Sunday, January 24, 2010

Organic Search Engine Optimization – 8 Tips for Better Pagerank

Optimizing your website so you will obtain a high search engine results position is what SEO Techniques are all about. It is reported that 65% of all websites visited start with a search from a search engine.

There is no need to go to some overpriced firm to get your site ranked well in the search engines as most of theses techniques can be accomplished by anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML. Organic Search Engine Optimization will help your page rank well and drive traffic to your site without the expense of using PPC programs or placing banners all over your site as well.

There are no tricks here, just a bit of work and some time. So let's get started by reading the following list of Organic Search Engine Optimization Techniques!

1. Domain & File Names:
Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. You can also try to use your keyword or keyword phrase as the name for the actual filename of the page you are creating as well.

2. Keyword Phrases:
Use keywords that are being searched for. You can check your keyword phrases with either the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool or the Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how often they are being searched and then incorporate these phrases into your content. You can also look at Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions for suggestions for different keyword phrases.

3. Keyword Density:
Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. Keyword density is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase are of your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to see what keyword density they are using. Too high of a keyword density will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted. A good measure of keyword density is between 3 and 7 percent. Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and your keyword phrase can be in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.

4. Bad Techniques:
Bad search engine optimization techniques can get you 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 to high, mirror pages and mirror sites.

5. Title & Meta Description & Keywords Tag:
Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see. Below the title is a description which will be either be taken from your meta name description content="Description phrase" or from the first sentence on that page. Your description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as should your first sentence. The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say Google doesn't ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway.

6. Quality Content:
Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind

7. Site Design:
You may think, “what does site design have to do with organic search engine optimization”? Well if your website has a bad color scheme that is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all of your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic header and menu bar the same place on each page. These things will keep your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has brought to the site. Use W3C Link Checker to make sure all your page links are good. If you have broken links on your site this can effect the ranking you are given. Put a proper doctype on each page. If you don't have a proper doctype on each page Internet Explorer will go into quirks mode and display it different. Use The W3C Markup Validate Service to verify that your pages are Validate HTML or XHTML code. The W3C validation will verify that your HTML or XHTML is not broken. This validation shows you any broken code that could keep your webpages from displaying properly in all the different browsers and browser versions.

8. Separate Content & Presentation:
Put all your presentation code into Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This separates the presentation from the content and makes your html files up to 50% smaller. It is reported that the search engine bots prefer this and the more content you have compared to presentation in your file, the better you get rated. Read why tables for markup are stupid for an overview.

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