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.

Having worked directly with hundreds of web sites I have discovered techniques for optimizing web sites that actually work. I often get question about SEO such as, “what is the one technique that works better than all others?” A difficult question to answer because I have found a number of techniques that are truly effective.

The first SEO ranking factor that has proven effective time and again is making sure that all inbound links to your web site have keywords in their anchor text. By placing keyword in the anchor text of these links, you are directing search engines to your website and individuals search for a particular keyword. I know that you can’t always control what someone names a link to your web site, but where you can, make sure it includes your 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 final ranking factor is keyword use in root domain. Although it’s possible to use subdomain or dedicated pages to get your keywords in a URL, nothing beats having them in your root domain.

All of the top five ranking factors will work for you. I have personally seen them dramatically improve rankings for even the smallest web sites. Make sure that you address each factor. In combination, these factors have the most impact. By addressing the top ranking factors for your web site, you’ll be able to add additional search engine optimization techniques to ensure top placement over the long term..

No related posts.

Tags: google, internet, search, search engine optimization, search engines, SEO, Yahoo!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.