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So you have a ranking in a search engine but it’s not quite what you expected, right? Well there are a few tips for ranking higher and I’m going to share those with you today so listen up.

Rank Booster #1 Increase Your Reciprocal Links

This is a time tested approach and it works in both Directories such as Yahoo! and also in Spider Search Engines such as Google.

What you do is setup a link trading directory and make categories just like a mini Yahoo! except you have them all relate to your market. This provides keyword density and it also gives your link popularity a big boost.

But please be warned that if you just go and get any links you can (i.e. untargeted links) you will be penalized rather than rewarded in your rankings.

It’s much better to get just a few high ranking link partners verses hundreds of unrelated and untargeted ones.

Rank Booster #2 Add More Content

This is a great technique that also works in both Directories and Spider Search Engines. By adding more content you will keep people who click over to your site there longer and this gets your ranking up in the Directories such as Yahoo! because they track how long a visitor stays at your site. If they click their back button then you will be shown as a site which doesn’t help the visitor which will decrease your rank.

You will get a higher ranking on the Spider Search Engines such as Google because they spider through your whole site seeing how many pages there are and this increases your ranking because you have more information there for there visitors.

Both Directories and Search Engines love content and track how long people are staying at your pages which in turn also increases or decreases your rank based on how long they stay. If they stay longer, your rank goes up. If they click the back button immediately, your rank goes down.

Rank Booster #3 Improve Your Sites Load Time

This is another that works with both Spider Search Engines and Directories. This will improve your ranking in Directories because it will keep more of the visitors that click over to your site there longer. Internet users want information and they want it now. If your site loads like molasses then they are going to leave. Directories track how long a visitor stays at your site and rank you accordingly. If a visitor leaves immediately then you’re rank goes down because your site was tagged as “not useful”.

It will improve your ranking in Spider Search Engines because the spiders check for load time and load speed is part of the ranking system when they calculate relevance of a site.

Rank Booster #4 Improve Your Keyword Density

This one only works for Spider Search Engines. The reason is because Directories only review & list you once so you can change your keyword density after they list you but the review and placement of your site has already happened.

It works great in Spider Search Engines because they continually spider your site analyzing & updating your listing according to what it finds.

If you need a better listing then utilize these strategies in helping you boost your rank today. They work and although they all take time, you will see a difference.

These are much easier tactics than you will find in big, complicated SEO courses and there’s a good chance that they may just bump your position up.

Get to work and start using them now.

Copyright (c) 2008 Titus Hoskins

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms… SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche – you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.

Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time.

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.

2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches. Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don’t forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting “long-tail” keywords been very beneficial for me.

3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content. Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from it – keeping a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords… are all optimized. (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site – make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.

4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google. Don’t ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google’s influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.

5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the ‘anchor text’ is related to your keywords but don’t ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don’t forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in your niche.

6. Article Marketing is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works. Writing short 500 – 700 word informative helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters… plus other major online sites. Don’t forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you’re also using these articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don’t forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages… to increase your rankings and traffic.

7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me. These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts – a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts. Works similar as a sub-domain but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you’re creating content to first satisfy your visitors.

8. WordPress blog software is extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.

9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web. These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter… media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati… you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It’s time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on all my content.

10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO. You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don’t want SEO – you want effective SEO. In order to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.

First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you’re pursuing – your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That’s why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to what’s been searched for or discussed.

Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site – tops in your niche – the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.

Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you’re into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.

Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you’re seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.

Many small businesses work hard to generate sales leads and want to tap in to the customer and client traffic that utilizes the Internet each day. Most small business owners don’t know that many search engine companies have studied how users click through to websites listed at various positions in the search engines. Surprisingly, over 90% of all user clicks were only to websites listed on the first page of search results, and over 40% of all clicks were only to the first website listed on the first page of the returned results! This is sobering data, made even more surprising by noting the following: moving from position 20 to position 10 in the search results accounts for an incredible 888% increase in the number of clicks to a website. Even more surprisingly, moving from position 20 to position 1 represents almost a 14,000% increase in click throughs! I think it is clear that being listed on the first page for a targeted search phrase is highly desirable, and indeed almost necessary for businesses looking to generate online sales.

The goal for small business website owners, then, should be to create a plan for generating Internet traffic that translates into sales. This is not easily done, and is difficult without guidance from a knowledgeable internet marketing or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert. SEO professionals understand the intricacies of data flow on the web, can show you to where internet traffic is flowing, can deconstruct competitor sites, and can develop plans for targeting search phrases and your customers or clients effectively. Further, it is essential to create a plan for gaining website credibility through generating relevant back links to your site, and professionals know how this can be accomplished quickly and effectively.

If you are new to the realm of web marketing, then you need knowledge and strategies that will help you create more customer leads immediately. This article will give you six Search Engine Optimization tips that will help you to create more traffic to your web site or blog.

SEO Tip Number 1: Fully study the most appropriate targeted keywords for your site. These keywords will describe your web pages to the search engines, and must be targeted, highly searched for and as non-competitive as possible. A good start for this research is to use Google’s free Keyword Tracking Tool, which allows users to enter search phrases of interest, and learn how many searches for their keywords are being done each month. This tool also shows search phrase trends so you can make note of how internet traffic is flowing over time. This tool is essential for any internet marketer, and keyword research is, arguably, the most important step toward optimizing your website for search engines over time. Selecting your targeted search phrases will determine how your website content is written, and you should spend a good amount of time carefully doing this research. Make note of the Cost Per Click displayed for a given search phrase or keyword, as this will likely reveal how difficult it will be to rank in the search engines for that word.

SEO Tip Number 2 : Update your Page title to use your chosen phrases in the title tag of the website. This title will tell your visitors what your internet site is about, and more importantly this is the phrase that will turn up in the search engine results. Many Internet marketers either do not use a title tag, sometimes they forget, or they don’t know the significance of this tag. Without this tag your internet page won’t have a title, it will not look professional and this will in turn limit your potential for new visitors.

SEO Tip Number 3 : Add a Description tag to your web site. Make the description keyword rich, but also make sure that it makes sense when read. Do not just pack it with all your targeted keywords, but use it to make descriptive sentences. This outline will be displayed in the search results. Do not make it too long, but make it informative. You will want potential clients to click on it and visit your internet site.

SEO Tip Number 4 : Use the Keyword Meta tag. Search engine robots look for this descriptor to see what your internet site is about, and will send visitors to it according to these tags. If you’ve got more than one keyword, this is the tag you should use to insert all your targeted keywords. However, it is very important not to over use your focused search phrases. In the past, stuffing a web site full of keywords would drive search engine users to a site, but the search algorithms have become more complex over time. While the Keyword tag should still be used as part of an overall website optimization plan, it does not carry the weight it once did. Other factors have taken precedence, including relevant content, keyword density and back links to a website.

SEO Tip Number 5: Write informative and useful content for your visitors. Make your content keyword rich and with high density. The recommended keyword density percentage on a given page is between 3% and 5%. If you stuff your page full of keywords, search engines will penalize your page, and your ranking may drop. Google’s guidelines specify, for example, that your content should be clear and relevant to your subject. If you are interested more about Google’s recommendations, search the web for Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. It’s an interesting read.

People around the planet use search engines every day to find the data they seek. When the search results point to your website, your potential clients hope to find something beneficial there. They are not looking for a spam site, a desperate sales pitch or a redirect to another internet site. If you make your readers click too often they will likely leave your internet site, reducing your sales. Offer relevant information and products that are helpful to the user and relevant to what he or she has searched for. This relates back to the importance of doing your keyword research correctly. Time spent up front determining what consumers want will help you create a web page that has your customers coming back for more.

SEO Tip Number 6: Create relevant back links to your web pages. You can spend countless time and money creating a elegantly designed website that is visited by no one. It is crucial that your site is written to draw targeted readers, clients or other consumers. One of the most important methods to gain further search engine ranking is to create back links to your website where the anchor text associated with your site link contains your targeted search phrase. For example, suppose you are selling Blue Widgets, but your website is named JoesGarage.com. You need to associate the phrase “Blue Widgets” with your website address as much as possible, from as many unique sources as possible. The anchor text will permanently associate your keywords with your site address, increasing your website’s visibility in the search engines for phrases containing those keywords. Note that you will want relevant back links to your site, ideally DoFollow links that will have the search engine robots crawling your pages whenever a link to your site is found on another site. These links, too, should ideally be from high Page Rank sites that are related in subject matter to your page about Blue Widgets. Further articles will discuss these points in more detail.

I covered several essential on page and off page Search Engine Optimization factors that should help your business web site rank high in the search engines for targeted keywords. I can not stress the importance of proper keyword research enough, and connecting with a competent, knowledgeable SEO Professional can help your business generate more traffic quickly. Hopefully you’ll use these SEO tips on your websites today to generate new visitors, customers and sales!

If you would like more information about Search Engine Optimization services available in Madison, Wisconsin, visit Madison Niche Marketing.

When you are trying to rank your website on a search engine there are steps that you will need to take, to rank your site properly. Speaking now of the specific techniques that will need to be carried out in an ongoing campaign to position on Google.  

Bear in mind that these techniques are the basis for a websites position, and it varies each time to get the first spot in Google, to give an opportunity to the other websites that are also trying to rank and not always be the same pages, which are the top, and leave in the search more convenient. It is the principle of democracy that governs the network.   

Finding Keywords   

Knowing who will lead to establish the keywords that will help someone find you and your company. The more times a certain keyword is searched for each month will determent if that keyword is good to rank your site for. Finding keywords that do not have much competition, but still have enough traffic is what is called “Long Tail Keywords.” These types of keywords are much easier to rank your website in the search engines.  

Using long tail keywords will not bring you millions of hits to your website, but it will insure that you get a healthy flow of targeted traffic to your website each day.   

There are many free tools online to help determine keywords, all one has to do is a Google search for “Free Keyword Tools” or something along that matter. Picking a tool will be a matter of personnel preference.   

Using Long Tail Keywords in Your Website   

Distribute the keywords that you identified in the previous step, throughout your website is the key to letting the search engines understand what your pages are about. Also, take into account the designing of your website and use a clean code-designing program, which is what will open the door to ranking first in Google.  

Just like in real estate the location on were you will be putting your keywords play an important part in just how Google and the search engines understand your website. You will want to put the long tail keywords in what is called “On Page Factors” spots. These include but are not limited to, the h1 tags, meta keywords, meta description, the first and last 25 words on the page and the keyword density of the entire page. Optimizing your website with these factors will boost your website rankings and put your website first in Google’s indexing eyes. This gives your website great relevance to the search engines.   

Ranking your website in the organic web searches will take time. I think one of Google’s mottos are “If it is not done naturally then it’s not going to be done at all” So do not expect to start seeing traffic coming to your site right off the back. But if you keep it up and continually add fresh unique content and maybe through in some web 2.0 tactics. (Topic for another article). There is no reason in the world why you cannot out rank any of the top ranking website.