SEO techniques for the home enthusiast: Search Engine Ranking For Webmasters & Online Marketers

Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

First off, if your site does not conform to the minimum basic requirements stipulated by the google webmaster gidelines then read this.

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There are two teams in SEO, the on-page optimizers and the off-page optimizers. This page is primarily focused for on-page optimizers and factors they would consider important.

In he overall SEO process I would say that on-page factors account for about 20% of the entire SEO task. The most important thing to understand as a search engine optimizer is that algorithms shift and change. However adhereing to common on-page criteria will close the gap to #1 on all the "big daddy" search engines.

The primary elements to getting top search engines rankings are:

Links are the primary focus of this post and in particlar how to find out which backlinks are regulary being cached by google.

The first thing to observe from your competitors’ sites is their inbound links. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to Google and typing: “link://www.yourcompetitonssite.com”. However do not only do this on Google because they don’t show all actual links pointing to a site.

Yahoo and MSN tend to show a lot more of the back links to any given website than Google, this is because Googles algo is somewhat a secret and relies heavily on back linking websites.

Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think about what the category or subject of the website that those links come from. If you begin to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category.

Some marketers use special software for robotic content creation. They generate thousands of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice can be very dangerous, as Google will penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of service. And what happens is that those links do not look natural. One day one site may have 50 links and the following day have 2000 links, which all say the same thing and come from the same IP address.

Jagger update took a big look at those “link farmy” IP’s and is automatically weeding out the offenders. If you understand how to observe, this will never happen to you. You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe who is linking to them. Then, just do what they do.

Another service prvided by Google is “Alerts”by setting up an email alert to update you each time a backlink from a competitor URL is cahced by google. You can isolate their leading backlink publishers.

Fresh Quality Content

The second thing to observe is how much fresh content the top sites have. Search engines love quality relevant content that is added and updated frequently. You will probably notice that the top sites in your niche have many articles and other quality content, and are continuously adding new content to their sites.

People that surf the web are usually searching for information, so content is the “fuel” of internet traffic. If you want to attract many potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests. Updating it frequently with more quality content will keep visitors coming back to your website over and over again.

Keyword Density

The third thing you need to observe is the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should you repeat your main keywords? In which part of the web page should your main keywords be mentioned? Again, there is no magic number, it’s all about observing and measuring against the top websites in your market. But what should you measure?

Each one of these items should be measured independently. There are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets of top rankings.

Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail in overall optimization. This is when you use keywords too often or too little. If you look unnatural, your rankings will suffer as a result.

So, what did we learn here? Basically that the key to ranking highly in the search engines is to understand what the top 5 websites in your niche are doing and to apply this to your own website optimization.

What do you do now? Get out there and start getting inbound links for your site. Add quality content to your site daily. And be sure that your on-site optimization, such as keyword density, is similar to that of your top competitors. Continue to do this every day and you will be ranking at the top of the search engines before you know it.