How to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

When people think of search engine optimization, they immediately think of time consuming very tedious tasks that are way beyond their capabilities. That might be true if they put no time and effort into it. I do agree that improving search engine rankings in competitive niche markets require a good deal of knowledge and expertise. It's TIME to learn the basics of how to improve your search engine rankings. There is huge need for search engine optimization experts, but most websites don't find themselves in a very competitive niche market. Many websites can achieve top rankings by applying my optimization basics. All you have to do is put in the time learning and applying them.

Let me lay out the basics of search engine optimization. You can find a professional to do it but some professionals charge thousands to even get your foot in the door. Others have you fill out lengthy quote requests and tell you they'll be back in about three days with a quote. Then you wait for three days, and no email shows up. It might be worthwhile trying these basics out before paying an expert.

Please Note: If you feel you haven't achieved the results that you want, then try some affordable SEO experts who have more knowledge and expertise in their field.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of coding a website to achieve top rankings in the search engines. You must concentrate on the website's most relevant keywords. These relevant keywords are the key phrases that people are most likely to type into the search engine to look for websites. These websites must present their products and services within a twenty second period to ensure that the visitor locks into their site. Let me give you a scenario that happens far too many times. Let's say you are looking for a great hosting company. You type in your favorite search engine and enter a few keywords: cheap hosting. You get thousands upon thousands of websites. What the search engine displays to you makes you decide whether or not to click on it. When you finally decide to click on it, how many times have you seen Google "adwords" throughout the whole left side in no particular format? How many times have you seen affiliate product advertising on the whole right side in no particular format? Goodbye! What could have been an easy sell turned out to be an easy click out of your website. This is not what you are trying to achieve.

The first step for search engine optimization is to choose the most suitable keywords for your site. Make a list of the most suitable keywords for your site and then split one or two of them to each suitable page within the site. One keyword per page is preferable, but two per page is not so bad. Sometimes it is useful to split a large page into two smaller pages so that a different keyword can be targeted on each page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Matching keywords to a page's content is essential. A search engine robot and spider has caught on to all the tricks. Don't try to outsmart it.

Basic Search Engine Optimization Structure is vital to your success.

An obvious and overlooked aspect of search engine optimization is to make sure that search engine spiders can actually crawl to all of your website's pages. If the spiders and robots can't find them, then they won't get indexed, and we've wasted a lot of time on search engine optimization. Make sure that your navigation structure of your website is strong. Would you build a mansion on a one inch foundation? Probably not! Then why build your website mansion on a weak foundation. This means that all of your pages are linked together on every page. When the spider crawls throughout your website, it will crawl to all of the pages and back again. If there is one broken link, this could affect your search engine rankings!

Don't forget the not so obvious:

?Robots and Spiders can't see links embedded in Java and most times Flash. When a spider and a robot crawls over your website, it only reads the text, and those embedded links are invisible to the spiders and robots far as search engines are concerned, they don't exist. Let's make a promise not to use them.

?How many times have you clicked on a link and looked at the URL, and it contained about 32 extra letters and numbers in it? Google won't spider any URL that looks like this. Avoid using dynamic URLs.

?Make sure all pages link to at least one other page. Links to pages that don't link out are called "dangling links". Google founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, once wrote about Dangling links

"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet..........Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly." -

extract from the original PageRank paper by Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

?It is good to structure the internal links so that targeted keywords are reinforced. For example, organize the links so that a topic's sub-topic pages link to the topic page with the right link text (see below), and vice-versa.

Off-page elements

Link-text ahref="url">Type in your link textType in your title words hereInsert your headings or your titles of your text here