Thursday, January 29, 2009

Do it yourself Optimization

By Brent Sweet

There are several strategies that can be used to get to the top of Google. It is actually much easier that many would believe. It is simply amazing how many sites are ranked where they are by luck, very few are ranked for keywords because they are trying to be. The purpose of this writing is to give you things you can work on to directly affect your rankings.

First of all I want to say there are many things you can do, that are completely within your control to move yourself up. If anybody here has ever studied six sigma or anything like that you will know that you really only need to focus on things in your control. It is ultimately a waste of time to focus on things out of your control.

Here is what is in your control with search engine optimization.

- The title tag is the first thing. It influences your rankings more than anything. I like to pick 5 phrases that I want to rank for then arrange the words in a way that makes sense, doesn't repeat and is less than 9 words.

- The text in your body. Use each phrase that you want to rank for in the body. I don't really care if it is in H1 tags or in Bold. I don't think those carry that much weight. When you want to get from position 2 to 1, maybe, but bold and h1 is not the difference between the 100th position and the first page.

- The filenames you use are important. Do not put things like sessions or log tail URLS in your file names. This causes the engines to index your pages seperately which hurts rankings.

- The links to your site. Yes you have control over how people link to you. One way is to create or buy link bait. This is something that people will want to link to. Can be like a top 10 list. Real creative things get more links. I am not creative so I submit articles. This way I have full control over how people link to me and I get a lot of free one way links.

There are 4 things that you can control that will improve your rankings, and very quickly if you work hard. - 15615

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