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Everybody wants to know how it is their site can rank better on the popular search engines like Google, Bing! and Yahoo!. If you administer your site and/or blog yourself, here is a quick list of some of the most critical elements you need to employ to better your chances at improved ranking among the top search engines.

Keywords

• Keywords in your <title> tag – Probably the most important. Shows as your page title in search results. Keep it short (5-7 words) and put keywords near beginning
• Keywords in URL – Ex. If you sell diamond studded dog collars you will want something like: http://domainname.com/diamond-studded-dog-collars.php
• Keyword density – beware keyword ”stuffing” (where keywords make up +10% of your text). Keep major keywords in check under 7% and minor ones at 1-2%
• Keywords in anchor text – Anchor text can be defined as pages to which inbound links get sent. Ensure you employ above density rule for keywords in these landing pages for optimal SEO performance
• Keywords in headings <H1>, <H2>, tags, etc.. – We see this get overlooked all the time. Simple to do, but often forgotten. Critical that keywords here are relevant to content found on page in question.

Links

• Anchor text of inbound links – as discussed above, it is best if you have keywords in the text of these inbound links
• Origin of inbound links – the more links you have from higher ranked Google sites the better. The more reputable the linking site in other words, the better for your ranking
• Links from similar sites – search engines view this as a vote of confidence for you and your content. You are considered an expert and therefore are awarded with higher page rankings
• Links from .edu, .gov or .org sites – the more of these you have the better. They are hard to come by and viewed as more reputable than .com or .net links

Content

• Unique content – A real boost for your rankings are reflected by amount of different (and relevant) content you have on your site that others do not
• Posting/Updating frequency – If you are in a position to constantly add new content to your site (ex. Blog, Consumer reviews, etc..) great. This is very positive and encourages spiders to come back and index your pages more frequently. If you are not in a position to do so – you better find a way!

Meta Tags

• <Description> metatag – Use to describe your site, sometimes shows up in search results. Less important with Google, but still applicable for Bing! and Yahoo!
• <Keywords> metatag – Again, becoming less and less of a critical factor in relation to page rankings. Recommended that you put 10-20 words here, provided they are relevant to content on page

Found above are some of the more critical elements in ensuring your page ranks as high as possible. There are tons of websites dedicated to this and only this, not to mention companies who specialize in applying SEO with hundreds and hundreds of employees.

We’ll go over some of the ways you can sabotage your page ranking and perhaps get banned from Search Engines altogether in our next post.

Some of the sites we frequent include:

http://www.immadeeasy.com

http://www.seowizardry.ca

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under General, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.