Being number 1 on search engines isn’t the easiest thing to achieve. Depending on the niche your trying to rank #1 on Google and Yahoo, competition will vary. Here are 10 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 shoes
- shoes for men
- sport shoes for men
- shoes
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 <a href=”shoes/sport-shoes-for-men.html”>sport shoes for men</a> 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 arent 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 havn’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 seleting 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 much 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 <h1> to <h6>, 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.