subject: Simple SEO Tips to Raise Your Rankings [print this page] The art and mechanics of search engine optimization (SEO) concerns what are called on-page and off-page SEO factors, and doing this will hopefully give you a high position within the search engines for your market keywords. You want to get results in your IM business with SEO, so we'll let you discover a couple important areas you'll need to use in your own SEO marketing.
An important tip that many people forget when optimizing their website is to look at all the variables and not just focus on one. Page rank becomes the obsession of many marketers. When they should realize that there are many other factors that can help them rank well. Page rank alone will not determine how well your site is doing. So what really matters is how you optimize your site and create backlinks for it. There are other factors that help your site more in the long run than page rank. Making a list of areas to improve regarding SEO is the best way to keep your site strong.
You can also help yourself by doing the occasional bolding, or putting in italics, of your various keywords - but not on every single page. That is just something that will help you, everything contributes something, and it's not used on a lot of websites, either. Search engines apparently give more weight and higher priority to words that use these tags. But always remember that you should never overdo anything with SEO. Perhaps several to three times should be good enough to provide some help. And be sure to use h1 and h2 tags along with your primary and secondary keywords and phrases. They'll become more valuable and relevant for the search engines in terms of optimization. what you'll also be doing is optimzing each page for its own primary keyword/phrase plus some additional secondary keywords.
Backlinks - you're going to need them if you ever hope to achieve any kind of rankings in the search engines. Search engines look at backlinks as votes from other sites, so when you have many links coming to you from other relevant sites in your niche, then that will give you a boost in your rankings. You don't want to attract the attention of search engine human reviewers if you've built too many backlinks, using services, too fast, etc.
You'll get the most out of your backlinks if they are relevant to your site topic. The more relevant backlinks you have, the higher you'll be able to rank.
It is important to note that search engine optimization is not an overnight fix. It takes time to get lasting results which is why SEO is worth the effort. Keep your focus on creating strong titles and adding fresh content to your site. Search engines will respect your site as long as you keep perfecting these external factors.