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Search Engine Optimization Rules ? Three Rules To Help You Top The Search Engine Rankings

Search engine optimization is probably the most important aspect of website development.  No matter how much you pay for a fantastic looking site, you can still have no visitors for it if you do not address the basic requirements of search engines.  You can, of course, get visitors by paying to advertise on other websites, but this is an ongoing cost and as soon as you stop paying, the visitors stop coming.

There are many different aspects to search engine optimization, but the following three rules will get you off to a good start and save you a lot of time and money.

Rule 1 – Get it right from the start

If you create a website first and then try to deal with search engine optimization, you will face an uphill struggle.  This happens to lots of people because they often have not even heard of SEO until after they have built a site and found that no-one is visiting it.  The most important thing you can do when developing a new site is to build in your SEO right from the start.

To succeed online, your website should be designed right from the start with search engines in mind.  This will govern the whole structure of your site, the names and keywords you use for pages, the file names and alt text you select for images, the subjects you choose to cover on your site and even the whole theme of your website.  Putting these things right afterwards is sometimes impossible, particularly if your site is not small.

There is one option open to you if you find that you have a site which you are happy with, apart from the fact that you have no visitors.  In this situation it can be best to set up a new well optimized site which attracts lots of visitors and funnels them direct to your old site to deal with sales, etc.

Rule 2 – Learn From Your Competition

When you know what key phrases are most important for your website, check out which other sites are in the top ten positions for these phrases now.  You need to analyse these sites carefully, because whatever they are doing is what you need to be doing too.

A good SEO tool will help you analyse your competing websites quickly and easily, covering all the different aspects of your competitors, such as who is linking to them, what keywords they use on each page, keyword density, etc.  A large part of why the other sites are at the top of the search engine results pages will be the sites who have added links to them.  You need to be able to quickly assess all of these links and pick out the ones that are doing the most good in terms of adding Pagerank, and target those to get links for your own site.

Rule 3 – Automate as Much As You Can

The problem with SEO is that so much of it is a time consuming business.  There are lots of separate jobs that each require careful research and then many repeated actions on your part.  I am thinking of keyword research and analysis, submission to directories, seeking link exchange partners, article submission, etc.

If you were to do all of these things manually, it would take you forever just to deal with one website.  The only way to make SEO tasks practical is to automate as many of them as you can, using shortcuts wherever possible.  This is what SEO tools are designed to do.  You can get specialist packages and services to deal with link building, or directory submission, but a good SEO software package will deal with all of these together, making your SEO efforts much easier to manage and co-ordinate.

3 Search Engine Optimization Rules That You Should Follow

Search engine optimization is the single number one way to get high traffic to a website. Sites which rank in the top of search engine returns for popular search engines get many times the amount of traffic as sites which rank farther down.

So whether you just have a website you want to get traffic to or you have a product site you are looking to increase traffic to, there are some simple search engine optimization rules to follow which will help you make the most out of those keyword searches that millions of people run every day.

Follow the Search Engine Optimization Rules of the key Search Engines   – If you do not know what the guidelines are about correct search engine techniques, you need to find out.

If you break the rules, you might think you are outwitting the search engines in the short term, but your websites are guaranteed to suffer from no indexing or being dropped if you try to take short-cuts, especially if you believe the promotional sales letters put up by some self-proclaimed Gurus.

You need to learn the Search Engine Optimization Rules to develop the best SEO  techniques, such as using  relevant returns and appropriate keywords since they can become indexed. You will notice sites such as Wikipedia ranking near or at the top of almost all relevant search engine returns.

This is because they have been indexed as having accurate and relevant content. The search engine wants the user to have the best experience possible, so these sites are almost always at the top.

Creating a Site Map is very important to all the top search engines, and then you need to notify them of the url where they can find your site map.

Creating a Blog on your site, that pings the search engine whenever your site is updated with new content or specific blog posts, is essential in today’s www environment.

Make sure you are fully utilizing the free website services of network sites like Squidoo, Geocities, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Stumbleupon and similar.  They provide good high Page Rank linking to your site, and a flow of interested readers who click through to your site as well.

There are many, many online sources where you can learn for free how to use these to optimize your website. You can also use YouTube and similar video sites to promote your site.  You can use your free Windows Movie Maker software already on your computer!  Just add some graphics and you can record a message or just load some jazzy music as a soundtrack.  It really can be fast and fun to create witty or dramatic videos, and they may become ‘viral marketing’ tools for you as well.

You can also create free eBooks and reports that your visitors can download from your site to make it more ‘sticky’ for visitors, as search engines also pay attention to how long your visitor stays on your website when they create rankings.  If you load the free book also to Scribd.com the search engines index the book, and the tags you loaded there.  Sometimes Scribd will index your new book within 30 minutes of you loading it!

Remember Every Page – Every single page counts when considering the search engine optimization rules. While the home page may be the one you focus on, it is important that all relevant pages take advantage of search engine optimization rules so that people have an even greater chance of coming across your content.

Make sure you fill your tags and titles on each page with relevant search engine keywords.

Check every page to make sure you don’t have any broken internal or external website links, or broken graphic links as search engines loathe this problem.

If you are not an expert in preparing html code, you need to buy software like Dreamweaver to be able to follow the search engine optimization rules, as they react badly when your code breaks them.

Keep It Natural – One of the most important things to remember is to keep your content natural. Basic search engines optimization rules require you to fill your content with keywords in order to rank high.

But if that content comes off as spam or is impossible to read because it focuses only on keyword percentage, the site may be indexed as spam with search engines, ruining your ranking. You want to have a site that appears to have been written for an intended purpose other than simply ranking high. Relevance is key, but natural flow is what keeps people coming back.

If you follow some of these simple search engine optimization rules, you will find your rank quickly rising in search engine returns. If you follow some of these simple search engine optimization rules, you will find your rank quickly rising in search engine returns.  You can also watch your progress in SEO by keeping an eye on your Alexa.com Rankings as that is updated daily, and gives you plenty of warning if your sites are slipping in their performance and rankings.

They have numerous bots working for them, crawling the web and determining how content should rank. If  you follow these search engine optimization rules, you will surely have a site which returns at a high rank with relevant content.

To ensure your site is following all the search engine optimization rules, and you are a ‘newbie’ to website building, it may be best for you to hire the services of a SEO consultant so that you can learn from an expert.

Search Engine Optimization Rules – Discover The Most Vital Search Engine Optimization Rules

Search engine optimization is such a huge subject it is difficult to distil it down to a few rules, but there are certainly some key factors which are simply essential, and without which none of the rest matters very much.  The following search engine optimization rules are almost a step by step guide to follow while you create your website.  It is important to have an understanding of these rules before you build your site, or you may well end up having to re-do much of it later.  Websites created without reference to these rules are likely to receive little or no visitors and websites without visitors are websites that generate no income.

Get Your Meta-Tags Right

Meta-tags are the unseen but vital pieces of text in the ‘head’ section of each of your web pages.  The title tag is by far the most important, and you have to put your primary keyword at the beginning of your title tag.  Repeat it again at the end or include a second keyword, but don’t stuff it.  The title tag is the wording which appears as the main heading in the list of search results when you do a search on Google or other search engine.  It tells the search engines and potential visitors what your site is about.

The description meta-tag is less vital than the title, but it is still important to get it right.  It is the brief description of your site that visitors will see beneath the title in search results, so repeat your keyword and write something that will encourage viewers to click on your site.

Content Is King

This means that there are no substitutes for a good quality website which offers useful information.  Search engines are looking for useful and interesting sites with original content, so rather than put your energies into trying to fiddle a shortcut to that, just give them what they want in the first place.  This is the only way to be sure you will be ranked well and continue to be ranked well in the long term.

Choose The Right Keywords

This is so important.  Your keywords will be used on your web pages and will tell the search engines what your pages are about.  If you choose keywords that no-one is searching for, you will get no visitors.  If you choose keywords that people are searching for, but which millions of other well established sites are also using, again you will get no visitors.

You can’t identify the best keywords by guessing, you need to use a tool that will tell you not just how many sites are competing for those words, but also how many searches are being done for those words.  The best tools will help generate lots of keywords that you could not have thought of yourself, and refine and organise your keywords to give you the terms likely to bring the highest volume of targeted traffic to your site.

Build Links To Your Website

One of the main criteria search engines use to judge a site’s importance is the number and quality of other sites which are linking to it.  This measure of importance is used to decide where your site will be shown in the search results.  The way Google works is to look for all the sites which are relevant to the term being searched for, and then present them to the viewer in order of importance.  So being seen as important is crucial in showing up high enough in the results to be found by potential visitors.

There are various ways to get inbound links to your site.  One of the most common ways to get links to your site is to exchange links with other websites.  Search engines seem to value more highly links from sites which have content closely related in subject to your own.  For that reason, the best sites to exchange with are those with the same kind of theme as yours.

For people in business this can sometimes throw up the problem of not wanting to deal with sites seen as direct competitors, but it should still be possible to find sites which are related to the general subject area without being in competition.  The best way to approach this is to add a link to the site you wish to exchange links with, then contact the webmaster to say you have linked and ask if they would be willing to link back.

Work at following these main search engine optimization rules and you will go a long way towards developing a site that will rank high enough in search results to be found by lots of visitors.