Making out your website for search engines is essential to its success. A typical website can drive an average of up to 60% of its web traffic from organic search engines. While there is no precise discipline for what sort of tactics should be applied to maximize your search results, there has been some worthwhile proven ways based on history, experience and evidence. Listed below are the techniques to attain higher ranking in the search results.
1. Carefully Chose your Keywords
Without useful and related keywords your website will get lost in the millions of websites competing for your business. It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not being looked for. So you should invest some resources into finding the best keywords. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, there are several SEO tools and SEO software available such as KeywordDiscovery, KeywordIndex, Wordtracker or Google's Keyword Tool. A better tool would be to buy software with elaborated information about keywords. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose some different ones for every page. Never go for general keywords such as "health" or "medicine" as they are rarely suggestive of what your site is really about.
When using any SEO tool, start by keeping your searches vague, and drilling down to create small clusters of keywords. The results will generate new hints and ideas that you may not have had in mind. In the Sponsored Ads, these clusters become your ad groups. With your SEO, they become the directories of the content you'll want to have on your website.
2. Get a Niche Market
It is much harder to receive top search engine rankings for a new site than an established site for it will have to fight amongst web sites that have established high search engine rankings. To compete with these web sites you first need to find a niche market, and then work up your website to a competing position. Let’s say your website is geared towards hair care. You would not use the keyword hair care since it has too much competition. You can use a keyword tool to find suggestions of related keywords that you will be able to compete against. You may find the keyword “hair care products” or “hair care remedies”. These phrases are much better keywords than generic terms like “hair care”.
Use the list of a few keywords and check out the number of competitors on Goggle. If this exceeds a few million, then you need to seek a more specific keyword.
The next step is to observe the top listed pages and see how well they are optimized. You can download Google Toolbar and add Page Rank to your browser for free. Check the domains homepage, not a sub page to get an exact Page Rank. You can easily compete with web pages holding low Page Rank between 0 - 3. A web site with a Page Rank of 4 - 6 is a bit harder to compete with, but is manageable.
3. Inspect Competitors Source Code
It is important to view expected competitor’s source code to see how efficiently they have performed on page search engine optimization. Click “view” on your Brower and then click on the “source” option as exhibited. This will bring up a page with all the html code on it. You do not need to be skilled in html to understand what we are looking for. We need to see if they are using their keywords in the header tags, the title tags, and the image alt tags. These should all be placed near the top of the source code.
If you cannot find these then go to the toolbar and chose “edit” and select “find” and type in h1 or title, etc. to see if there are being used for the keywords. If these do not exist or are not being used to hold keywords, you have found an easily beaten page that can be outranked with some suitable optimization. Then look at the body content to see the number of keywords in the body content. A site deficient in keywords in the body context is poorly optimized. You should always make sure your web page is keyword rich with relevant content.
4. Keyword Placement
After you have selected a few keywords to use, combine the ones that have like terms. For example you have selected three keywords “hair care remedies; hair care products; organic hair care”.
As you can see that all three keywords contain the words “hair care”, therefore we can combine the words to better optimize your page.
After ascertaining keywords, you need to optimize your website for good ranking. Regarding on-page scripting the search engines look for keywords in the Meta and Title fields and keywords in the body of your website.
There are two very important fields regarding Meta Tags.
(i) Title Tag: For the title tag the fewer the keywords used, the better the search engines will rank your page. It is important totarget the most critical keywords in the Title. Every page should have a unique Title.
When we create the page it should never have “Welcome to our website!” in the Title Tags.
It should never have “hair care remedies and hair care products and organic hair care” in the Title Tags either. The way the title tags should look is: “Organic Hair Care Remedies | Hair Care Products”
You should always remove prepositions such as “and” as this will only harm your search engine optimization. The fewer, more relevant the words are the higher your search engine ranking will be.
(ii) META Description Tag: Some engines display the defined description, while others do not. All search engines do interpret the description tag, and do utilize the content found within in the ranking process. A good formula is to create descriptions that do not exceed 200-250 characters.
In today's SEO market META keyword Tag is essentially useless, but is often good to utilize as a placeholder for the keywords targeted.
Header 1 tags should be placed above your body content. This should carry your most relevant keyword in this tag. It will considerably increase your page ranking. The Header 2 tag should contain your second most significant keyword. The header 3 tag will have your least important keyword placed in it. These header tags are often neglected, but make a substantial difference in your on page search engine optimization.
The other optimization factor is body content. The body content of your webpage should be rich with keywords and relevant content. Depending on the architecture of a website, one may regard various means of placing keywords within body content. Generally it is best to place body content within a viewable area of the website. You should have each keyword appear at least once for every 1-2 paragraphs. Do not stuff your body content with keywords.
Some websites possibly be graphic intense or within frames, or flash. In this situation, you need to place keywords in ALT Tags or No-Script tags. Image tags alt tags should also be keyword rich. Search engines often look at the alt tags of images on your web site to get a feel of what your web site is about. If the alt tags do not have your keywords then you will be ranked lower than if you had keywords in your alt tags.
You must supply spiders with the keywords you want to rank in a variety of places, including META tags, Title, ALT Tags, Body content, links, etc. Engaging the help of a professional is often times the thriftiest means of carrying out these various nuances.
5. Search Engine Submission
You should not submit your site straight to the search engines as it can take weeks or even months to get your site listed. Instead get listed on top ranking pages that are relevant to your web sites content. These high ranking pages are often optimized on a weekly or daily basis. Every time the site is indexed your link will appear and the search engines will automatically list your site in its index.
To do this you need to search for web sites that are indexed by search engines and get them to link to you. To make it easier, write some kind of article relevant to your business line. Include your web page URL at the bottom of the article to get picked up by the search engines. Submit the article to popular article directories on the web and you will be indexed by the search engines in a matter of days rather than months.
The other option is to contact high page ranked websites that are relevant to your line of work. Contact the web site and by sending them an email ask them to link to your site. In return, you link back to their website.
You can buy a link in top Page Rank sites through link builders. Remember that you only need to purchase a link for one month, since it will take less than one month to get you indexed by the major search engines. Continuing to pay for the link after a month is a waste of your money.
6. Off page Optimization
Off page optimization is just as important as on page optimization. First open up a spread sheet in Excel and list the following columns: Linking Website, Anchor Text, Page Rank, Link Popularity Page Title, and Number of Outbound Links. Then search your keyword on Google and fill in the information for the top 10 websites.
To discover the linking websites go to Google and type in the websites URL “link:www.thewebsite.com”. Count the number of sites that are listed to get the link popularity.
Anchor text is whatever follows the .com or .org of a website URL.
Page Rank is the rank Google gives to websites.
Page Title is the title of the page that appears on the top left of the screen. If the title does not contain the keywords then the site is not well optimized and easy to excel in rankings.
Number of Outbound Links is the number of links located on the webpage linking to the site you’re checking.
Once all this information has been assembled you can see what needs to be done to your site to beat the top ranking sites.
7. Search Engines and Capitalization
Capitalizing different letters in keywords brings up different results in search engines. Search engines are case-sensitive so it is important how you use capitalization. The problem with listing every variation of a word results in the search engines thinking that you are spam and deleting your URL. This gets worse with singular and plural words.
The solution is to stick with lowercase listings instead of trying different variations. Most people search in all lowercase and get the most relevant listings. Lowercase searching has dominated all the search engines ranging from 85 percent to 90 percent of the total terms used. Now most search engines are not case sensitive anymore.
8. Search Engine Spamming
Spamming does not take well with current search engines for they have fell upon ways to fight keyword stuffing and other search engine tricks. Search engines can detect your spam and will act consequently by penalizing or banning you from their listings. Search engine spam is reckoned the same as email spam and nobody likes to work with a spammer. There is no need for search engine spamming if your website has been optimized correctly.
9. Hire a Professional SEO
Search engine optimization is something that is time taking and demands lots of research. Most businesses do not have time to optimize their websites. Hire a professional search engine optimizer if your business relies on internet sales. SEO optimizers make sure everything is inline at your site and fix any problems that may be holding you back from reaching the top ranks. If you really want to be at the top of any searches you need professionals to get in and assist work out the problem.
10. Optimizing File Nomenclatures
If possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "hair care" you'll want to save the images used on that page as hair-care-01.jpg or hair_care_01.jpg. Many SEO's have experienced progress in ranking by renaming images and media. You may also receive visits from Google Images and other media search queries.
More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now permit users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the hair-care page could be hair-care.html or hair_care.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or show content, do your best to guarantee the content has the keywords in the filename in addition to a Title or ALT attribute. You may need to contact your IT department or webmaster to rewrite your page URLs if your website platform is non-accommodating to custom URL nomenclature.
11. Paid Submission
Once your site if fully optimized you'll need to submit to the engines, or pay the engines to guarantee that you will be indexed into their database. Paid Inclusion doesn't mean better rankings, but it does mean you are guaranteed the chance to rank because you will be listed in the databases.
12. Page Rank
After setting the right keywords and optimizing all of the content, you are now in the top 80 percentile of the websites listed for the keywords you are trying to target. Now you have to be the most popular too to get top page listing. This is named as link popularity or PageRank by Google. Every algorithm uses a different form of link popularity, PageRank being the most desired because of the large Google network. Every website is given a score somewhere between 0 and 10. You need a high score to target popularly searched keywords.
13. Link Building
While the algorithm for determining page rank covers many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your website. There are many esteemed and niche directory sites that you can use to submit your web site, or specific blog articles to.
With genuine content you’ll be able to generate links with other web sites and blogs too. It’s slightly of a reciprocal, in that if you link out to other sites, you’ll find sites linking back to you. This way, hopefully, you will see your page rank going up as well.
14. Make Your Website Crawlable
Flash-based Websites look nice and pretty but search engines robots and engine spiders cannot crawl them. Use of iFrames also is not encouraged somehow. While search engines today handle better at working with Flash, text and HTML are still the way to go, unless you are more interested in flashy interface than stronger search results.
15. Submit Your Pages to Social Bookmarking Sites
Social media ranges from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more. Submitting content of your website to major social news sites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can help get better results on the SERPs and you’ll see traffic to your web site increasing as well.
Don’t expect to join a site like Twitter for the pure sake of pushing your content. Even if you are on the site merely for networking, the key is to make friends. Help out your network members if they ask for a “retweet” or Digg and give helpful advice if inquired. You will often find that friends will submit your posts and give you votes on the social bookmarking sites. The more votes you receive, the more likely your post is to be noticed by others and shared around.