Looks familiar ?
When it comes to SEO a few things are realy important.
Lets look at "keywords" in.....
Content
Keyword in Title Tag
Keyword in regular text
Keyword toward top section of the page
Keyword in Heading Tags H1, H2, H3
Keyword in links
Keyword in image file names
Keywor in Meta Tags
Keyword in Alt Tags
Keyword in comments
Don't underestimate the links..
Links
Total number of incoming links
Links from high PR sites or authorative sites
On-topic Links
Having Keywords in the anchor text of incoming links
Having keywords in internal links within the site and menues
Age of the incoming links (Currently links less than 3-6 months old, may not even get counted)
One-way links may get more credit than 2-way or recprical Links
Links coming from pages with less outgoing links are better.
Links coming from pages with over 100 links are no good.
Factors that may count against you,yeah im not kidding..
Too much keyword repetition
Hidden content via text same color as background or CSS or other such methods.
Javascript Redirects or certain other redirects.
Cross linking bunch of sites to eac other in the same network.
Doorway pages,Pages that are specifically written for search engines and cannot be found by your site visitors via your normal navifation menues.
PPC: Adult, Pharmacy and Casino related content.
Duplicate content : watch out for those duplicate filters.
Make sure your site doesn't have content from other sites or one else has copied you.
Age of your domain.
Brand new or less than 6-month old domains may be in the Google Sandbox
Participating in Link Farms or services that try to artificially increase your links by doing shortcuts.
Cloaking : Showing a page to search engines different than what the users see based on their IP address
Factors that won't count against you, but are problems
Dynamic content, such as shopping cart based content may not get indexed
Primarily Graphic or Flash based websites
Javascript content and/or menus.
Optimization Process
Most of you people out there who have decided to create your own online business; think that by having the business idea and creating the corresponding website; then your work is done and the money will start flowing.
After a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website, you decide to try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in one of the millions of search engines.
Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck.
Trying to optimize your website without a proper optimization strategy will eventually be a complete waste of time.
Where to Start?
The first thing to do is choose the appropriate keywords that you will be targeting in your optimization process.
You might think that this might sound like a quick and simple thing to do.
Well you are mistaken.
Choosing the correct keyword is a crucial issue in optimizing your site.
Targeting the wrong keywords will result in wasting your time.
Keyword Research
To research your keyword you must visit THIS page of mine.
Its an online tools that provide you with an idea of what are currently the most searched keywords on the top search engines.
Using Overture, you can first start by inserting a general keyword that you think might describe your web site topic.
You will then notice that Overture will provide you a list of related terms with a number near each one under the "count" column.
This number corresponds to the number of times the specific keyword has been searched for the previous month within the Overture search engine.
Generally, you can take that number times 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.
Don�t directly choose the term with the highest count.
Why? you ask... If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then mostly likely the competition will be very fierce.
That much competition is not good for a new site.
Let�s say for example you�re sites topic is Phpnuke.
Although the keyword Phpnuke might have the highest count, if you search for it in Google, you will realize that that you will be competing against 13 million sites.
Try to narrow the competition by targeting more specific keywords as long as the keywords still apply to your site.
Choose 2 or 3 keywords and then move on to the search for each one in Google.
If the #1 ranking website for your targeted keyword is not a top-level page in his domain, then this is to your advantage if you are trying to optimize your homepage.
Next install the Google toolbar, and then enter the #1 ranked page for your targeted keyword.
Check the PR of the page.
The less the PR of the page, the easier will be you job in outranking all your competition.
Note: Here's a quick definition of Page Rank.
Page Rank is Google's way of giving a specific value to how popular your website is.
It is based on the number of "votes" other websites cast for your website.
A "vote" is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to your website.
Generally, the more "votes" or links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank (PR) will be,but this doesnt mean your site is of high quality.
Page Rank is just 1 of the many factors that Google takes into account when ranking websites.
Next open the source code of the top ranked page, cause you need to check a few issues.
Check if they are using the targeted keyword in the "title" tag.
Check if they are using the targeted keyword in the header "h1" tag.
Check if they are using the targeted keyword in the "alt" image tags.
Check if they have placed the targeted keyword at the beginning of the page.
Check if they have bolded the keyword within the body of the page. If they have, then see how many times they have done it.
Remember the purpose of this study your competitor�s optimization strategy.
This strategy has already worked for him.
So our purpose is to do what they have already done but do it slightly better.
Do not overdo the optimization cause there such a thing as over optimization.
This will result in the undesirable, which is being penalized and quarantined by Google and other search engines.
And it will be taking you several months before being back in the competition once again.
Good Luck with your optimization process.
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