subject: 5 Easy Steps To Improved Search Engine Ranking [print this page] Have you been trying with little or no success to get people to visit your website? Take heart because you're not alone. Thousands of websites are created daily globally, but few of these ever get to be viewed by web users. The secret to unlocking the doors of web traffic often lies with mastering the art of search engine optimization; properly done, SEO can greatly improve your search engine ranking resulting to the positive consequence of increased traffic.
SEO is not magic and can be easily mastered by anyone with a deep desire to learn, neither does it involve tricks or hacks. SEO is all about designing your website with consideration to what search engines deem important and providing useful content to end users. Below are five steps to implementing SEO.
Step 1. Keyword Selection
SEO requires that you select keywords or key phrases that properly describes your page content. Your web content should consist of three things namely:
The phrase or keyword should consist of the essence of your web copy. If your web content is about dog food, then an example target phrase could be "Dog food" and not just "Dog".
Accuracy of keywords; many people make the mistake of choosing keywords based on their phonetic similarity to other words such as "sheep" for "ship" and optimise with these matches which often results to no-ranking.
Popularity of target keyword
A good example is the point number 3 above ; if your web copy is about "Dog food" for example, you can't optimize using "Dog chow" because people hardly search using the term.
There are various free search engine optimization tools that you can use to locate proper targetted phrases and key words. Some are:
Google Keyword Tool: This is a great tool that you can use when brainstorming for keywoord phrases.
Overture by Yahoo: a great tool for keyword brainstorming and popularity assessment.
Word Tracker: a great tool for competitive analysis and popularity assesment of targetted keywords.
Step 2. competitive intelligence
The second crucial step in SEO is competitive intelligence, to learn who your competition is. SEO work is mostly focussed on individual pages within a website. This means that you may end up locating other sites selling similar products with phrase like "Dog food", just keep in mind that your competition could be more specialised. Use Google and Yahoo to find out what comes up when you search using your target key phrase.
Step 3. Write your web copy
Search engine optimization is not all about meta tags. Take the following focused approach to search engine optimization:
* Include your target phrase twice in the meta title tag and ensure that the title is "clickable".
* Add the target phrase twice in the meta description.
* Add the target phrase in the meta keywords.
* Add the target phrase in the title or headline for your page.
Step 4. Promote Your Site
Make sure that when you announce your page, you use your target phrase in both the link text and any explanatory text.
Step 5. Check Your Results and Modify
If the major search engines don't craw your site on time them submit your site URL to them.
