Friday, July 25, 2008

Improve your Search Engine Ranking by Using Keywords

By Jude Wright

SEO (search engine optimization) is a necessary method for bringing visitors to your website. People searching for your site will not likely find it unless it is listed on the first three to five pages of a search engine. Using search engine optimization will bring your site nearer to the top of the rankings.

How Do You Apply SEO?

You could pay professionals to optimize your web pages but this could cost hundreds of dollars. You would only want to do this if your website has a great many pages. You can easily optimize smaller websites yourself with the proper knowledge. But, optimization is an absolute necessity if you want to be indexed in the search engines.

SEO can be employed by getting links that point back to your site. Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is one way to get those links. If the content on your website is interesting enough, people will link to it voluntarily so that they will have new and interesting information for their own visitors. There is also the option of paying other webmasters to place your links on their sites. This method will bring visitors to your site as well as providing the one way links.

Make sure that your Meta tags are correctly displayed is another factor in effective SEO.web page should have a title based on the main keywords, and the meta description must also contain them. When somebody does a search, the meta tag description is what he or she will look at to see if it it contains the information that is looked for. The more descriptive your keywords and description, the more visitors you will get.

Another way to apply SEO is to have great written content. Pictures and videos are nice, but if your website has little to no content and only flash, pictures and movies, you will not rank well in the search engines. The search engine spiders can only read text, so all of your art skills will be of no use, if a visitor cannot find your website. Write great content and articles with the keywords that greatly describe your website and what it is about.

What You Should Not Do

Do not use the same keyword repetitively. Although keywords are necessary to having a good ranking with the search engines, they have become wise to people who try to cheat the system by repeatedly using a keyword over and over again, for no good reason.

Do not use text colors that are the same as the color of your page background. People who use this tactic are only hurting their site ranking and their profits. This may have worked in the past, but it definitely won't work now.

Using the same content on different pages is a trick that is still being used today. However, this hurts more than it helps a website. You cannot write one article or grab it from online and then use it on all of your web pages. Search engines like Google are penalizing websites that have one page of duplicate content much less an entire website.

You may have visited websites that use keywords that do not fit the topic of their site. This is another trick that is used by uninformed webmasters. They put a list of keywords at the bottom of each page to try to get the search engines' attention. Like using colored text, this maneuver no longer works and just might get your site delisted.

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