Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Search Engine Optimization For Non-Techies

By Jack Sinclair


Everyone that wants instant web site traffic simply heads over to a search engine, and registers to get pay per click (paid) advertising, so when people search, their website gets listed. It can add up to quite a bit of money when you use ppc traffic.

Of course, the better your pages are, the more likely the search engines will list them for free, and let people click all day without charging you a penny.

You may have heard of this Page Rank thing. It is a google score between 0 and 10, and the higher the number, the better your page is. No one really knows how PageRank is scored, not even Larry Page (one of the key guys at Google). I can show you some simple things you can do to get better search engine rankings, and a better Page Rank.

Does that sound cool? It's easy stuff, and let's get into it straight away.

1. Generate links on other websites pointing to your website, using popular keywords.

Having a lot of other sites pointing to your site is a surefire way to get the attention from the search engines. If those links use words that people search for, you have a shot at getting on the results pages of the search engines.

A great way to do this is to write informative articles and use the author box to link back to your site, then submit your article to many article directories.

2. Include your keywords in your title tag.

The title tag is what you read at the very very top left of your browser. Make sure your keyword shows up there.

3. Include your keyword in your headline.

The headline is the big text on your web page. It is the "H1" tag, if you look at the code for your page. Your page should have only one big headline, and your keyword should be in it.

4. Put related keywords on your page.

Some folks call this semantic indexing, but you can ignore those big words, and simply write meaningful stuff on your page, and you will have related words that tell the search engines that this is stuff that humans should see.

5. Remove the programming jargon from your main html file.

Get the programming mumbo jumbo out of your html files, and put it in another file. Things like javascript and "css" mess up the search engine spiders that come and index your pages, so put that stuff on other files, and include it in one small line of code. That way, there is no chance of messing up the bots when the come to visit.

6. Put the full link to your internal HTML pages.

This is quite easy, and just means of linking to the HTML page, you link to it like it was on another site, using the fully qualified domain name (that http colon slash slash stuff). When you do this, the search engines know that these other pages are worth indexing too.

7. Update your site frequently.

By keeping things new on your website, it means you have active dynamic content, which the search engines love. So keep things maintained and updated, and your rankings in the "SERPS" will rise steadily.

Try these tips out, and watch your search engine results rise higher and higher. It is simple when you know what to do.

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