Effective webmasters and online marketers are constantly searching for ways to improve their search engine rankings.
The simple fact is that most websites get the majority of their traffic from search engines. So it is important to give the search engines what they are looking for. If you do, your site will do well in searches and the search engines will drive traffic to your site.
There have been many changes over the last two or three years to the way search engines evaluate the importance of websites. Many of these changes have been spurred on by Google. But other engines such as Yahoo and MSN have followed suit.
There is a general consensus among search engine optimization experts on many of the techniques and practices that enhance your website in the eyes of the search engines. Here are some of them.
1. Give your site a clearly focused theme - Your site should have a clearly focused theme which can be defined in terms of search phrases (or "keywords"). If your site has no clear theme, the search engines will not be of much help to you. Ask yourself if there is a small set of search phrases that people can use to find your site. If not, then go back to the drawing board and redefine your site.
2. Evaluate your keywords - Now let's assume you have decided on a theme, and you have defined it in terms of five or six primary search phrases (keywords.) It is time to analyze these search phrases and determine if anybody actually searches for them. There is no point in having a focused theme that no one is looking for.
There are excellent free tools and services available to help you do this analysis. One of the easiest to use is at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion - the Keyword Selector Tool built into Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture.) Just enter a keyword and the tool will tell you how many searches have been done for that term in a recent period. It will also give you searches for related terms.
3. Start creating pages - Once you decide on your most important search terms (keywords) you are ready to start building pages. Give each search term its own page, and remember to focus, focus, focus. Be sure to put the keyword for each page in the page title (what shows up in the title bar), in the description metatag, and in the major headline. Then repeat it several times throughout the page, with an emphasis on repetition near the top of the page.
4. Include outbound links to "authoritative" sites in the subject area you are emphasizing. For instance, if your page is about "Golf Travel" a link to a couple large established golf or golf travel sites will help establish the subject matter of your own page.
5. Create content that is unique and that focuses on your subject matter. To carry on with the previous example, if your site is about Golf Travel, you will want to focus on several different areas -- for example Scotland Golf Travel, Ireland Golf Travel, Florida Golf Travel, and so on -- and make the content on each of these pages relevant to the theme of the page. Yes, this seems obvious, but so many websites do not have this kind of obvious focus.
6. Keep your content current and update it regularly. Search engine experts refer to this as "fresh" content. One way to keep adding fresh content is to place an RSS feed from a relevant reputable source on each page. Feeds are often from news sources or blogs, and are often updated on a daily basis. Generally speaking, the more often your content is updated, the more often it will get spidered, and the better it will rank in searches.
7. Get inbound links - Now it is time to get inbound links pointing to your site. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the project, and the one that takes the most time.
The search engines consider inbound links an indicator of the importance and relevance of your site. "Relevant" links are the most valuable. These are the ones that come from other sites (or pages) that are closely related to yours.
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