Monday, September 7, 2009

The Best SEO Strategies For Your Web Site

By Michael Fleischner

As someone who makes a living improving search engine rankings, I can tell you that there is a lot of bad information out there about SEO. What if I were to tell you that the road map for achieving top rankings was within your grasp? The holy grail of rankings is not imaginary. As is true with any major success, it leaves clues.

By working with literally hundreds of small and medium sized websites, I have found that top ranked sites have a number of factors in common. What are they? I'm about to share these factors with you and explain what separates those in the top Google positions and those that are never found on page one of search results.

The first search engine ranking factor has to do with the anchor text of all inbound links to your website. Google and other search engines use the anchor text from other sites linking in to determine what your site is about and what it should rank well for. If websites link in only using a URL, and not your keywords in the anchor text, email them and ask them to update your link. The link should always appear with your most important keywords.

The second most important ranking factor is using keywords in your title tag and other meta tags. Meta tags still have an impact on your search rankings. Although the weight of meta tags may be minimal, they are effective in categorizing your page and identifying what search engines should expect to find when they spider web site pages. Make sure your tags are constructed properly and include you keywords.

The third raking factor is what we call link popularity. Link popularity refers to a couple of things but most importantly the number of inbound links to your website. Each of these links carries with it some type of value. The value might be a Google PR of zero or ten so it's important to look at the value of each inbound link to your website. The greater the link value or popularity, the more it helps you with search engine rankings.

The fourth ranking factor is the diversity of domains that link to your web site. For many search engines, its not only what links you have to your site but making sure they are from different domains. This represents more popularity associated with you web site and therefore is judged to be a better search result. When link building, try to focus on generating inbound links from different websites.

The fifth ranking factor you want to consider is having your keywords in your domain. I know that it's pretty difficult to do so, but at the very least, make sure that your keywords are in the subdomain or folder one step away from your domain. This place the keyword in proximity to your page and can support higher rankings.

Each of the five factors mentioned above are some of the most effective I have seen over more than a decade of online marketing. Focus on inbound links that are formatted properly, link popularity, and domains. By doing so you can dramatically improve the overall effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts.

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