SEO - Optimization of Website Ranking Factors !

After you have made a final selection of 15-20 of your most relevant and important keywords, you need to use them on different parts of your website you should optimize your web site to improve search engine position. It is not advisable to use all your keywords on all the pages. A good way to use the selected keywords on your site is to divide them into 5-7 groups of keywords. Each group should have closely related keyword-forming themes. Identify various sections/ parts of your website that closely match with the keyword group themes and optimize your pages using these themes. I recommend using your keywords 2-4 times per page. Over-repetition of keywords on a page might be interpreted as spam by the search engines. Make sure you don't put all your keywords on one page.

The important ranking factors including website title tags, description tags, meta keyword tags, heading text, link url, link text, image alt, comment and web page body text. Every keyword frequency, weight, size, prominence and proximity all affect the ranking.

If you want to have a complete optimized site you have to take care of both on-site and off-site optimization. I will first outline the basics of on-site optimization.

Title of the Page : You should always begin the title tag with the most important keyword that you are targeting. A Title Tag should be of on more then 90 characters, inclusive of your most important keywords is good enough. For instance, the Title Tag of this page would be written as

"Search Engine Optimization : Techniques for search engine optimization,". Read our detailed section on Optimizing Website Ranking Factors !. Make sure that the title describes exactly what the page is about.

Meta Keywords Tag : The meta keywords tag has become less and less important as far as search engine optimization is concerned. However, although largely a remnant of the early days of web markup, the meta keywords tag is still used by search engines as a reference point for the terms targeted by the page. In the meta description tag include the keywords and keyphrases from your title, description and some other important keywords but try not to exceed 20 words.

Meta Description Tag : You should write a Meta Description Tag of about 160 to 180 characters with your important keywords. Be careful about over-repetition. You have to make sure that it describes what the page is about and, because it will appear as a description of your page in search engine results pages, you have to write it in a way to make the readers interested in your site. Hence, like the title tag, it is important that the meta description tag be keyword rich as well as attractive to humans.

Heading Tag : Each page should contain at least one heading tag. You have to place it at the top of the page and should contain your primary keywords/keyphrases. Make sure that all the heading tags are relevant to the content of the page.

Alt Tag : When you place your cursor over an image a text will popup. This text is the alt text. Try not to stuff keywords or keyphrases in it. Make sure it will describe the image and will include your main keywords/keyphrases.

Content of the Page : Along with the title, the content weights heavily for all major search engines. To get high rankings for those keywords, you need to use the keywords in the actual body content of your site. Ensure that your target keyword appears in the document text as many times as possible.

But remember that no keyword should just be placed on an ad hoc basis - try to mention each key term in a natural way as you are writing, so that any sentence containing a keyword could actually make grammatical sense. Besides, the repetition should be such that your human visitors do not feel that you have deliberately repeated a particular phrase throughout the page. First of all, you make a website for your visitors, not for search engines.

Moreover, this is not only important from the point of view of ensuring that your readers don't get a bad impression of your site, but also from the point of view of search engine optimization - the search engines may penalize your page for spamming if they find that you have randomly repeated the keyword throughout the page. So be careful - stuffing or overusing key terms in an attempt to appear "relevant" for key phrases may negatively affect rankings.

Also, make sure to mention your main keyword at the very top and the very bottom of the webpage.

In addition, you should pay much attention to the uniqueness of your webpage text. You must never copy someone else's text on your website ! A good thing you can do for your site is to add at least a new page each week to give users a reason to visit your site again.

Anchor text : Keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used. While the relevance of the page containing the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree (because of relevant keywords appearing on that page), the real gainer is the target page URL. Use this knowledge to build the relevance of each page of your site, through optimized anchor text containing important keywords, relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site.

When linking to internal pages, it is better to use the format:

Read all about Link popularity !

instead of

Read all about Link Popularity here !

It is always a great idea to restructure sentences if keywords don't fit in anchor text.

Sitemap Page : Existence or nonexistence of a properly formed sitemap page on your website is also a part of SEO that may boost the crawling speed and influence ranking effectiveness of pages at your website. As always, make sure that links to your pages contain keyword terms or phrases.

Invalid HTML Code and Broken Links : The use of code which may not be readable or spiderable to search engine bots may directly decrease your website's rankings, or may cause losing pages from a search engine index at all. So you should carefully validate your HTML code. One of the possible ways to automate this procedure is to use HTML validator.

If you will build all your pages accordingly to all this basic tips, your pages will be optimized the way they should.

It is the off-page optimization factors that will boost your rankings. I'll repeat once more : Though on-page optimization is an essential requirement of moving your website up, doing it alone can bring you only comparatively trifling changes in your search engine ranking. You will never get into top ten for your keywords without doing off-page optimization !

Finally, what you need to do to achieve high search engine rankings from "Off-Site Search Engine Optimization" is to start a great "Inbound Link Building Campaign" !