Tips To improve your website Rankings - Optimizing Your Website- SEO

In this article I will show you how to improve website for better rankings using seo optimization tips.

When you begin and SEO campaign, start by focusing on your on-page optimization. The practice of on-page optimization is all about what you do on your web page to help search engines understand your content and what your site is focused on. Even though off-page optimization is an important factor in the rankings equation, on page optimization builds a strong foundation for all SEO efforts.

Here are a number of on page optimization tips and strategies you can apply immediately to enhance your website and make is truly search engine friendly. As search engines crawl your website, they can apply the proper weight to different content.

Optimize Your Web Site URL. When planning to build a new website, be very careful about the domain name you choose. Select a name that will be memorable and is something you want to build your business around. You obviously do not want to limit your options significantly. Do so can limit the future development of your business. You should however, include your keyword or keyword phrase into your URL if possible.

Optimize Your Page Title and Header Tags Including H1 and H2. Develop a title that is relevant to your website content and which has no more that sixty characters. The reason you want to keep your title to a fixed width is because longer titles wont display fully on search engine results listings. The title is important because it gives you an opportunity to display your keywords and entice browsers to click on your link.

The first headline that appears on your page should include your keywords and be in the form of an H1 tag. The sub text should be presented as an H2 or H3 header. This reinforces the importance of your keywords and indicates prominence oriented around the specific content included on your web page.

Optimize All Your Meta Tags. SEO experts continue to debate the value of meta tags. I can tell you that although meta tags including the title, description, and keywords is less important that it was many years ago, it still plays an important role in optimization.

Meta tags are used as a starting point and reference for search engines seeking to rank your website. Your meta tags need to be aligned to web site content and include your most important keywords. I suggest limiting your keywords to twelve and limiting your description to about 150 words. By doing so you eliminate the chance that a search engine considers your content as questionable.

Optimize your keyword density. Keyword density is an important factor in search engine rankings. Your keyword density should be no more than 5 percent on any given page. Instead of focusing on keyword density alone, you are better off focusing on the placement of your keywords and treatment of your keywords. Focus on H1 and H2 tags and place keywords through out your web page. You should have an instance of each keyword phrase in bold, italics, and underlined to complete your on-page optimization effort.

Varying Your Keyword Phrase. Each time you list your keyword phrase, change it up a bit. Rather than stuffing your site with the same keyword phrases again and again, use keyword variety. One way to do this is to add a word or two before your keyword phrase and after it. Creating variety is critical because it shows each search engine that your site is really about the core content you are promoting.

The most important part of any SEO effort is to make your website appear natural and have a good flow. You want to make sure that your site presents valuable content and follows on-page optimization best practices. Use these suggestions as a guide, you will be on your way to a fully optimized website.

Optimizing for url submission

Get your page titles 100% optimized for search. Page titles are the single best element of overall on-site optimization that you can control, and one of the top things that a search engine, with its almighty power, uses to decide the destiny of the page. Will it rank your page or send it to the depths of the supplemental results where a bloodhound would find it difficult to sniff out? Theories vary on how best to format the title for 100% optimization. Long tail titles, key word stuffing, commas, density, bars and dashes have been tested and debated for many years.

I have found the best performance using the following method; First, I sit down and pick my top keyword, then I run it through one of many keyword tools out there that will show me the number of queries, demographic and geographic data, annual search trends, competition stats and so on. I take these results and start classifying them by this information to establish the pages that I will build. I continue to do this until I get down to 4 or even 5-word phrases.

Increase your site's link popularity by increasing your internal and incoming links.

Internal links - Cross link all your sites and important pages within each site. This will maximize the PageRank of all your pages within each web site.

Incoming links that you control - Create several small web sites related to your main site. Each site should only consist of a few pages. Then cross link them all together using the most important keywords. Don't forget to include links back to the main site.

Incoming links that you don't control:

Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors' domain name.

For example:

link:www.yourcompetitor.com

Exchange links with sites listed in the same category as yours in the major web directories, such as the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory.

Include a TITLE tag as the first META tag, directly after the HEAD tag.

For example:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Mike's Marketing Software Tools Reviews</TITLE>
...

Try to avoid stop words in your TITLE tag. Stop words (a, an, and, but, he, her, his, i, in, it, of, on, or, she, the, etc.) are common words and characters ignored by some search engines to enhance the speed and relevancy of their search results.

Include a META DESCRIPTION tag, directly after the TITLE tag. Include the most important keyword phrase for the web page as close to the beginning of the description as possible.

For example:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Mike's Marketing Software Tools Reviews</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Mike's Marketing Tools is the leading review site for the very best internet marketing tools for web marketers and webmasters.">
...

If you use a META REFRESH tag, make sure it is set to refresh after 30 seconds.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="30; URL=http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com">

Some search engines consider pages that refreshes under 30 seconds as spam. I recommend using a JavaScript redirect tag, if you require a quicker page refresh.

For example:

Step 1 - Paste this code into the HEAD section of your HTML document. Change the 3000 to whatever number you like. 1000 represents 1 (one) second.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"></SCRIPT>

Step 2 - Insert the onLoad event handler into your BODY tag, so that the JavaScript code is executed when the page loads.

<BODY onLoad="redirect()">

Include a site map with links to all your pages. This will help search engines find and index all your pages.

Limit the number of links on a web page to 50.

If you have more than 50 links, limit your links to your most important pages.

Include text on the page as some search engines, such as AltaVista, have been known to kick out links only pages.

Use one or more header tags in your main page body and include your most important keyword phrase/s.

Use large header tags, such as <H1> and <H2>.

Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to alter the appearance of the header tags to fit the look and feel of your site. For more information read this CSS tutorial.

Check the first couple of lines of the first paragraph to see if it's appropriate to be used as a description of your page. Many search engines utilize the first couple of sentences of the body text as the search results description, instead of the contents of the META DESCRIPTION tag.

Try to achieve an overall keyword density of 1-2%.

Try to achieve a minimum word count of 300 and a maximum of 750 words on each page.

Register a domain name with the exact keyword phrase you wish to target, using hyphens to separate the keywords.

For example, if the keyword phrase is "search engine rankings," then register:

search-engine-rankings.com

If the domain you want is unavailable, either try a different extension, such as .NET, .INFO, or .US, or add a keyword to the end (preferential) or beginning of the domain.

Name directories after your keyword phrases, using hyphens or underscores to separate the keywords.

For example, if an important keyword phrases is, "search engine rankings," name your directory:

www.yoursite.com/search-engine-rankings/ or...
www.yoursite.com/search_engine_rankings/

Name web pages after your most important keyword phrase. Separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores.

For example, if the keyword phrase is "search engine rankings," then name the page:

search-engine-rankings.html or...
search_engine_rankings.html

Name your graphic files after keyword phrases. Again, separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores.

For example:

<IMG SRC="search-engines-rankings.gif">

Include an ALT (alternative text) atrribute in image tags. Include the most important keyword phrases.

For example:

<IMG SRC="search-engines-rankings.gif" ALT="search engine rankings.">

If you use an image map, include HTML links, as some search engines do not follow image map links. Plus image maps do not offer search engines any link text to index. So, try to avoid the use of image maps as they do not help with your search engine optimization efforts.

Use the longer or plural version of a keyword, where possible. Word stemming is a concept used by some search engines to return search results that include keywords that extend beyond what you searched for.

For example, a search with the keyword "engine" might return results for, "engines," "engineers," and "engineering." If someone searches for the longer version of a word and your page only uses the short version, then your page will be excluded from the list of possible results.

Sprinkle a few uncommon keywords and synonyms in your main body text. Less popular keywords have less competition in the search engines. So your web page is has a greater chance of being listed amongst the top results.

Do not repeat keywords or keyword phrases over and over again on a web page, as this would be considered as spam by search engines.

Keep your pages as close to the root domain as possible. Do not set up more than 3 directory levels.

For example:

www.yoursite.com/index.html (1st level - excellent)
www.yoursite.com/html/index.html (2nd level - Good)
www.yoursite.com/html/marketing/index.html (3rd level - OK)
www.yoursite.com/html/marketing/search/index.html (Too many levels down - search engines will find it difficult to find and index pages this far down)

If you have a persistent (on most or all of your pages) navigation bar at the side of each page, your table is almost certainly set up in such a way that it pushes your page's body text down the HTML document. Search engines give prominence to keywords nearer the beginning of a HTML document. So, design your HTML table so that the navigation bar is placed after your main body text.

Move Javascript code to a separate file, or the end of the HTML document after your closing BODY or HTML tag. Yes, this technique actually works! If it is possible.

Follow these instructions to move the JavaScript code to a separate file and link to the file from the HTML document. Then place the following code in between the HEAD section:

<HEAD>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" SRC="file-name.js"></SCRIPT>
</HEAD>

This procedure also reduces your file size, and therefore your download time. In addition, it allows you to reuse the code on other pages by simply link to the JavaScript file. Both of these techniques will move your important body text nearer to the top of the HTML document.

Although not always practical, you may like to try naming your cascading style sheet tags after keywords.

For example:

.search {
color: #ff0000;
}

Use Robots.txt files instead of Robots meta tags, as some search engine robots do not recognize the tag.

Do not use font size one (1) text as the default text size. Many search engines consider tiny text to be spam. It's OK to use some font size one text.

Do not participate in link farms or link exchange programs. Search engines consider link farms and link exchange programs as spam, (which has been banned) as they have only one purpose - to artificially inflate a site's link popularity, by exchanging links with other participants.

Do not confuse link farms (which has been banned) and link exchange programs with reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking is the exchange of links with individual sites, and is certainly an accepted technique for improving your site's link popularity. Finally, do remember that links are not the only issue to be considered in ranking. Any site will stand a far greater chance of being perceived as valuable by a search engine if it contains robust and useful content that will add value to its visitors. So, don’t ignore what your site has to say!

Create Title tags with keywords. For example, if your site is www.newegg.com and you sell Computer Parts and Accessories, instead of your title saying "Newegg", it should say something like "Newegg - Computer Parts and Accessories"

- Use a lot of text on your site. At minimum we would recommend 100 words. Search engines cannot read graphics. If your site is primarily graphic based, then it will have trouble getting good rankings.

- Create Meta Tags for your site. Meta Tags are code hidden in the background that tell search engines what your keywords and descriptions are. Almost all Web Design programs like DreamWeaver and Frontpage have an option to insert Keyword and Description Meta Tags. However, if you are hand coding with HTML then you can use our Meta Tags Generator to create Meta Tags.

- Use your most important keywords about 3-8 times per 100 words.

- Purchase banner ads or text links on other sites, but make sure not to use tracking code as that will not benefit your link popularity. You want the link to be a straight link to your domain.

Install a site map, very important to do. You can make one here, go to our tools section.

Links: Web Designing Tips | Your Sites Placement In Search Engines

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