By Noah Ulrich
The lifeblood of any website/ecommerce business is traffic, andevery webmaster knows the best type of traffic is natural,organic search engine traffic. There are two very importantreasons for this: (1) it is extremely targeted, and (2) It isFREE! The hard part is getting top ranking for your siteskeywords... or is it? The purpose of this article is to providea few simple, effective, and most important, search enginefriendly strategies to help boost your websites' ranking andultimately your traffic.
1. We will start with the Meta Tags. I know you have alreadyheard of, and are probably currently using meta tags on yoursite. This is great. I just want to make sure you are using themeffectively. We will only go over 2 tags: the "title" tag, andthe "description" tag. We will not go over the "keywords" tag,as the major search engines have placed less and less weight onthis one, and some would argue this tag has no weight at all. Istill use this tag however, as I feel there is some merit and nodrawbacks to using this tag.
I have found it effective to use similar text in the "title" and"description" tags, and to place your keywords prominently inthese tags (near the beginning and more than once). I have seensites with "sitename.com", "New Page 1", or "Welcome to my site"in the "title" tag, which really does not help in their questfor higher rankings for their particular keyword. Also, try notto use words such as "and", "or", or "the" in these tags.
**Important note about your keywords. Search engines evaluatekeyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density whendetermining a site's ranking. All three are calculatedindividually for the page, the title tag, the description tag,as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means howclose the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keywordweight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrasecan be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of thekeyword to the other words on the page. You do not want thekeyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear tothe search engine as "keyword stuffing" and most search enginespenalize sites that stuff their keywords.
2. Place your navigational links (and JavaScript) at the rightor at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When thesearch engines "read" your site, they read from the top left tothe bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to benavigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your"heading" tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page.This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right orbottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to thetext first, giving more weight to what's important on your page.
3. Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiderscannot "read" pictures or images. The only way a spider knowswhat an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is alsoanother chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML,improving your page's keyword weight/density. Alt tags are easyto make and they can make a big difference in your sites keywordranking. A simple alt tag looks like this: alt="put your keywordphrase here." Search engines separately calculate keywordprominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimizeyour tags.
4. Place your keywords at the bottom of your page. Just assearch engines place more weight on the first words of yourpage, they also do the same to the last words. The generalthinking is this, if your site is about a certain subject, thenthe main points, or keywords, should, appear at the beginning,be spread throughout the page, and be prominent at theconclusion. But if you have all of your navigational links andJavaScript at the bottom, your relevant page text could end wellbefore the HTML does. An easy way to have your keywords at thebottom of your page is to include them in the copyrightinformation. For example, if you have a dog food website, youcould have something like this at the very bottom of the page:
copyright 2005 yoursite.com World's best dog food
Search engines are not (as of this writing), penalizing sitesusing this technique, and it wouldn't really make much sense forthem to do so.
5. The Anchor Text of your links. Anchor text is the actuallinking text on a site. It is what the user clicks on tonavigate to that particular site or page. If a search enginefinds many links to your site using the term "dog food", thenthe search engine concludes your site is about "dog food". Thisis overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very largeimpact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword.Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you aretrying to target. Try to avoid anchor text such as "Click Here"or "www.yoursite.com"
Also, if you're running a reciprocal link campaign, be sure touse variations of your text. If an engine notices every link toyour site is identical, it could place less weight on theselinks or potentially penalize your site. This is because searchengines generally give more weight to "naturally occurring"links, and less to "reciprocal link exchange campaigns". Usingdifferent, but relevant anchor text can dramatically affect yourtargeted keyword rankings, by making your links appear morenatural.
Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have readabove, little tricks that require little or no programmingknowledge, can make a huge impact on your website's keywordranking
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