission to directories, seeking link exchange partners, article submission, etc.

If you were to do all of these things manually, it would take you forever just to deal with one website. The only way to make SEO tasks practical is to automate as many of them as you can, using shortcuts wherever possible. This is what SEO tools are designed to do. You can get specialist packages and services to deal with link building, or directory submission, but a good SEO software package will deal with all of these together, making your SEO efforts much easier to manage and co-ordinate.

Tags: free search engine optimization tips, search engine optimization rules

Free Search Engine Optimization Tips – Why Your Website Needs Backlinks and How to Get Them

Butterfly — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:45:07 +0000

There are many aspects to search engine optimization and much discussion about the merits of different approaches, but there is little disagreement about the importance of getting links to your site. It is generally accepted that when a search engine is asked to search for something, it first of all sifts through its vast database of known websites to find which ones are relevant to the term entered, and then presents all the results in order of importance.

It is how a search engine judges importance that leads us to the subject of links. Google is a search engine that values good websites, and by good I mean quality ones full of useful information and advice. The Google guys want to see a web full of sites that offer things people want. So they make the understandable assumption that if a site is a good one, other websites will link to it to improve their own visitors’ experience. A site with lots of links going to it from other sites will therefore be taken to be one of some authority in its chosen area.

Important sites in the eyes of Google are those with lots of links pointing to them from other sites, so these are the ones that the search engine will put at the top of its results pages. We all want our sties to be at the top of the search results because that is the way to get lots of free website traffic. For your site to be up there where everyone will click on it, you therefore need to get lots of links pointing to it.

An important detail when it comes to links is that all links are not equal in the eyes of Google. A link from a site that Google considers to be an authority is worth much more than a link from a site it considers to be unimportant. Similarly, links from sites with a similar theme to your own are worth more than links from ones completely unrelated.

There are many ways to get links to your site, one of the most common ones being link exchange. This is the process of contacting other webmasters who have similar sites to your own, adding a link to their website and asking them if they would be prepared to link back to yours. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement which lots of webmasters are happy to participate in.

You need to organise your links carefully to ensure that you get the most benefit from them. ’Pagerank’ is Google’s rough measure of a page’s importance and you can check the pagerank of any web page by downloading Google’s toolbar and using the pagerank function on that. In the same way the links to your site increase your site’s importance (or pagerank) links going out from your site will ‘leak’ a little bit of pagerank too, so you need to manage this carefully.

The best way is to organise all your outgoing links into new directory pages, so that you do not lose any pagerank from your existing and main web pages by putting any links there. Set up a main link directory page with different categories on it, then have sub pages within this which contain the actual outgoing links for each different category of website. When you are arranging for other webmasters to link to your site, the links should be directed to a variety of pages, but mainly your home page.

This process can take a lot of time, but it can bear magnificent fruit. There are also various tools available that can help you speed up and manage this process.

Tags: free search engine optimization tips, how does search engine optim, search engine optimization rules

Free Search Engine Optimization Tips – How to Achieve High Search Engine Rankings

Butterfly — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:45:01 +0000

Some knowledge of search engine optimization is essential if you have your own website and are serious about getting visitors to it. While you will save a lot of time by having a good understanding of SEO techniques before you start building a website, it is perfectly possible to make changes to your site if you find that it is not designed with search engine ranking in mind. Search engine optimization in general is an on-going process, but sometimes just a few changes to an existing site can produce quite dramatic results.

The following are some of the most important and basic requirements for ranking well in search engine results and therefore attracting more visitors to your site:

Make The Most Of Your Title Tag

This is probably the single most important factor in telling the search engines what your site is about. The title tag is one of the meta-tags found within the ‘head’ section of every web page’s source code. It does not appear directly on your web page itself, but is the main heading representing your site which people see in the list of search engine results when they carry out a search.

The first few words of your title tag should contain your main keyword for that page (see below for information on keywords). If possible, repeat the keyword again at the end of the tag, but ensure that your title still makes grammatical sense. Do not use full stops of commas in your title tag, as these are thought to sometimes stop search engines going any further, so anything after the full stop might be missed. Use hyphens instead.

Make Sure Your Site Is Indexed By Search Engines

Search engines like Google never stop searching the web for new sites, so the chances are that your site will be found eventually, but you can speed the process up by submitting your site to the search engines directly. This in effect tells the search engines that your site exists. You will see many companies offering to submit your site to hundreds of search engines for you. This is a waste of time – who uses these obscure engines compared to the market share of Google, Yahoo and MSN? Hardly anyone, so why waste your time or money. Just submit your site to the main three and that will be sufficient.

Find The Best Keywords For Your Site

If you want your website to attract visitors from search engines, you need to know exactly what terms people are searching for. You can then use this information to set up each page of your site to be focussed on particular search phrases, known as keywords. Finding good keywords makes an enormous difference to the volume of traffic your site can attract.

Whatever the main subject of your website, there will be hundreds of different possible search terms that people are using to find out about various aspects of that subject. Only by knowing what people actually enter into search engines can you begin to attract a lot more visitors by targeting lots of different search terms. The other important element in selecting good keywords is to know what the level of competition is for each keyword. In other words, you need to know how many other sites are targeting that same keyword, because if the competition is too tough, you may never rank anywhere for that keyword. A good keyword research tool will help you identify the most useful keywords for your website.

Tags: free search engine optimization tips, how does search engine optim, search engine optimization rules

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7 Free Search Engine Optimization Tips

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