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Achieving Good Search Engine Rankings

It may seem like a daunting task to please all of the many search engines out there, as there are thousands. Still, there are several pieces of advice I would give in order to streamline your SEO efforts among all of the major search engines.

Do your keyword research. This means learning how many times your keywords are being searched for every day, what competition you have, and how these relate to your content in each page.

Select 3 - 5 phrases to optimize each page, instead of a whole slew of keywords. The more keywords you try to use, the more diluted your keyword density becomes. Use keywords for each page, not geared toward the entire site. (Keyword density ranges for all of the above websites run from .07% for Google to 1.7% for Yahoo.)

Write unique, compelling titles for each page. Titles are still important to all five top search engines.

Focus on writing unique content that adds value to users and incorporates valuable keywords. Write for ideas, not keywords. When you are finished with your ideas, your keywords should result from the content, and not the content from the keywords.

Ensure site architecture and design do not prohibit thorough search engine crawling. Clear navigation, readable code, no broken links, and validated markup will allow you to not only make it easier for the search engine spiders to crawl your website, but this will also mean better page stickiness to your visitors.

Build high-quality, relevant, in-bound links. Since all search engines rely upon in-bound links to rank the relevancy of a site, it is good to concentrate on this area. Don’t inflate your backlinks with artificial links. Build organic, natural links, and keep the sites you link to relevant. Avoid link directories on your website. In the case of all search engines, the more links, the better.

Be familiar with how the top search engines work. When you do your homework and understand the workings of the search engines, it will help you determine what search engines look for in a website that it considers relevant, and what practices to stay away from.

Stay with it. SEO is not a one-time project. Continual growth in content, links, and pages is required for long-term success. The key to keeping your site relevant to search engines is fresh and unique content. This applies to keywords, links and content.

Don't sweat about the small stuff. Changes in search engine algorithms should not affect too much you if you follow the basic principles of SEO. While tweaking may be necessary, there is certainly no cause for alarm.

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© Lee Stretton 2005 |