Marketing Defined

How to improve your Search Engine Rankings:

Updated: September 2008

Most people think of SEO to improve their search engine rankings as being such a skilled task, that without putting a great deal of time and effort into it, it is simply beyond their capabilities in a quest to increase their free website traffic.

Wrong! Yes, improving search engine rankings in competitive topic areas does require a good deal of knowledge and expertise and search engine marketing experts are needed, but most websites aren’t in very competitive areas.

Many of them can get top rankings and the associated flow of organic or free website traffic, by applying the basic SEO strategies… learned in less than 30 minutes.

[NOTE: Until you become a recognized authority figure in a chosen niche, it's best to avoid little personal touches that you think are OK, unless you have solid backing that it will not hurt your rankings ... a pet example: the title phrase of your article must contain your keyphrase at the very beginning and preferably have no extra words at all, for any reason! Fullstop!]

This article lays out the foundations of best practice SEO.

It can be well worthwhile trying them before paying an expert as oftentimes, the basics are all that’s needed.

NOTE: the SEO copywriting method [a.k.a. search engine optimization copywriting] applies these basics to a site’s existing pages. It doesn’t go into more advanced search engine optimization techniques that require more knowledge and expertise.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of achieving top rankings in the search engines for a website’s most relevant search terms.

The most relevant search terms are the phrases that people are most likely to type into a search engine when looking for what the website has to offer. These are the search terms that it is essential to rank highly for, and these are the search terms that search engine optimization targets. The following steps are recommended:

• The first step is to choose the most suitable search terms for your site
• Then allocate one or two of them to each suitable page
  within the site
• One search term per page is preferable, but two per page is not so bad
• It is sometimes useful to split a largish page, that covers several closely related topics or several aspects of a topic, into two or more smaller pages so that a different search term can be targeted on each of them
• Matching search terms to a page’s content is essential

NOTE: smaller pages are better than larger ones because it is easier to target a search term when there is less text on the page to dilute the focus.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Wherever examples of HTML tags are outlined in this article, be sure to substitute the brackets [ ] for the correct format < > brackets required for the HTML language … this is the quickest way to display HTML commands in the body of an article, without having to add “code” tags or use a code plug in.

SEO: Link structure within the site

An obvious, but sometimes overlooked, aspect of search engine optimization is to make sure that search engine spiders can actually find (crawl) all of the site’s pages. If they can’t find them, they sure as hell won’t get spidered and indexed, and no amount of search engine optimization on them will help.

A Site Map is an absolute must!  An XML site map must be generated for a Blog and a link to this XML map placed on the home page… preferably in the footer so a SE spider who visits  your home page… will continue crawling and indexing all other pages of the Blog contained within.  For Wordpress users, this is easily accomplished with an  XML compliant Site-Map generator plug in .

Some points to note:

• Spiders can’t see links that are accomplished by Javascript so, as far as search engines are concerned, they don’t exist. Don’t use Javascript links if you want spiders to follow your links.
• Google won’t spider any URL that looks like it has a Session ID in it, so URLs with longish numbers in them must be avoided. These are usually dynamic URLs .. for example: containing characters like SE ‘unfriendly’ ampersands.
• Make sure that all pages link to at least one other page - but not vice versa.   However, all pages must have a link to the home page.  Links to pages that don’t link out are called “dangling links”, and the reason to avoid them can be found here.
• It is good to structure the internal links so that targeted search terms are reinforced. E.g. organize the links so that a topic’s sub-topic pages actually link to the topic page with the right anchor text in the link (see example of where anchor text should go in the below).

SEO: Off-Page Elements

Link text:

[a href="yoururl"]keyword containing anchor link text[/a]

This is one of the two most important elements for good rankings.

The clickable link as in the example: ‘keyword containing anchor text’ can be on pages within the site or on other sites’ pages. Either way, it is important that …

The target page’s main search term should be included in the link text as shown in the example above.

CRUCIAL: Don’t use identical link text for every link that links to a page, but do include the target page’s main search term in the link text .. simply alter the link text with theme related keywords so it does not appear as SPAM to the Search Engines.

Google attributes link text to the target page - as actually being on the target page, and it treats it’s pseudo-presence as being an important element of the target page. Links carry even more weight if the text around them is concerned with the target page’s topic and search term(s).

SEO: On-Page Elements

The Title tag:

[title]some title words[/title]

This is second of the two most important elements for good rankings. Make sure that the page’s search term or keyphrase is contained in this tag, and place it as near to the front or beginning as is reasonable, whilst ensuring that it reads well.

There’s nothing wrong with placing the search term up front on its own, followed by a period; e.g. “Pagerank. Google’s PageRank and how to make the most of it”. The target search term is, of course, “PageRank”.

Obviously each page’s Title tag should be different to the Title tags on the site’s other pages.

The Description tag:

[meta content="your description goes here" name="description"]

Some search engines, such as Google, don’t display the Description like they used to do, but even so, it should still be included in each page for those engines that do, and for the odd times when Google will display it.

Write an appealing description for the page and incorporate the page’s search term into it at least once and, preferably, twice. Place one instance of it at the start or as near to the start as is reasonably possible.

The Keywords tag:

[meta content="your keywords go here with no commas in
between" name="keywords"]

The words in the Keywords tag were never treated as keywords by the search engines; they were treated as text on the page. The tag isn’t as effective as it used to be but there is no reason to leave it out.

So put a few keywords into the tag and include the search term for that page once at the front, and a second time further along the line.

There is no need to separate keywords and keyphrases with commas as is often done, since the engines ignore commas.

The H tag

[hn]some heading words[/hn]

“n” is a number from 1 to 6; the biggest heading size being 1.  H tags are given more weight than ordinary text and, the bigger the H size, the more weight it receives, for example the H1 tag bears the most weight.

So include the target search term in H tags at least once on the page, and two or three times if possible. Also, place the first H tag as near to the top of the page as possible.

Also make a habit of using H tags in the sub headings of your Blog posts.

Bold text

Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. At least, enclose the search term in bold tags a couple of times when it appears on the page, preferably at the very beginning of an article and right at the very end…  but no more.

Text

Use of the search term in the body of your web page is recommended at no more than 2% for Google, who will consider anything more SPAM and penalize you accordingly.

On the other hand, Yahoo and MSN Search have much higher keyword or search term density tolerances, perhaps as high as 5% of total words… please note the following update on keyword density.

That difference leaves quite a distance between the optimum limits for Google and the levels permissible in Yahoo and MSN.

A prudent webmaster will recognize that a tradeoff will be necessary, while ensuring that the copy reads well for potential customers and clients

[Update 2008: Theme related keywords now bear far more weight in line with the new shift to Latent Semantic Indexing. Read Using Theme vs Keyword Density For Top Rankings to appreciate why stuffing keywords in to an article no longer works.
Therefore it is now crucial to use theme based keyphrases in a natural manner throughout all of a web site's pages. For each page.. make sure that you use the key term just twice, preferably in the first paragraph of body text and once at the end, and bold it one time only. Anything more will probably be viewed as Spam.]

Alt text

[img alt="alt text which is displayed on  mouseover must
include search phrase or keyphrase" src="url" /]

Include the search term or keyphrase in the alt text of all images on the page.  Keep in mind that some systems such as Braille readers and speach synthesisers use the alt text, so you might want to make them accurate by closely describing the image..  and including the search term.

Improve Search Engine Ranking - Summary:

• Select your main search terms
• Allocate each search term to a suitable existing page
• Split some pages if necessary
• Organize the internal linkages and link text to suit the target search terms and their pages
• Organize links from other sites to suit the target search terms and their pages and again include these terms in the alt text
• Organize all the on-page elements to suit each page’s target search term

Sit back and watch your Search Engine rankings improve!

Some of the points in How to Improve your Search Engine Rankings is based, in part,  on a forum thread I read at the Digitalpoint Forum.  But to allow for recent change in the SE algorithms, I have updated in September 2008 all these practical SEO tips to help you gain quality search engine placements.

Until you become an authority figure in your chosen niche and gain a decent reader base… it is recommended to apply the above optimization tips when writing each article or blog post.  These are the very same tips which I have consistently applied, particularly to the earlier posts in this Blog. The results will be rewarding: they have certainly provided me with repeat, targeted traffic that high search engine rankings so generously provide.