Let's get one thing straight, Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
can be taught to the masses, but very few individuals are
willing to methodically go through the steps, on a consistent
basis, to achieve and maintain the ultimate ranking for their
website.
This article is designed to simply touch on the cycle of events
required to raise your current website's ranking in the search
engines and then maintain those levels for the long haul.
The 10 Steps needed for proper SEO are outlined below follow by
a very brief description. There are many tools available which
enable you to perform the analysis required producing key data.
This data is needed in order for you to effectively optimize
your website.
1. Identify Your Competition
Run an analysis on what you figure to be the most common keywords
searched for your site. Take a look at the websites that rank
above you in the search engine results - this is your
competition. Create a list of the top five websites and move on
to step 2.
2. Quality Link Building
Find out who do your competitors link partner with? Make every
attempt to link partner with high quality websites. There is
tremendous value in linking to high quality websites. Find out
who your competition has a link to. Take the highest ranking
(quality) websites they are linked to, contact these websites,
and set up a link partnership.
3. Perform a Keyword Analysis on the Competition
This allows you optimize your website for the same keywords.
You'll want to check out your competition's website and optimize
the content on your site for these particular keywords more
effectively than the competition. Keyword Density, how often a
particular keyword appears in your website, is paramount for
achieving high rankings in the search engines.
4. Rinse and Repeat
Steps 1-3 are the foundation for search engine optimization.
What you are doing is building both a highly tuned website and
search engine strategy enabling you to beat your competition
both with your website and your website's exposure on the search
engines. Repeat steps 1-3 for as many keywords/phrases as you
feel create the greatest exposure for your website.
5. Your Keywords
Create a list of keywords/phrases that you may not have come
across from your evaluations and find out what the popularity is
of these keywords/phrases. You may find a niche that your
competition does not have, therefore creating more exposure for
your website. You would obviously want to inject any of these
keywords/phrases into your website.
6. Let's Go Under The Hood
It's not nearly enough to have the competition's keywords and
link partners. You need to tinker behind the scenes, "Under The
Hood" of your website to really soup it up! Take your main
keywords/phrases and very efficiently place them into the Page
Title and Meta description of your website. This is absolutely
necessary in order to help bring everything together if you want
to rank high in the search engines.
7. Keyword Density (Keyword/Total Words)
Quite simply, use, but don't overuse, your main keywords that
appear in your Page Title and your Meta Description. You want
these keywords to appear as early as possible on your page, but
in a grammar friendly format. Listing keywords/phrases randomly
on the page is a "No No". The text content should read well with
a good flow. The more keywords you can place in your content,
the higher the Keyword Density. Alt Tags and Header Tags
increase your Keyword Density.
8. Submit Your Website
Your website needs to be submitted to the major search engines
in order for it to be seen in a timely manner. Google, MSN, &
Yahoo, along with other major websites, make it available to you
to submit your website for review. It is suggested to only
submit a few pages a day to a couple of the major search
engines. You do not want to perform this daily. Over submitting
is a bad thing in the search engine world. Submit your pages a
few times a week until you know you have been indexed.
9. Check Your Indexing
Go to the search engine of your choice, type in the
keyword/phrase you are interested in, and see if your site has
been indexed. You may have to run through a number of pages to
find your URL. Once you find your URL, you then know that you
have been indexed. You may want to give this a few weeks in
order to be indexed.
10. Continue to Refine
Your SEO work is never complete. Getting ranked in the search
engines is only the beginning. The ongoing work required to
successfully rank high in the search engines never ends. It's
because of the grueling, never ending, process that most people
fail at SEO.
We wish you the best of luck with your optimization.
About The Author
Dan Mercurio is President of Elite-SearchEngineMarketing.com. Let us show
you how affordable and effective SEO done our way can be.
