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Your Guide to Top Search Engine Rankings
By Trent Brownrigg (c) 2006

Does it seem like no matter what you do your website just won't
climb up in the search engine rankings? If so, your web site may
not be optimized well enough for the search engines to increase
your rankings. There are some very important factors that
determine where web sites are ranked. These factors are referred
to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and they can
make all the difference in your site's rankings.

Here are some of the most important factors that the search
engines use in determining your rankings:

1. Web Site Content

Content on your site is one of the most important factors for
successful search engine optimization. Your web site should
provide valuable information on specific subjects relevant to
your web site. Furthermore, your content should be updated
regularly. It's not enough to just put up a few content pages
full of information on your site and then never add to it. This
is a continuous process that will help your search engine
rankings if done correctly.

It's also important that you don't try to trick the search
engines by flooding them with multiple versions of the same
page, repeating the same content over and over. Doing that will
not help your rankings and will eventually lead to your site
getting banned from the search engines.

2. Link Popularity

Inbound links are very important for achieving high search
engine rankings. Most of the search engines today regard link
popularity as one of the most significant determinants of your
website's rankings.

Here are some of the best ways to get inbound links:

* Articles - Writing and submitting articles to websites and
article directories is a very good way to get inbound links.

* Content - Not only will adding quality content help in your
rankings by itself, it will also help you with your link
popularity. Other webmaster's will want to link to your site
because it is valuable to them and their own visitors.

* Directories - Submitting your site to online directories will
help you gain inbound links.

* Blogs - Start a blog that you update frequently with
information related to your website's niche. Then, link to your
site from the blog. You can also submit your blog to various
blog directories to get even more inbound links.

* Link Exchanges - Simply find other quality sites related to
yours and ask them to link to you in exchange for a link back to
them. This is not as effective as it used to be but it is still
a pretty good way to get inbound links.

When trying to increase your link popularity remember that the
more inbound links you get the better, but quality is always
better than quantity. Stay away from low quality sites, FFA's,
and sites unrelated to yours.

The next things that should be considered when doing SEO for
your web site are the on-site and the off-site elements. Some of
the on-site elements are the title tag, Meta tags, heading tags,
ALT tags and highlighting of the text using the bold tag. The
Link text is an important off-page element.

On-Site Elements:

3. Title Tag and Meta Tags

Meta tags help describe the page where they are placed. Though
today the Meta tags are not nearly as important as they once
were and are definitely not the only things the search engines
look for when indexing your site, they are still somewhat
important in deciding the relevancy of the page for a keyword
search.

Search engines focus on three primary tags to help them
determine the relevance of a website for a particular search
phrase. The Title Tag, Meta Keywords and the Meta
Description...

Editorial Note: Most experts agree that the Title tag is very
important to a website's ranking and that the Meta Description
tag is still useful to most search engines in the SERPs (search
engine result pages) as a concise outline of a site's content.
The Meta Keywords tag is, however, generally believed to be
irrelevant to all the major engines in determining site ranking.

Ideally the title tags should contain less than 64 characters
with your most important keywords in them and should definitely
be relevant to the content on the page. Do not stuff keywords in
to the title tag!

The Meta description tag is a summary of the page and its
contents. This Meta tag should be 200 characters or less and
should contain keywords and phrases you hope to be found for,
but it should also read like an introductory lead-in for the
page and be appealing to the reader. The description you provide
for your page has to convince the visitor that they have found
exactly what they were looking for.

Probably the least important Meta tag to search engines is the
keyword tag. However, it shouldn't be ignored. Keyword tags
should be less than 1000 characters. This tag should include
important keywords and phrases consistent with the body text,
title, and content of the page. Be specific and accurate with
the keywords and key phrases in this tag. Again, do not stuff
keywords here... they should only be those that are actually on
the page and do not repeat any word more than 3 times.

4. Heading Tags

The heading tags are given more weight than the ordinary text.
The higher the H tag the more weight it carries. You should make
use of the heading tags to highlight the important keywords and
headings of your page as well as the paragraph headers.

5. Bold Text

Bold text is given a little more weight than ordinary text but
not as much as heading tags. Make sure to enclose some of your
keywords in bold tags when they appear on the page.

6. Alt Text

The alt tag provides alternative text when images cannot be
displayed... This might happen if the users have set the
browsers only to download the text and not the graphics, or if
the images are too heavy to download for the user’s internet
connection. Only include important keywords relevant to your
site and the image and do not stuff keywords in them.

Off-site elements:

7. Link Text

This is a very important factor in search engine optimization to
gain higher rankings. The link text can be on pages within your
site or what other web sites use to link to you. Either way, it
is important. If possible the target page's main search term
should be included in the link text instead of just the URL. Do
not use identical link text for every link, but do include the
target page's main keywords in the link text. Links carry more
weight when the text around them is relevant to the target
page's keywords and phrases.

Following the above SEO information will help tremendously in
your search engine rankings. Remember that the search engines
are advancing all the time. Don't try to trick them because they
will eventually catch on and that could mean the end of your web
site. Stick to the basic techniques above and you will increase
your search engine rankings without fear of being banned or
dropped.
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Trent Brownrigg is a successful Internet marketer and home
business consultant. Visit his website Work-At-Home-Jobs-Iowa.com
(http://www.work-at-home-jobs-iowa.com) for all the information,
tips and resources you need to succeed in your home based business
(http://www.work-at-home-jobs-iowa.com)
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