PCs>> Five and a Half Ways to Amp Up Your Search Engine Optimization

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If you have a website and you want more people to see your pages then you definetly need to optimise your pages for search engines. That is you have to play the game that search engines use to rank each and every page that is relevent to a search. This article talks about choosing the best keywords to use in your pages and where to place them.

Search engine optimisation is phrase that is the buz word among web developers and web marketers. It is basically is to do with the changes that you can make to your webpages so that search engines are more likely to list them near the top a list of search results.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask all have slightly different criteria to determine the most relevent pages to the words that you type in. Here in this article are some general principles that apply to all search engines to a certain degree. When you really get into optimising your pages for search engines you might want to target specific search engines that you want to rank highly with. To do this you need to concentrate your efforts more on some principles than others. For example, at the time of writing Google places a lot of importance on how many links point to that page from other sites.

 by: Dave Carlson

Statistics show that 85% of pages visited on the Internet come from people who have gotten there from a search engine. Statistically, people look first at the top of the first page of the regular search results, then the bottom, and then they go to the sponsored listings.

There is an art and science to being ranked highly on the search engines. The science is formatting the pages with the right meta tags and submitting them in the right way to the search engines. The art is to make the site look and read normal in spite of filling it with key words.

Here are five and a half ways to get a higher ranking and more visitors:

1. Pick the right Key Words and Phrases

These are the words and phrases that people will put into search engines to try to find your product, business or organization. Having good key words and phrases is foundational to have good optimization. This takes research using such tools at Wordtracker and Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. They give you a good idea of what people are searching for and what you should focus on.

2. Use Good Header Tags

Header tags are hidden in the code within your Web page. The most important one is the "title" tag, which isn’t considered a META tag. It tells what’s within your page and it’s important to have your keyphrases in it. It is also good to have keyphrases in your "description" META tag, though it doesn’t rank nearly as high as the "title" tag.

3. Use Keyphrases in Your Visible Page Title

Provide a unique title to each page on your site that is chock full of key words and phrases. Search engines like this because it means that there is a higher probability that your site is a good match for what people are looking for. This is should be placed within the H1 tag (top heading) of your page and is visible to the visitor. It also pays to have your keyphrases in subtitles on the page.

4. Provide Plenty of Content on Your Site

Shoot to have at least 450 characters on your page. Concentrate on putting key words and phrases in the first paragraph and last paragraphs.

5. Secure a Lot of Related Incoming Links

The more sites linked to your site, the higher you will be ranked by the search engines. These links can be from strategic partners, vendors, directories or other types of sites with whom you exchange links.

If you are a web site developer, put in your contract that you are going to put a developer’s link at the bottom of the site, such as, "Web site design by Green Chair Marketing Group," with an active link to your site. This will help your site grow in its link popularity.

5.5 Keep Optimizing Your Site

The more content on your site, the better. I suggest adding a couple pages a month, whether it’s case studies, more product information, testimonials, articles, press releases, etc. If you add just five new pages a month, you will have 60 new pages by the end of the year, and over 100 pages by the end of the second year.

You are bound to catch some people you would have missed because there is more content to choose from. And your site will be more highly ranked by Google, because they highly weigh sites that have more content.

While you’re at it, continue to get relevant links coming into your site. Google loves incoming links. And you might have people click through to your site from these other places.

If you don’t have time to work on the optimization or would feel more comfortable having someone else do it, consider strongly hiring a professional to do your search engine optimization. That way you can focus your energies on sales or creating more and better product.

One caveat, I would stay away from companies that initiate contact with you through emails or phone calls. They often use techniques that can get your severely penalized by the search engines. Ask people you know who have been successful in their search engine positioning who they use.

About The Author Dave Carlson owns Green Chair Marketing Group, an Internet marketing firm specializing in driving visitors to web sites by search engine optimization, pay per click, and web design/redesign. 720-427-5660 Visit his site at http//:www.GreenChair.net. links@greenchair.net

PiciFix would like to add ...

As mentioned above inbound links are a great way improving your search engine ranking. But that's just half the story really. What is equally important is how the link is made. The words that you click on to follow a link are called the anchor words and are very important to search engines. For example, imagine there are loads of links all over the web that point to your homepage, all using the anchor text "click here". As far as the Google is concerned your page is associated with not so much with topic of the page but with "click here". Try it. Go to Google and search for "click here". You will find pages not about click here but ones that are linked to with those words e.g. Acrobate reader.

In other words it's best to get your targeted keywords in the anchor text that link to your pages.

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