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Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Search Engine Optimization Techniques for Improved Search Engine Ranking

There are several search engine optimization techniques that many people are unaware of that can provide you with improved search engine ranking. In fact, many of these techniques are referred to as ‘secrets’ by many that are trying to sell their knowledge, but they are no more secret than my name.

Search engine optimization covers a wide range of techniques used online to make a page on your website appear to be more relevant to the search term used by the search engine user than competitive pages. In other words, SEO, as it is also known, can put you ahead of your competition in the search engine listings for any specific keyword.

Search engines rank web pages (not entire websites or domains) according to the relevance calculated by the software they use to scan your web pages. Such software is referred to as robots, crawlers or spiders and they are mathematical algorithms, or formulae, that use specific statistical mathematical rules to determine how relevant your page is to the keyword used by the person searching for information.

There are many different aspects of a search engine algorithm, and nobody but those that designed them fully understand what they are looking for. However, tests and search engine results have indicated many of these factors and the purpose here is to examine just a few of them, and how that knowledge can be used to improve your search engine ranking.

There is large number of factors involved, but these are the more important of those we know about.

1. On-page SEO: the HEAD section

a) Much is written about HTML tags on your web pages, but I am going to mention only the important ones. The TITLE tag appears within the HEAD tags, before the BODY tag. That means it is not seen by readers but by the search engine spiders. This is a very important tag, so use your main keyword as part of your title, but not all of it (if possible). This is what Google and others will use as the title of your search engine listing.

b) The description tag also appears in the HEAD section, and is used by search engines as the description part of your listing: either in full or in part. Use your keyword here also, and make it read well so as to persuade search engine users to click to your site.

c) Ignore the other Meta tags. You can use the keyword tag because it does no harm, but only use keywords that are actually on your web page. Few search engines use this now.

2. On-page SEO: the BODY section

a) The BODY section of your web page is what visitors will see. Use a heading to your page that contains the main keyword for the page within H1 tags. Always use one main keyword for each page – you can use others, but your main keyword will be included in the TITLE, DESCRIPTION and HEADING tags, ad is the one that you will be optimization your web page for. So anybody using that keyword should find your web page as high in the listing as possible.

b) Also apply bold and underlined formatting to your heading: the bold is the more important, and together with the H1 tag, conveys to spiders that this is important text.

c) Don’t over-use keywords. I generally use it in the heading, in the first 100 characters after the heading and in the last paragraph of the page (that spiders frequently check). Also once each 400 words or so, but use a lot of semantically related text – that is text that has the same meaning as they keyword (a keyword can consist of one word or a whole phrase). Thus, if writing about locks, make sure that the text defines whether they are canal locks, locks of hair or security locks. Use words such as barges, longboats, canals, keys, doors, hair and combs to make these distinctions to the spiders that are programmed to use the LSI algorithm (latent semantic indexing).

4. On-site SEO: Page design

a) Design your web page so that the spider sees your body text first and THEN your navigation links. You don’t want to lead the search engines away from your page almost as soon as they get there. There are tricks you can do to achieve that that have got some of my customers high on Page #1 on Google, when they had previously been unable to find their website on any search engine.

b) Use a logical on-site linking strategy that will lead the spider exactly where you want it to go: there are also ways of doing that that very few people use.

3. Off-page SE: Linking Strategy

a) Your on-site linking strategy is very important, and you can arrange the internal links between the various pages on your site to give more PageRank to one page than another. In that way you can focus on getting one page in a high listing position. Once that is visited, your visitors will be able to access your entire website.

b) Off-site linking is also of importance, and you should try to get as many possible links from other websites back to the page chosen in a). That will usually be your home page since that is generally the easiest to get the highest listing. Easy ways to do that are to publish articles on article directories, and your website on web directories.

By applying the above search engine optimization techniques it would be very surprising if you did not achieve an improved search engine ranking, even to the extent of being listed in a high position on Google. Nobody can guarantee a Page #1 listing, let alone a #1 listing on that page, but these techniques will get you a listing position considerably higher than now, and many have been rewarded with a Page #1 listing.

About the Author

Pete has been involved in article marketing and SEO for a number of years, and is you want more information on how he does it, the check out his ebook SEOciouswww.improved-search-engine-rank.com/improved-search-engine-rank.html where you will find details, including screenshots of his html, on what you can do to improve your search engine ranking

can we follow normal search engine optimization techniques for joomla websites.?

can we follow normal search engine optimization techniques for joomla websites or is there any techniques available to do seo for website which is created by using joomla.

You are talking about CMS premade web site systems. These templates are not made for SEO optimization friendliness. They often use a database factor and paramenters that do not do well with rankings, though they can be indexed. They do not offer proper page names, meta tags and so much more. I have had many clients with CMS sites who had many issues and problems as far as ranking, and we developed secondary informational web sites and blogs to help draw traffic.

CMS are wonderful sites for huge ecommerce, but again, there are major issues on the seo side.

Search engine optimization is not rocket science, but it is complex and it is an ongoing process that changes almost daily. There is no such thing as a permanent “fix” to magically send you to the top of the rankings for good. But here are some of the basics to look for when optimizing your site for the first time. There are some real simple things you can ask if they provided. FTp access to web site, not control panel, naming html pages with keywords, static html pages, use of xml sitemaps in root directory, use of h tags, different title and description tags for all pages, static text links, embedded text links and so on.

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

The fundamental concepts behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are understood by most search engine marketers, but those new to the subject should find this article to be very useful. Informative articles on various aspects of SEO have been published here on MarketPosition.com over the years, and in this post I will summarize these concepts and provide links to relevant articles.

Keyword Research
The first step in SEO is to identify the search terms for which you would like your web site to rank well on search engines. We might believe that we know these terms already, but our intuition is often incorrect about how popular or competitive search keywords actually are in reality. People use all kinds of variations of phrases as they are searching for information on the internet. It’s important to identify these terms and use them in your site content exactly as people type them into search engines. To discover what these search terms are, a keyword research tool should be used. There are several free tools available, but most of the robust keyword research tools are subscription based.

Web Site Optimization
You now have your well researched keyword list in hand, and are ready to use the keywords in your web site content. How should these search terms be integrated into your web pages? How often should the phrases be used, and in what sections of the pages? Those are excellent questions and the answers are not known exactly because they depend on the algorithms used by search engines. However, it is generally agreed upon that search engines look at several different sections of a page when evaluating its content:

Title tag
Heading tag
Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags
Text within the Body area
Link text and Link URL
ALT attribute for Image tags (the ALT tag may be less significant than other areas of the page)

Search engines look at the various sections of the document for repeating patterns of keywords or phrases. For this reason, it’s important to have a keyword density within a specific range.

Web Site Design
Aesthetics and user friendliness are important elements of web site design, but there are a number of other things to consider to ensure a web site will be as friendly to search engines as possible.

HTML Validation
It’s important to ensure that the HTML code that makes up a web page is correctly formatted. If there are errors in the code, then search engine spiders may have difficulty indexing the page’s content. Use a HTML Validator to check the formatting of HTML code,

Site Map
It’s always a good idea to create a site map to make it easy for search engine spiders to index the site’s content. Link to every page on the web site that has relevant content, and place a link to the site map on the site’s home page. It may also help to sign up for the Google Sitemaps program to help ensure your content is indexed by Google.

Develop a Site Theme
One aspect of web site design that is often overlooked is theme development. If possible, organize your content so that particular themes are reinforced. Read Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings for ideas to consider when organizing your site content.

Avoid Duplicate Content
It’s important to avoid duplicating content on the web site.

Comply with Search Engines’ Terms of Service
There are several practices to avoid to stay on good terms with search engines. Techniques like cloaking, hidden text, or spamming, for example, violate search engines’ terms of service. If a site is found to be using these types of blackhat techniques, it will typically be removed from the search engine’s index.

Build Link Popularity
The Link Popularity of a page is a term that refers to the number of other web sites that link to that page. Search engines typically consider how many other sites link to a page as a factor in determining that page’s ranking. The idea behind this is that if others link to a page, then they must consider that page’s content to be valuable in some way. However, all links are not weighted equally and it’s therefore important to try to encourage high quality web sites within your own theme area to link to your site.

Monitor Performance
Once your optimized web site is online, you’ll want to monitor its performance on the search engines. If the site is brand new, it should of course be submitted to the search engines, or perhaps resubmitted if necessary. Monitor the site’s positions on search engines for keywords of interest to identify areas where the site is performing well and areas that can be improved.

A web site that is positioned well in search engines should start receiving a significant number of visitors. To monitor traffic and other useful web site statistics, a web analytics solution such as WebTrends is recommended.

Conclusion
The art of SEO is a set of skills that can be learned and implemented by anybody who manages a web site. However, proper optimization and maintenance of the site requires time and effort, and the fundamental elements of SEO discussed above must be put into practice. Those who find they do not have the time or desire to implement their own SEO program, then hire an SEO Expert who incorporates all of the steps above.

Intro to Search Engine Optimisation