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.