Search Engine Placement

Improved Search Engine Placement Secrets   by Mark Abrahams

When you develop your website do you stare into space? Do you keep on reading different forums and search engine ranking newsletters with different tricks to get to the top and wonder what steps you need to take to get it ranked well in search engines? It takes at least six months or more to get good rankings, but well worth the effort in the long run for all the free traffic you will get. Getting rankings in Yahoo and MSN takes much quicker a month to two while getting good rankings in Google can take up to 9 months for a brand new site with the Google sandbox.

Choose a good niche and do your keywords research to choose keywords without too much competition that will get good traffic. You can use the Overture search suggestion tool and the Wordtracker tool. Wordtracker has good guidelines for selecting keywords without too much competition. Follow these and select your main traffic keyword(2 to 3 words in length recommended) that you will optimize your home page for. You need to draw up a list of keywords preferably 2 to 4 keywords in length that will represent your main content of your website. Design each page of content based on these keywords, but remember to design the content for humans and not for search engines.

Your on page factors account for only about 10% of your search engine rankings. The title carries the most significance in your ranking. Use the key words in the title and keep it short 4 to 7 words and only target one set of key words in each title. The heading carries the next most significance and use your keywords in here. Use your keywords in the body of the web page 2 to 3 times. You can also place keywords once in the comment tags and the alt tags of the image tag.

Your off page factors account for about 90% of your search engine optimization. This mainly consists of getting quality back links to your website and you can use several ways to do this.

Get listed in the two most important directories on the web Yahoo and Open Directory. Google even mentions on their site that a link from these two websites constitutes as a vote of quality as in http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. This definitely helps new websites trying to break out of the Google sandbox.

Second tier directories which are important and will also help your search engine rankings since these still contain a quality directory trusted by search engines. These include Best Of The Web, Business.com, MSN BCentral and Gimpsy.

A few third tier directories that will help your rankings in Yahoo and MSN, but these will not boost your Google search engine rankings. I suggest you submit to a few of these.

You can write your way using articles to the top of search engines. Submit your polished article to the article directories and get good quality back links. Make sure that you place your anchor text in the title of your link for your keywords. You can write a good article with the following tips. Think of an attention grabbing headline, write your introduction and conclusion first, list your main points of your articles with bullet points and expand on these.

Do a search on Google for the top websites for your related niche and get the top 50 websites linking to you excluding your competitors. Topical links will boost your search engine rankings while unrelated links will not help.

Do a newsworthy press release to obtain free publicity and get good quality links pointing to your website. Include your anchor text for your keywords in your link to your website, follow the press release format and avoid sales and promotion. Based on my research PRweb comes highly recommended as a paid option while pr.com, prleap.com and free-press-release.com comes recommended as good free options.

Once you start doing the above activities on a daily basis your search engine rankings will improve. Search engine optimization takes at least 6 months for a new site before you start seeing good results. Usually you see results much quicker in MSN and Yahoo, but Google takes much longer.

About the Author

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Mark Abrahams is a full time internet marketer who has helped others to earn a living online.