"Search
Engine Rankings for Beginners"
By Niall Roche
Search engine optimization is best left in the
mystical land of the Intenet Marketing Guru right? Good Search
engine rankings are tough to achieve. Understanding search engine
marketing takes years of studying and only people with true insider
knowledge and secret tools rank well in Google right? WRONG. Pure
crap as a matter of fact.
Ranking well in the search engines is not difficult.
In fact search engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops
most people from ranking well in search engines is misinformation.
Every week there's yet another quick fix to ranking well in search
engines and people jump from one quick fix to the next hoping
for that Top 10 position in Google and never achieving it.
There are 6 key areas of search engine optimization
that you need to know about. These are the basics. Getting these
right will help you achieve the Google rankings that you've always
wanted.
Domain Name - The jury is still out on the how
relevant a keyword rich domain name is. What I mean by keyword
rich domain name is say for example your site was going to be
about money making ideas then an idea domain name could be either
www.moneymakingideas.com or www.money-making-ideas.com. My own
personal preference is with the hyphenated approach e.g. www.money-making-ideas.com
simply because I believe that search engines can read it more
easily. To registed your domain name I would suggest using either
000Domains.com or GoDaddy.com
Content - Useful content. Not keyword stuffed,
spammy pages. Write something useful for your visitors. If you
can't write then you'll need to learn. Turn Words Into Traffic
is a great resource for learning how to write content and is a
resource that I use personally. Turn Words Into Traffic gives
you an A-Z on article writing - from a writers perspective. If
you don't want to learn how to write content then you could always
use Create Website Content Fast to help you speed the process
up.
Keywords - Keywords are the words or phrases
that you expect people to search for your site/service/content
with. There are two distinct factors to consider when choosing
keywords for your site.
1. You need to target specific keywords. For
example if you have a website about dating then you'll probably
find it quite difficult to achieve high search engine rankings
initially with that single term. However if you were to refine
an area of your site to target say Gay & Lesbian Dating that's
more specific. You could also regionalize your keywords or key
phrases e.g. Gay & Lesbian dating in Toronto. This refining
process is often referred to as niche (pronounced neech) marketing.
2. You need to choose the keywords that you want
people to find your site with. Put yourself in your visitors shoes
- think about what they might use to find you in the search engines.
What keywords or key phrases would you type into a search engine
to find your site? What keywords or key phrases would your potential
visitor use to search for you? Always, always think like a typical
websurfer.
If you're interested in seeing what people are
searching for on the web and how profitable that might be for
you I would recommened that you check out Good Keywords. It's
free and does a wonderful job of helping you find good keywords
:-)
I would also suggest that you try Wordtracker
also. It's a brilliant service for tracking down specific, popular
keywords.
Keyword density - This is how often your keyword
is used on the the page itself. For example if you have 100 words
of text on a single page and you mention your keyword 5 times
then you have 5% keyword density.
Opinions vary on this but anywhere from 1% -
7% is considered ideal. If this doesn't make sense to you then
it's ok. The simple rule is this: less is more. Do not alter the
text on your webpages to include your keyword over and over again
because.........well.... it looks stupid, won't instill any confidence
in your prospective customer and might also get you penalized
or removed from the search engines.
Page title - Your tag is critical to your page
being ranked well. Stuffing your tag with keywords in the hope
of ranking well is pointless. Your tag, once constructed properly,
will see you moving up the search engine rankings quickly. Bear
this simple fact in mind when building your websites and it will
serve you well.
Links - Having good links pointing to your site
and good links within your site (an often overlooked aspect of
search engine optimization) is pretty important as far as search
engine ranking goes. Having other sites linking to yours proves
the importance of your site to the search engines i.e. if the
content on your site is so valuable that other site owners want
to link to it then it must be important.
META Tags - Meta tags are dead baby. Well not
quite dead but they are only used as a point of reference for
search engines. It's a shame to see websites that have their META
tags still stuffed with keywords. It's pointless. Put your primary
keywords in the Meta Keyword part of your webpage but apart from
that don't lose any sleep or waste any energy on them.
There's not enough space in this article to explain
all of the above in the detail that I'd love to. Also I'm not
a search engine expert so some of the explanation is best left
to those that I learned from (Sean Burns and Jay Stockwell take
a bow please :-)
Having learned the basics of search engine optimization
and submission I have achieved Top 10 Rankings for all of my websites.
It's not hard to do this. It just takes work, a little patience
and a little common sense.
Recommended reading: Rankings Revealed Microsite
Miracles
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