7 Keys to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are plenty of search engines on the web and each one has a different way of looking at your home page (and other pages as well). If you try to please everyone (the search engines) you will not likely please anyone. In other words, the more you put into your first page to get top ranking from several search engines may actually hurt you. So how do you decide on what works best?

Let's look at the top 7 things that you can do in order to rise to the top:

1. Stop trying to please all the search engines. Pick one or two at the most, you may even want to stretch it to three. For myself, I actually just choose one search engine. Since Google makes up 58 to 68% of all the searches, this is the one that I optimize my pages to come to the top.
2. Do your homework on your keywords. Guess what? You do not need to have a hundred keywords in your list. You need to do some research and choose ten or so of the best keywords for your site.
   
   How do you discover your best keywords? You find tools such as http://GoodKeyWords.com and type in the keywords you want to use. This software will show you how many times that keyword has been requested in the last month. This should give you a good idea on the most popular requests. This does not mean you want to choose the top words as the fight for usage will likely cost you top dollar.
   



3. Use your browser and see who the top sites are. Do not look at the sponsored links but look at the list of sites. Open a new window with each one of these sites and then take a look at their source code. This will give you some clues as to what keywords they are using along with how they are optimizing for this search engine.




4. Print out the source code to do a further analysis. Look for the following items: Are the keywords in the TITLE tag? Are they in an H1 tag or H2 tag? If not, then you can be one up by using the keywords in those tags. Most sites will place the keywords in the TITLE tag but not the H1 and H2 tags. If you place your keywords in the H1 and H2 tags, you should make sure that they are used in the top half of your home page.



5. Another item to look for is the usage of the keywords in the first twenty-five and last twenty-five words on the page. If the competition does not do this, you are once again bettering your page. For the last twenty-five words, you can place your keywords just after your copyright information at the very bottom of the page. For example: copyright 2006 CreditRepairForEveryone.com - credit help | credit rating | credit debt. By using this technique your are reemphasizing your keywords and being picked up by the search engines at the same time.



6. The usage of bold, italics, and underline are important. Even though many people are using Style Sheets you may want to consider using the regular bold, italics, and underline tags within your home page at least. There are three components you can use with these elements. First, you can simply bold, italics or underline the keyword (or keyphrase) on its own. Second, you can make the keywords part of a sentence and use the elements for the entire sentence. Third, you can (if you are using a keyword phrase like the example above (credit rating) and use the words in a sentence separately and applying the elements to just those words from the phrase. In our example we might use: Are you concerned that your credit is not giving you the rating you expected?



7. Getting others to link to your site is another tactic that really works. The problem here is the how do you do this? The answer is quite easy but it does take a bit of work. The simplest way is to go to Google (or any other search engine) and type your keyword or key phrase in as follows: "credit rating: "add a link". This will return a long list of sites that allow you to add your link to their site. The work part is entering all the information into each site. The other part of this equation is most of these sites want a reciprocal link back to your site. You will need to create a page that will contain the links back to those sites. This is fairly easy as all you need to do is place their URL in a word document, put a description underneath it, and then leave a space to add the next one. I call my page Resources and that page is a link from my home page. Great way to make your way to the top of the search engine list.

These are just a few of the items you can do on your own to optimize your site for the search engines. Most of them are very simple to do, you just have to put in the work to get it done. There are many more of these tips available in our latest release (currently in ebook format) Blueprints for Success - eMarketing: Winning the Internet Marketing Game. This book is available by emailing Sales@BlueprintBooks.com.

Bette Daoust, Ph.D. is a speaker, author (over 170 books, articles, and publications), and consultant. She has provided marketing, sales, business development and training expertise for companies such as Peet's Coffee & Tea, Varian Medical Systems, Accenture, Avaya, Cisco Systems to name a few. Dr. Daoust has also done extensive work with small businesses in developing their marketing, training, and operational plans. You may contact Dr. Daoust at http://BizMechanix.com. You may also view her latest publications at http://BlueprintBooks.com or http://CreditRepairForEveryone.com