10 SEO Tips to Be #1 on Search Engines
By Mathieu Roy
Being number 1 on search engines isn't the easiest thing to achieve.
Depending on the niche you're trying to rank #1 on Google and Yahoo,
competition will vary. Here are 10 essential SEO tips to make sure you
achieve your ranking goals.
Target keyword phrases with 2 or more words
When choosing the keywords to target in your yahoo and Google SEO
campaign, instead of targeting words like "shoes", target keyword
phrases such as "sport shoes for men". Doing so, you will target the
following keyword phrases:sport shoesshoes for mensport shoes for
menshoes
This will attract much more traffic than targeting single words that
you have almost no chance to even be on the first page of search
results.
Create inbound links with relevant anchor text
When you want to create an inbound link from your homepage to your
"sport shoes for men" page, create the link with a text anchor that is
relevant to the linked page. Here's an example of a relevant link for
your "sport shoes for men" page: Visit our (link)sport shoes for
men(/link) store!
This will tell search engines what the page is about the they will rank
it higher because it assures them they will not link to non relevant
content. Make full use of this is your whole website to have a better
SEO approach.
Your title is the most important tag for search engines
Be careful to what you put in your title tag. Include the main keywords
you want to target in your page. If you have a page called that targets
the "sport shoes for men" keyword, make sure to insert the keyword
as-is in your title.For now, this is the most important SEO technique
to use with the main search engines. If the rest of the page is
relevant to the title, you have a very good chance at ranking high on
Google.
Don't waste much time with META tags
While they once were the most important thing to do in SEO, META tags
are now less than useless for google. Yahoo still accords some
importance to them so you still should insert them. Just don't overdo
it and waste precious hours trying to tweak them to perfection. Instead
of doing that, create other quality keyword rich articles or tweak the
actual content of your existing articles.
Don't stuff keywords in your META tags that aren't used in the actual
content. Some sites have been penalized doing so. According to many SEO
experts, Google totally ignores the tag but other search engines could
see it as spam and penalize you.
Don't assume you know what keywords people search for
When determining what keywords you will target on your new page, don't
assume you know what keywords the users will search for when looking
for info related to your page.
To make sure you target the right keywords, use keyword tools provided
by Google and Yahoo. You can also use Wordtracker but it ain't free.
Enter a couple keywords and the tools will give you hundreds more that
you haven't though of. They will also give you relative numbers to know
how much times the keyword(s) was search for in the last month/year.
After selecting a few keywords that interest you, go on Google and type
"selected keyword". This will give you all the pages in the index which
contain that exact keyword in their page. This gives you a good idea of
the competition for that particular term. Try to find keyword phrases
with high demand and low competition. This is called finding "niche"
keywords.
Submit articles to get quality backlinks
By creating quality articles and publishing them to article submission
websites, you will gain very good backlinks. Publishers go on article
websites and get content to publish to their website with a link to
your website as a credit for the free article he just grabbed.
When creating your articles, be sure to include 2-3 links to different
parts of your website to gain even more from the exchange.
Google values backlinks as much as the actual content of your website.
They think that if other publishers link to your website, it indicated
that your content is quality content.
Be sure to vary the anchor text of the links pointing to your website.
Google will see them as more natural links and you will gain ranks
doing so.
Just like links inside your website, make sure the links you receive
from other website have an anchor relevant to the linked page.
If you do this regularly and have quality articles, you will gain a
huge amount of backlinks and this will give you the chance to target
more competitive keywords on google and yahoo.
Submit to many directories
Even if it's true that directory backlinks are no longer as important
as they were before, submit to as much as possible. It's easy, fast and
cannot harm you.
Some quality directories like DMOZ and Yahoo are sure to help you ranking high, especially at Yahoo and MSN.
When submitting to the directories, try varying the anchor (often the
title of your directory listing) pointing to your website. Some
directories will only let you use your company name but some less
popular ones will let you put what you want. Keep the anchors relevant
but varying them will seem more natural to search engines, especially
Google.
Don't spam too many keywords in your page
Keyword density is not as important as most webmasters think. Don't
overuse keywords in a context where it seems unnatural to your
visitors. As long as the keywords appear in strategic places such as
your title and headers (see tip bellow), include them wisely in your
paragraphs. As long as the phrase appears at least 1 time in your
content, search engines will know you targeted it. Don't repeat the
same keywords 2-3 times per paragraph, your content will be of lesser
quality to your readers and you will gain less natural backlinks doing
so.
One more thing to not do is stuff keywords at the end of your page
hoping that search engines will think the page is relevant to them. The
search engines will penalize such "blackhat" techniques and your pages
will be dropped from the index. Too much blackhat tricks will get your
entire site banned from the search engines forever.
Use header tags wisely
Instead of bolding text to create headers in your pages, use the header
tags. They vary from to , h1 being the biggest and h6 being the
smallest. I suggest you use only one h1 tag to put a title at the
beginning of your page and then use h2, h3, h4, etc. to create sub
divisions. Search engines give allot of credit to headers. Try using
keywords that you will target in the following paragraph so search
engines trust the header even more and give it more credit.
Be very patient
Search engines take allot of time to master. When changing the content
of your page to have a better SEO approach, don't expect engines to
pick up your pages instantly and rank them. It can take several days to
several weeks for Google, Yahoo and MSN to update your rankings.
Put up any SEO changes and just forget about them. If you want to know
if the search engines updated the content of your page, search for your
site by searching for site:yoururl.com and find the page in question.
Click on "cached page" and look at it. The cached page is the page they
are using to give you your rankings
I hope this small guide will help you have a better SEO approach and
give you all the success you are hoping for your business. Good luck
and don't forget to not overdo any SEO techniques. Create pages for
viewers and adapt them to search engines, not vice versa.
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