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How to Increase Your Website Search Engine Ranking
The most important thing you can
understand as a search engine optimization expert is
the following: algorithms change. Just when you think
you understand what is going to make you number one
for a search phrase in a search engine, something could
change, and you might have to spend months or years
trying to find out the engineering of the algorithm
again.
When we are talking about search engine ranking, the
first thing you need to think about is the market place.
Many people ask themselves, how many keywords should
I put in my anchor text? What is the keyword density
that I should have on my page? Should I use 300 words
on my copy or should I use 500 words? Can I use flash?
How many keywords should I put in my "alt"
text? Etc...
Here is a general statement: magic numbers
do not exist. The most important thing you can understand
as a search engine optimization expert is the following:
algorithms change. Just when you think you understand
what is going to make you number one for a search phrase
in a search engine, something could change, and you
might have to spend months or years trying to find out
the engineering of the algorithm again.
It is better not to try to reverse engineer
the algorithm and do something much easier instead,
observe your competitors. All you need to do is to understand
what elements are your competitors using that are making
them rank on the top positions.
Let's see what those things are:
- Number and quality of inbound links
pointing to your site
- Keyword density
- Fresh content
The first thing to observe from your
competitor's sites is their back link index. This means
the number of sites that have a link pointing to their
website. You can easily measure it by going to Google
and type: "link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com".
But it would be a mistake to do this only on Google,
as Google discriminates sites much more than other search
engines. Yahoo and MSN are much more accurate for measuring
the back link index.
Part of the observation should be not
only what the links say, but where the links come from.
Think on what is the category where those links come
from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should
start actively searching for links coming from that
category.
Some marketers use special software
for robotic content creation. They generate thousands
of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice
can be dangerous, as Google may penalize unnatural linking
or violations of their terms of service. And what happens
is that those links do not look natural. One day one
site may have 50 links and the following day have 2.050
links, which all say the same thing and come from the
same IP address.
If you understand how to observe, this
will never happen to you. You will learn how to look
at your competitors, and observe how they are getting
linked to.
The second thing you need to observe
is the keyword density of your competitors. How many
times should we repeat our main keyword? In which part
of the web page should our main keywords be mentioned?
There is no magic number, again it's all about observing
and measuring against your competitors. But what should
we measure?
- Meta tags
- Alt tags
- Titles
- Names of the images on the page
- Highlights: h1, h2, h3...
- Frequency and position of the keywords on the body
text
Each one of these items should be measured
independently. There are tools to run keyword density
against your competitors. If you run them against the
top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets
of top rankings.
Again, your keyword density needs to
look natural; otherwise you may fail in over optimization.
This is when you use keywords too often or too early.
If you look unnatural, your page ranks will suffer as
a result.
The key to success is to understand
what Google likes about their top 5 pages, and to apply
this to your own website promotion.
The last thing to observe is how much
fresh content do the top sites have. If they have many
articles and they are continuously adding new content
to their sites, then it is clear that the search engines
like content and are ranking better those sites which
have more and more updated information.
People that surf the web are usually
searching for information, so content is the "fuel"
of internet traffic. If you want to attract many potential
customers to your site, then you need to make sure that
you provide enough content which is relevant to their
interests.
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