For website owners just starting to explore search engine optimization, improving search engine ranking may seem like learning a foreign language. The many properties that can affect a website’s ranking in search engines have very particular rules to follow that seem to change as soon as you have mastered one. However, in the search engine marketing industry, some general consensus has been reached over basic search engine optimization tactics. This article will outline the preliminary steps to search engine ranking improvements.
Before any search engine optimization (SEO) work is performed, it is critical to first conduct keyword research and analysis. Identifying relevant and attainable keywords is vital for any SEO campaign. Focus on keywords that will direct targeted visitors to your site, and don’t concentrate on keywords that do not represent what your site is offering. This will only result in misled visitors and high exit rates. There is typically a good balance between being too general and overly specific when choosing keywords.
The second part of keyword research is competitive analysis. Focusing your SEO work on highly competitive keywords can be virtually useless, especially for new sites. Once you have developed a solid list of realistic keywords to optimize for, there are several elementary tactics to concentrate your efforts on. In this article, we will focus on on-site optimization and link building.
On-Site Optimization
Because search engines “crawl” your website when determining its relevancy to keywords, website elements are important for search engine ranking. On-site details such as title tags, meta descriptions, keyword density and URL’s can have significant influence on search engine ranking. Targeted keywords should be placed in the title tags, meta descriptions and URL’s of your site. Additionally, the body text on the home page and on internal pages should reflect the title tag and meta descriptions in a relevant manor. Avoid duplicate content and assign different title tags and meta descriptions to each page.
When developing page text, you should also consider keyword density. Competitive analysis is one way to determine the appropriate keyword density as well as keyword placement in different site elements. There are many tools that can help you analyze the competition’s on-site layout; however, if you simply observe the pages of top ranking sites, you can get a pretty good idea yourself.
Link Building
Increasing the number of incoming links to your website is one of the best tactics for improving search engine ranking. Depending on the competition, the number of links needed to boost ranking varies. Like on-site optimization, looking at the competition is a good way to determine how many incoming links you should aim for. Developing a link goal is fairly simple; attaining links, however, can be very difficult.
There are several ways to acquire incoming links including article writing, forum posts, blog comments and press releases. Writing articles for submission sites such as ezinearticles.com and amazines.com is an easy and effective way to gain incoming links and improve keyword ranking. As long as you author an informative article (that incorporates your keywords without sounding spammy), submitted articles are generally published within one to two weeks. Be sure to incorporate links with keyword anchor text into the body of the article or in the resource box, depending on the site’s editorial guidelines.
The more relevant and respected the site is that links back to your own site, the higher search engines rate the value of that particular link, so it is important to avoid low-quality sites. When evaluating a site to place an inbound link, do your research because by placing a link on a site, you are essentially telling both the search engines and visitors that you are associated with that site. Similarly, forum posts and blog comments should be limited to sites that are highly relevant to your keywords and that have a decent page rank. For any new product launches or company events, press releases are an excellent opportunity for increasing inbound links as well.
On-site optimization and link building are just two of several search engine marketing strategies. Professional search engine optimization firms and consultants consider many more components than those briefly summarized above, but having a basic understanding of the structure behind search engine ranking is important for any professional involved in the online community.
Rachel Messina is a writer and Internet marketing specialist with Mountain Media, an ecommerce solutions firm that also provides professional search engine optimization and search engine ranking services.
<p>by <a href="http://www.seo-optimisation.net">SEO Optimisation</a></p>
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