SEO techniques are effective procedures to put a website on the first page of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN for your targeted keywords. These techniques directly help in raising the SERPs (search engine result positions) of the site, increase site traffic and acquire relevant quality links.
If you want people to find your site via a search engine easily, the site will require a high SERP. This means when users search on specific keywords or phrases, they will find your site on the first page generated by the engine. Having the site on the 10th page of search engine results will not give you satisfactory traffic and you can potentially lose thousands of customers and sales.
Let's discuss the techniques that can help you towards achieving a high SERP
1. Domain & File Names
select a domain name of your site that contains words from your main keyword phrase/query. The domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. Ideally it should only contain alpha-numeric characters and no hyphens for optimum results.
2. Easy to think Keywords:
Such keywords are to be used which are searched for in excess on the net. Add keyword synonyms to your content. Make sure you use your keywords from the page you are linking to.
3. Density of placing Keywords:
Keyword density is related to the number of times the keyword appears in the text on a particular page. High keywords density is considered spamming by the search engine and can get your site blacklisted. Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.
4. Misuse of SEO Techniques:
Misuse of search engine optimization techniques may get your site blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density too high, mirror pages and mirror sites etc. These are all termed as Black Hat SEO techniques. While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for a short time, however in the long run they will slow down your progress and can have detrimental and very damaging consequences.
5. Construction of Titles and Description:
Each page should have a different title with two or three of your keyword at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people observe and therefore enough time should be spent on constructing a fully optimized and well thought title. Your description should also have at least two or three of your keywords at the beginning as so should your first sentence on the page. There should be a different title, description and first sentence on each page.
6. Authors Biography:
At the end of the page place an author biography or company name. This technique will help you to improve the branding of your site and get good rankings for your company name.
7. Website Design:
In what way the website is designed is also important. Text content should balance the HTML text. The pages of the site should validate and be accessible in all browsers and from anywhere.
8. Links on the Site:
There should always a navigation menu present on the site from where you link to all the important pages of the site. The idea is not trying to optimize the home page alone, but each and every page of the site. The secondary and tertiary pages of the site will only be recognized and indexed by the search engines if the spider can reach those pages. There should not a single broken link on any page of the site especially the index/home page.
9. Links to the Site:
This involves ascertaining links that point to your site. The online world is not much different as compared to offline world. The celebrities in the real world are all famous and rich people i.e. have high SERPs. The reason they are famous is because so many people are familiar with them and know about their lives. The same principal applies to web-sties. The more the sites link to your site, the higher it will rank on search engines. This is an ongoing task and therefore a lot of effort should be spent in obtaining links from other sites. In an ideal world you should have all the sites linking to yours and your site not linking out at all. However this is not possible, but the idea should always be kept in mind when trying to acquire links. Also the quality of incoming link plays a big role in determining the overall benefit derived and its effect towards increasing the SERPs. The better the quality the better the result and so on so forth.
These are some of the techniques, which if used effectively can directly help in increasing not only traffic, potential customers but also the rankings on all search engines. In the end it's not only about what you know but how you act. Hard work, dedication and patience is always a recipe for success, whether working online or offline.
Site Search Engine Submission
Knowing exactly how to carry out search engine optimisation can be considered a bit of a minefield. Seemingly it is easy to make mistakes that can result in not only losing rankings but also in total de-listing from search engine rankings. Here are ten of the most common bad ideas when undergoing a process of search engine optimisation.
Do not rely purely on your keyword Meta tag information. While this may have worked in the past, since around two years ago the importance of this factor has lessened. Nowadays search engines read the visible test on your website when ranking. The keyword Meta tag is not visible by users and hence its importance has dropped greatly. That is not to say that you will not need them, they are still necessary, just as not as important as they used be.
You should create a title and description Meta tag however, these are still user visible and hence regarded as relevant by the search engines. While this optimisation strategy may not in fact improve your rankings, the description and title tags are usually the first thing seen by users and hence their importance is guaranteed.
One of the worst optimisation ideas is to utilise invisible text boxes that are stuffed with keywords. This optimisation strategy can get your site banned and hence is highly unadvisable. This includes creating text that is written in the same colour as the background; understandably the search engines still see this as hidden text. These ideas can be considered as 'spammy' and as such should be avoided.
You should never purchase links; despite its popularity, search engine regulators frown on the practice. By purchasing links you may be able to improve your site rankings in the short term but as the search engine algorithms actively work to hunt down this optimisation strategy, the chances of keeping that rank for long is seriously questionable. The algorithms will in fact evaluate your links and look for patterns that may indicate you have bought links. If you have, you may see your site de-listed. A better idea is to find links that your site actually deserves, in the time you spend buying links, you could quite easily build up relevant links instead.
One of the major optimisation mistakes of developers is to develop an extremely pretty site in Flash. Unfortunately no matter how attractive it is, a search engine has no use for Flash and cannot read the information it presents. Remember that the search engine is looking for text, not lots of pretty images that jump around on the page. The same can be said for JavaScript; once again the search engines have trouble reading this format. You can use it sparingly but the best way to design your site is with text only. Make sure this text is unique so the search engine spiders find it relevant.
You should definitely avoid the optimisation process labelled cloaking. Fundamentally this involves showing the search engine spider a different page to the one that human users see. In the past this has been an extremely popular form of spamming and hence the powers that be are highly suspicious of any site that employs cloaking, no matter what your motives. Transparency is essential when trying to achieve high rankings.
By avoiding these techniques it is possible to achieve high rankings. Ultimately if you employ these 'black hat' methods you will feel the wrath of the search engines. Find yourself an optimisation firm that avoids these methods and pursues ethical SEO, this is the only true way to rankings success.
Both Gurpreetk & Thomas Pretty are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Thomas Pretty has sinced written about articles on various topics from Formula One, Debts Loans and Interior Design. Internet marketing expert Thomas Pretty looks into some of the biggest search engine optimisation mistakes and ways to avoid them.. Thomas Pretty's top article generates over 1500000 views. Bookmark Thomas Pretty to your Favourites.
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