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Home::SE Optimization
Free SEO - The Do It Yourself Approach
Author : Derek Moore
Did you ever wonder about making your site more appealing to the
Search Engines? Did you get scared off by the high fees that SEO
specialists charge for their services? If you answered yes to
each of these questions, then I have some good news for you.
There are only a few very effective ways to get good search
engine rankings. The techniques are not very hard to learn and
only really require time and patience on your part. Let's get
started....
Domain Name The trick here is to register a domain name your
customers can remember and the search engines think is relevant.
Use words in your domain name that describe your product or
service. For example, don't call your site www.derekspage.com if
you sell pink widgets. You would be better off calling your site
www.bestpinkwidgets.com.
Title Tag Search Engines value the contents of the Title Tag
when ranking your site for keywords. Put your most important
keywords in your title tags, using singular and plural versions
of each word. Make your tags different and specific for each
page on your site. For example, "Pink Widgets and Pink Widget
Support". The Title Tag should be a short logical description of
your web page.
Header Tags The description Meta tag is still used by many (not
Google) search engines and is often used for displaying a short
description of your website. Use about 20 to 30 words to
describe your site and be as comprehensive as possible in the
small space allowed. Try using your important keywords within
the description tag. The keyword Meta tag is rarely used and
should not be considered very important. Just put your important
keywords in this space and move on to more important
optimization issues.
Image ALT Tags The ALT tag is used for a very short description
of an image or graphic file, and is displayed when your mouse
pointer hovers above a graphic. Using your important keywords in
the image description has been shown to have a small effect with
some search engines.
Keyword density. Different search engines have their own
preferences as to how many times a keyword phrase can appear on
a given web page in order to demonstrate the importance of that
keyword phrase. You should try and make sure that your important
keywords have a 5 to 8 percent density in your site. If you
keywords have higher than 10 percent density, it may be
considered as keyword spamming or stuffing. (This will hurt your
search engine rankings dramatically) Use the H1 and H2 heading
tags to elevate your important keywords within your site. The
keywords contained in these tags are considered slightly more
important by search engines.
Inbound Links Getting inbound links should be considered your
most important SEO strategy. Search Engines will rank your site
based on the number and quality of inbound links to your site.
Links from other highly ranked sites are more valuable and will
increase your sites ranking. Contacting other website owners and
asking them to exchange links with you is a good strategy. The
sites linking to you should not be your competitors, but should
be related to your site. For example, a bike repair shop would
benefit by exchanging links with a bike trail site. Page Rank is
a good indication of how valuable a site would be as a link
exchange partner. Yahoo and Google each have a page ranking
system. When arranging a link exchange, make sure that your
important keywords are included in the anchor text. Search
engines use anchor text when they try to figure out the
relevance and importance of your web pages.
Example html code using good anchor text:
HREF=http://www.Yoursite.com>Place your important keywords
here
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