SEO Techniques

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

So you want your website to be on the first page of every search engine? This article on SEO Techniques will help you to move towards that goal. Set your aim high, the sky is the limit! Others have done it, so why can't you -- with some time and effert it is possible!

If you have been putting off optimizing your website so you'll have a higher search engine results position, today is a good day to make a start. You will find it is much easier that you expected!

The following list of SEO Techniques will help you optimize your website so you will get a higher Search Engine Results Position (SERP). Some of the items can be done quickly -- others will take a bit of time.

If you complete all the items on the following list of SEO Techniques, give the search engines some time to send out their bots to deep crawl your website, your site traffic will increase. Make sure you are ready for it!

Search Engine Optimization -- What is it?

Optimizing your website so you will obtain a high search engine results position is what SEO Techniques is all about. It is reported that 65% of all websites visited start with a search from a search engine.

For people to find your site via a search engine, the site will require a high Search Engine Results Position (SERP). This means when they search keywords phrases like SEO techniques, they will find you site page on the first page of the search engine results. Ending up on the 10 page of the search engines results will not get you any traffic.

Getting a high SERP is a combination of a number of things. Leaving out any of the items on the following list of SEO Techniques can result in your page not getting as high a search engine results position as it could.

The SEO List

There are no tricks here, just a bit of work and some time. So let's get started by reading the following list of SEO Techniques!

  1. Search Engine Submission:
    After the content of your website is finished, your website is up on the internet and you have applied these SEO Techniques, you will need to either submit your site to the top search engines or obtain backlinks from other websites so the bots can find your website. See backlinks information in the item that follows.
    The top three search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Google is the #1 search engine choice and Yahoo is #2. Yahoo recently stopped using Google search technology and started using their own search engine technology. Yahoo search engine technology is used by MSN and Altavista so when you submit to Yahoo you will be covered for both of those search engines.
    MSN is #3 and is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft is slated to launch their own search engine technology in 2005. MSN is currently powered by Yahoo. There also are a large number of other sites that have a smaller market share. Most of these are powered by Inktomi. Google's submission form and Yahoo's submission form are free, while Inktomi's submission form is fee based. Inktomi/FAST search engine technology is used by Lycos, HotBot, Excite, AllTheWeb, Overture, Infospace, Dogpile and a number of others search engines. So when you submit your site to Inktomi/FAST you are getting submitted to the above search engines and to a good number of other search engines at the same time.
  2. SEO Tools:
    The following SEO Tools are the cream of the crop tools and are a very important in helping your optimize your website pages. These are the tools that I use when I optimize a web site. I have gone over all the major SEO Tool websites and have included here the best tools.
    If you are in the process of building a site these tools will help you choose your keyword phrases, provide you with synonyms terms to include in the body of your page, enable to your view the PageRank and number of Backlinks of the sites you will be be competing with for the keyword phrases your are targeting.
    For those that already have a site, these tools will enable you to check and make sure you are targeting the best keyword phrases for your site, enable you to check and see how many pages you have in the different search engine databases, check the PR and backlinks of your competition etc.
    If you have found an useful internet based SEO Tool that is not list here please feel free to email me the URL and a commment concerning that SEO Tool to Add This SEO Tool.
    1. Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool is a popup tool where you enter a prospective keyword and it returns all the different keyword phrases that are being searched on Overture search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and Hotbot. This tool will also show how many times each keyword phrase was searched in the last month. You use this kind of data to help you choose the keyword phrases you want to target.
    2. Overture Keyword Popularity Tool is the same as the popup above but this tool shows the number of times each keyword phrase is searched by hour, day, week, year, and gives you estimates of the coming year.
    3. Search Engine Position Checker by Webmaster Toolkit allows you to enter your keyword phrases and site URL and then displays the top 50 position for those keyword phrases in Altavista, Excite, Google, Yahoo, HotBot, MSN, WiseNut, Alltheweb and Teoma.
    4. Search Engine Positioning Tool by SEO-Guy enables you to enter your keyword phrase with your site URL and it shows the top 100 results for those keyword phrases in Yahoo, Google, AllTheWeb, MSN and HotBot.
    5. Keyword Verification by Marketleap has you enter you keyword phrase and site URL and displays the top 30 results for your keyword phrase in Alltheweb, AltaVista, AOL, Dmoz, Google, AOL, HotBot, Lycos, MSN, Netscape and WiseNut.
    6. Keyword Analysus Tool by McDar displays the top top websites for the entered keyword phrase and displays their number of pages in Google, number of backlinks, PageRrank, their allinanchor: position and number of pages in Yahoo.
    7. Link Popularity Checker by Webmaster Toolkit enables you to enter your URL shows the number of links your site has in Google, Altavista, MSN, AlltheWeb and Yahoo.
    8. Link Appeal tool by Webmaster Toolkit will calculate the desirability rating of having a link on the url you specify. This calculation includes factors such as PageRank, number of outbound links and the overall percentage of links to html. It is intended as a guideline for evaluating whether you should ask for a link on a certain page or not.
    9. Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions provides you with More Specific Keywords and Similar Keywords. While this tool doesn't provide you with as many different keyword phrases that are being searched on Google as the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool does for Yahoo, MSN, Hotbot and Altavista etc., it does provide you with a long list of Similar Keywords that you can include in the text of your webpage for synonyms words.
    10. Search Engine Saturation Tool will display the number of your site pages that are in the database of Alltheweb, AltaVista, Google/AOL and HotBot Search Engines. It also enables you to enter up to 5 URLs of competing sites and compares your site to those sites in a graph. MarketLeap also stores this data so your can view your trend/history report.
    11. Keyword Density - Search Engine Spider Simulator
    12. Word Tracker - The Ultimate Tool to Increase Your Website Traffic
    13. Meta Tag Generator - Webmaster Toolkit
    14. Search Engine Spider Simulator
    15. Web Page Analyzer - Webmaster Toolkit
    16. goRank SEO Tools - Ontology Related Keyword Finder
    17. Similar Page Checker
    18. Code to Text Ratio Calculator
    19. Google Toolbar
    20. Yahoo Toolbar
    21. Tracks Status of Inclusion to DMOZ Directory
  3. Backlinks:
    Getting numerious backlinks from other relevant websites with the anchor text of the links being your keyword phrase will get you a higher SERP, and also high PageRank (PR). The more revelant the backlinks are the higher SERP you will get. Some times people get their eyes all on a high PageRank.
    High PR with out numerous revelant backlinks anchor texted with your keyword phrase, will not get you the SERP you are looking for, PageRank is secondary. With these revelant backlinks comes PR and with PR come crawls and deep crawls with higher PR.
    Many SEO experts suggest you don't submitting your URL to the search engines but than you work on getting revelant backlinks. Through these backlinks the search engine bots will find your site, crawl it and add you to the search engine database.
    When looking for backlinks, find websites that use the same keywords as you do and have high SERP but low PR. In many cases they will be easier to get backlinks from these sites. You can find prospective sites for backlinks by searching your keywords in the main search engines. Visit those pages and email the webmaster and offer a reciprocal link.
    Do a search engine search using "keyword phrase link exchange." This will bring up sites that are related to your site that are looking for link exchnages.
    When requesting reciprocal links you need to be careful how you link. Keep in mind it is not high PR you are looking for but relevant backlinks. Never link to an casino website unless that is what your site is. Also be careful that you aren't linked to pages that have more than 40 out going links on one page.
  4. PageRank:
     PageRank is one of more than 100 factors Google uses in the ranking of you website and your resulting position on their search engine. You get PageRank (PR) by having backward links from other website pages that have a higher PR rating than your site page the link is to. The PR of your site is updated about once of month when Google updates their database of web pages.
    For example if you have a backward link from a site that has a PR of 5, some of that PR be will transfered from their website to your website page they linked to. These links are called backlinks.Sites with high PageRank will get crawled by the search engine bots more often, and the crawls will be deeper.
    While Google takes into consideration the PageRank of your site, high PR doesn't always equate to a higher Search Engine Results Position (SERP). You can have high PR and have a low SERP on a certian keyword phrase, while some other site can have low PR but have a high SERP on the same keyword phrase.
    In your pursue for a high PR keep in mind that numerous relevant keyword anchor texted backlinks will get you a higher SERP than just raw high PR and that with numerous relevant keyword anchor texted backlinks will come PR.
    You aim shouldn't be just for high PR, but for proper backlinks that will bring with them a higher PR.
  5. Keyword Phrases:
    1. Use keywords that are being searched for. You can check your keyword phrases with either the Search Term Suggestion Tool or the Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how often they are being searched. You can also look at Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions for suggestions for different keyword phrases.
    2. Add keyword synonyms to your content.
    3. Put the keyword phrases in the <title>keyword phrase</title> .
    4. Insert the keyword phrases in a <h1>keyword phrase</h1> tag at the beginning of your page. Keyword synonyms should be put in your h2 & h3 tags. The h1, h2, h3 tags are used for titles and subtitles in articles.
    5. Make sure you use your keyword phrases from the page you are linking to, in your anchor text on the site map. i.e. SEO Techniques.
  6. Keyword Density:
    Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. Keyword density is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase are of your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to see what keyword density they are using. To high a keyword density will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted.
    Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and your keyword phrase be in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.
  7. Bad Techniques:
     Bad search engine optimization techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density to high, mirror pages and mirror sites.
    While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt you.
    Google has a good article on Google information for webmasters that is very imformative if you are considering Getting a SEO Company to so work on your website.
  8. Title & Meta Description Tag:
    Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.
    Below the title is a description which will be either be taken from your meta name description content="Description phrase" or from the first sentence on at page. You description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence. You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You many also what to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance. Also you can consider putting your domain name at the very end of the title.
  9. Meta Keywords Tag:
     The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say Google doesn't ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway. It is as follows, <meta name="keywords" content="keywords,go,here" /> and put in it all your keywords and keyword phrases. This tag should be different for each page.
  10. Author & Robots Tags:
     The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a #1 position for your company's name.
    <meta name="author" content="Solutions with Service" />
    Use a generic Robots Tag on all pages that you want indexed. This instructs the robots to crawl the page. The following is the generic robots tag.
    <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
  11. Quality Content:
    Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind
    12.
  12. Quantity Content:
    The more the better. Just remember your content will need to be both quantity and quality.
  13. Changing Content:
    You can do this by hand or with a script. For example you can have a php script that draws five paragraphs from a pool of twenty paragraphs when the content is different each time the php page is accessed.
    www.carsinlondon.com/used-cars-london-ontario.php shows a sample of php script that will do this.
  14. Domain & File Names:
    Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. You keyword phrase also should in many cases go in your file name. Read this thread Keywords in the URL from SEO Chat Forum.
    For example I use the file name seo-techniques.html for this page.
  15. Separate Content & Presentation:
     Put all your presentation code into Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This separates the presentation from the content and makes your html files up to 50% smaller. It is reported that the search engine bots prefer this and the more content you have compared to presentation in your file, the better you get rated. Read why tables for markup are stupid for an overview.
  16. Avoid Dynamic URLs:
     Are you pages via php, asp, or cf? Some search engines may have a problem indexing them. Create static pages whenever possible. Avoid symbols in your URLs like the "?" that you will often find in php, asp or cf pages.
    Static pages are the best but if you have a db driven site, make sure the menu and site map like go to inventory.cfm not inventory.cfm?vn=0 .
  17. Frames:
     Many search engines can't follow frame links. Make sure you provide an alternative method for the search engines to enter and index your site. For more information read Search Engines and Frames.
  18. Site Map:
     A good menu system is really a site map. A well constructed menu system that is on each page and contains a link to very page on the website is all you need.
  19. Site Themes:
     All of the top 3 search engines look for site themes or a common topic when they crawl a website. If your site is about one specific topic you will rank better than if you have more than one theme or topic on your site. By using similar keyword phrases in each page the search engines will detect a theme this will be to your advantage.
  20. Site Design:
     You may think, what does site design have to with search engine optimization. Well if your website has a bad color scheme that is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic header and menu bar the same place on each page.
    These things will keep your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has brought to the site.

Contact For Site Evaluation

Bob Mutch - SEO Techniques Contact me if you need help optimizing your website and if you are interested in having the above techniques applied to your site.

I will take a look at your site no charge, and let you know what can be done to bring your Search Engine Results Position higher.

Bob Mutch
bob@bobmutch.com
Tel: 519-636-6636

June 29th 2004 All rights reserved.

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