Search Engine Ranking for Beginners

Search Engine Ranking for Beginners

Search engine optimization is best left in the mystical land of the
Intenet Marketing Guru right? Good Search engine rankings are tough to
achieve. Understanding search engine marketing takes years of studying
and only people with true insider knowledge and secret tools rank well
in Google right? WRONG. Pure c--- as a matter of fact.

Ranking well in the search engines is not difficult. In fact search
engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops most people from
ranking well in search engines is misinformation. Every week there's yet
another quick fix to ranking well in search engines and people jump
from one quick fix to the next hoping for that Top 10 position in Google
and never achieving it.

There are 6 key areas of search engine optimization that you need to
know about. These are the basics. Getting these right will help you
achieve the Google rankings that you've always wanted.

Domain Name - The jury is still out on the how relevant a keyword rich
domain name is. What I mean by keyword rich domain name is say for
example your site was going to be about money making ideas then an idea
domain name could be either www.moneymakingideas.com or www.money-making-ideas.com. My own personal preference is with the hyphenated approach e.g. www.money-making-ideas.com
simply because I believe that search engines can read it more easily.
To registed your domain name I would suggest using either 000Domains.com
or GoDaddy.com

Content - Useful content. Not keyword stuffed, spammy pages. Write
something useful for your visitors. If you can't write then you'll need
to learn. Turn Words Into Traffic is a great resource for learning how
to write content and is a resource that I use personally. Turn Words
Into Traffic gives you an A-Z on article writing - from a writers
perspective. If you don't want to learn how to write content then you
could always use Create Website Content Fast to help you speed the
process up.

Keywords - Keywords are the words or phrases that you expect people to
search for your site/service/content with. There are two distinct
factors to consider when choosing keywords for your site.

1. You need to target specific keywords. For example if you have a
website about dating then you'll probably find it quite difficult to
achieve high search engine rankings initially with that single term.
However if you were to refine an area of your site to target say Gay
& Lesbian Dating that's more specific. You could also regionalize
your keywords or key phrases e.g. Gay & Lesbian dating in Toronto.
This refining process is often referred to as niche (pronounced neech)
marketing.

2. You need to choose the keywords that you want people to find your
site with. Put yourself in your visitors shoes - think about what they
might use to find you in the search engines. What keywords or key
phrases would you type into a search engine to find your site? What
keywords or key phrases would your potential visitor use to search for
you? Always, always think like a typical websurfer.

If you're interested in seeing what people are searching for on the web
and how profitable that might be for you I would recommened that you
check out Good Keywords. It's free and does a wonderful job of helping
you find good keywords :-)

I would also suggest that you try Wordtracker also. It's a brilliant service for tracking down specific, popular keywords.

Keyword density - This is how often your keyword is used on the the page
itself. For example if you have 100 words of text on a single page and
you mention your keyword 5 times then you have 5% keyword density.

Opinions vary on this but anywhere from 1% - 7% is considered ideal. If
this doesn't make sense to you then it's ok. The simple rule is this:
less is more. Do not alter the text on your webpages to include your
keyword over and over again because.........well.... it looks stupid,
won't instill any confidence in your prospective customer and might also
get you penalized or removed from the search engines.

Page title - Your tag is critical to your page being ranked well.
Stuffing your tag with keywords in the hope of ranking well is
pointless. Your tag, once constructed properly, will see you moving up
the search engine rankings quickly. Bear this simple fact in mind when
building your websites and it will serve you well.

Links - Having good links pointing to your site and good links within
your site (an often overlooked aspect of search engine optimization) is
pretty important as far as search engine ranking goes. Having other
sites linking to yours proves the importance of your site to the search
engines i.e. if the content on your site is so valuable that other site
owners want to link to it then it must be important.

META Tags - Meta tags are dead baby. Well not quite dead but they are
only used as a point of reference for search engines. It's a shame to
see websites that have their META tags still stuffed with keywords. It's
pointless. Put your primary keywords in the Meta Keyword part of your
webpage but apart from that don't lose any sleep or waste any energy on
them.

There's not enough space in this article to explain all of the above in
the detail that I'd love to. Also I'm not a search engine expert so some
of the explanation is best left to those that I learned from (Sean
Burns and Jay Stockwell take a bow please :-)

Having learned the basics of search engine optimization and submission I
have achieved Top 10 Rankings for all of my websites. It's not hard to
do this. It just takes work, a little patience and a little common
sense.