Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Basic Search Engine Optimization Techniques: Improve Search Engine Rankings Today!

In today's post, we highlight some key search engine optimization techniques you'll want to us to improve search engine rankings for your website. Here's a quick rundown of things to consider...

On Page Optimization

1. Make sure the page title is descriptive - make it different with each page if you can.

2. Use the meta description tag and make it good - this is what most search engines show as the blurb about your site on the results page.

3. Make sure you use your keywords in your copy more than once. Do bold them if it works in your content.

4. If you can make it work, use an H1 or H2 tag. If you are comfortable with CSS you can make the text in them smaller (this is becoming less and less important).

5. Make sure to use alt and title tags on images. It lets the search engines know what the image is about and can cause your images to show up on the Google image search.

6. Use title tags on your links. It will help the search engines know more about the page you are linking to and improve relevancy.

Off Page Optimization

This is also called 'Off Site Optimization' which is a misnomer. Search engines care little about 'websites' and care more about 'web pages'. The reason for this is that they don't link to a site, they link to a page. So what is this mysterious type of SEO you ask?

Well, if you read the on page part above you will have learned that Google and the other search engines decided that they couldn't trust the page itself too much as too many people put fake content on a page to generate traffic. So they decided that the best way to know if a page was relevant was to let people do it for them.

How do they make this work? They simply look at who links to you and what their page is about. If your page is about sewing, and another page that Google knows people like is also about sewing and it links to you, then your page is probably not misrepresenting itself. This is the driving force behind what is called 'Page Rank'.

Page rank is essentially a calculation of the importance of the pages linking to you vs the relevancy of your content to those pages. If a page about banking links to a page about peanut butter, then chances are that the search engines won't assign any importance to that link, but links between pages of similar content have high importance.

There is also a nebulous thing that we know exists, but don't know how to quantify. It is the matter of how much a search engine trusts a site. Sites with high trust have their outbound links given more importance than sites the search engine does not trust. An easy way to determine if a site is trustworthy or not is to think about it yourself. The folks at the search engines are humans, they will trust the same sites you do and distrust the same sites you do.

Untrustworthy Sites Include:
1. Link/Banner farms - sites with nothing but links to various other sites. These used to work, but the search engines wised up and now having a link farm link to you will hurt, not help.
Sites with a lot of advertising on them - The search engines know that these sites are mostly computer generated and have no valuable content, and so don't pay any heed to what they link to.

2. Black Hat Sites - sites that use questionable SEO tactics aren't ones that you want linking to you. Google is suspicious of them, no reason to make it suspicious of you.

Trustworthy Sites Include:
1. Directories - There are two types of directories. Automatic and Human verified. Google knows which are which and if your site is listed on a human verified directory (meaning that someone looked at your site and verified that your description and content match the category you chose to have it listed in) then it knows that your content is relevant to the description you gave. Find the directories for your market (just google things like sewing boston directory or whatever your niche/market is and you'll find some to list in.

2. News Sites - Many news sites allow you to post comments on them. Don't spam, but find some relevant articles to your site and post a few comments. Its not advised that you place your link right in the article (unless you think it applies) but rather have your link in your profile.
Sites with high page rank - This is key. There is little point having sites with no page rank link to your site with no page rank. You want sites with high page rank linking to you. Install the Google toolbar and select yes when it asks if you want to view pagerank. This will let you know how other sites rank and help you determine where to try to get links.

There are a lot of other tips and helpful bits of information out there and I'll be posting a few more specialized articles about them. While there is a lot of bogus software and ebooks out there that will literally tell you no more than what you have read above, there are some that will help you carry out the suggestions above. They'll suggest directories, give you reports on how well you rank against your competitors and many other things. Most you can do on your own, but they take time. Good SEO software like SEO Elite should mainly remove the tedious, manual tasks involved in SEO and help you focus on more important things like niche research and adding actual, valuable content to your site.

About the Author
Michael Cooper is a computer/internet/technology enthusiast and has been building websites since 1996. He has been using SEO for years to help drive traffic to his and his client's sites. Visit http://seosoftware.topconsumerproductreviews.com/

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