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SEO and Positioning your Website for Top Search Engine Rankings

SEO and positioning your website to grab top positions in search engines for targeted keywords require both good on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization refers to how you tweak the webpage itself, ie the meta-tags, webpage title, content, navigation sitemap, etc. It has everything to do with the web architecture. Off-page optimization is more of a technique applied beyond your website, without involving any change to your website. Let’s take a look at some important elements of SEO and positioning that would boost the ranking of your website.

First of all, we need to understand a bit more about the role of on-page optimization in SEO and positioning. In summary, on-page optimization requires you to craft the web page structure such that it is optimized for a particular keyword that you are targeting. Never build a site first before knowing what you hope to achieve, ie whether your aim is to drive maximum traffic and sell more products or just as a hobby.

You need to pay attention to the keywords you are targeting first, and do detailed researches before you start building your webpage and optimizing it for the keywords. A lot of webmasters fail to realize the importance of keyword research in SEO and positioning for top search engine ranking. They often do it the other way round, targeting popular and extremely competitive keywords and keyword phrases. You may have realized that competitive keywords like “search engine optimization” or “web traffic” are simply out of reach for a new or amateurish website. SEO and positioning your website for such keywords would only bring you disappointment as you realize that even with a fully optimized page, you are still on page 1000 of the search engine results.

One hint for you is to go for any keyword phrase with less than 1 – 2 million search results and fewer than 1000 competing websites in Google. How do you check the number of competing websites? Simply type in “Allintitle: Target Keyword Phrase” into Google search box and all the websites containing the specific keyword phrase would be displayed. It is common sense that any website targeting a keyword phrase would include it in the webpage title, isn’t it? Looking at the search results alone is vague and difficult to determine the level of competition. Once you have found the keywords for optimization, remember to include them in your page title, sub-headers, and meta-tags.

Off-page optimization looks more at the popularity of your website. The search engines are constantly changing the landscape of the internet but one principle stays constant, that is to give users relevant results. Other than meddling with the on-page factors, you need to be aware of how search engines measure your website popularity and keyword relevance. One major yardstick of SEO and positioning is using link popularity. Search engine spiders are not humans and can only understand web content to a certain logical extent. A human may see a web page as rich in content but a search engine spider may deem it as spam.

The unbiased and more accurate way of judging the importance of a web page in terms of keyword relevance is to leave the decision to fellow webmasters and search engine users, or in short, votes of confidence. A link to your web page is a vote declaring that your web page is worth mentioning for that specific topic. But I must emphasize that not all links are equal. Find out why at my blog and also learn basic and advanced tips and tricks about SEO and positioning your website for top rankings either manually or using tools that would conveniently and quickly rank your website.

This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author’s name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.

Jim DeSantis asked:


Optimizing your blog for fun and profit can be a daunting task. There are secret tricks of the trade that separate newbies from techies but that does not mean you cannot do some of it yourself. This article is one of a series that lifts the curtain on this shadowland of optimization.

If you read my article – “What Should You Blog About?”, and I surely hope you did, you should have a blog filled with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, as opposed to a lifeless factsheet. So, how do you get your words where others can read them?

No matter how delicious your content is, if nobody knows it exists you can’t generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract readers, you must offer exciting and unique information. Simple enough, right? Common sense? Not exactly.

You see, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, to name the more popular ones.

So, to get these people to visit your blog, your blog needs to rank high on results pages of these search engines. When people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website high rankings on search results pages is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It is a complex and technical subject to master, but that will not stop you from learning some simple, yet effective techniques, to conquer the search engines for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as “fat loss”. I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, let’s determine the best keywords to optimize your site for.

For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you’d want to check in Google whether it is a very competetive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 (twenty-nine-million!) search results. Think you can beat 29,000,000 sites at your first attempt? I don’t think so. In fact, I know absolutely that you cannot.

Let’s try to narrow our scope to keywords you can successfully optimize for. Let’s look for the keywords – “technological gadgets”. At this time of writing, Google lists 792,000 results. That’s more manageable but still not narrow enough. You would still need to search for more focused keywords. An example is – “technological lap top gadgets”, however, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadgets” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title.

For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great.

You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the Wordpress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML! Note: You will find some resources in the sidebar of this site for optimizing your blog.

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your template code that is enclosed within the tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant. For example, write an article/post titled – “Cheap Technological Gadgets for Everyone!”. It has your keywords in the headline.

You should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint to the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic. But, don’t overdo it. Use of the term “technological gadgets” just a couple of times in your posts is quite enough. More than that and it may appear as spam to the search engines and, more important, your readers will feel the same way. The real downside to over use of the same keywords in a single article is that the search engines may de-list your blog and you will be cast out into the internet darkness.

So, keep this in mind: Write for humans, not for search engines, using your targeted keywords!

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. – Please forward this article to someone who can use it.

sebastian foss asked:


Pssst… I’m going to let you in on the worst kept secret of search engine optimization:

It’s all about getting links to your website .

I’m serious. While on-page factors such as keyword density and title tags are rudimentary techniques that almost every new website has picked up on (quite a difference from three years ago), link building is something that still eludes many webmasters, and for good reason: It involves work.

In fact, search engine optimization is about 90 percent effort and 10 percent experience. You need experience to recognize which keywords are more profitable, which techniques you need to learn in order to get more visitors to your website, etc. etc. After learning all that, it’s just a matter of getting down to doing the work itself. And that is why search engine optimization software such as SEO Elite are so effective: They cut down on the sheer load of work involved and provide intuitive ways for you to use your experience and get the most out of your investments (in this case, your website AND your time!)

In this lesson I’m going to talk a bit about the techniques you can use to get more links to your website. There’s nothing special about them; they all involve some work, but they all pay off in terms of targeted traffic. In fact, that should be the prime goal of your link building campaign:

Use inbound links to build traffic

All the strategies mentioned below can be used to get more links to your website. It goes without saying that the more of these strategies you use, the faster you’ll be able to get more links.

A common pitfall for most people new to SEO is that they often get sucked in by catchphrases such as ‘the best way to get links to your website’ or ‘the top 3 strategies you can use to get tons of links to your website’. The truth is that none of these techniques is the ‘best’. In reality, your website and your business model (in other words, the nature of your website-customer interaction) will determine the most fitting strategies for your linkbuilding campaign.

In fact, when you launch your linking campaign, you’ll probably have varying degrees of success with the strategies below. For example, article submissions are a great way to earn more subscribers to your newsletter, while affiliate programs work wonderfully well if you have a decent list of proven products (or a great product). The methods below are not separated in any specific way; I’ve listed the ‘free’ methods first and the paid methods later. Use this list as a reference through your link building campaign, and for best results, mix and match these techniques in the way they suit your website the best.

Just ask…

The traditional way of getting links is to directly ask potential link partners to link to your website. This can be a one-way link or a reciprocal link (more on reciprocal links later). The key factors here are to identify potential link partners and then to contact them and offer either a reciprocal link, an offer to their visitors, or both (we’ll cover paid links later).

Finding potential partners is a difficult business. It used to be that you would search on a major search engine like Google or Yahoo for your target keywords, and then check each website in the top 50 or top 100 listings manually, evaluating their similarity to your niche and noting their contact information. This is a tedious process, and is fraught with the primary obstacle of most link managers: ‘What if they say no?’

You could make them an offer they can’t refuse (which you will, and I’ll tell you how) but to improve your chances, use technology to your advantage. As before, use your target keywords to search for the top websites in your niche, but instead of contacting them, use a search engine optimization software to evaluate the back-links of a top website.

The idea here is to find out which websites link to the top competition in your niche – the websites in the top 10 or top 20 results for your target keywords.

The second step is to make the approach, sell the idea, or like I said before, make them an offer they can’t refuse. Part of this approach is to ability to write convincingly (you’ll find samples online of successful link request emails) and it is something you learn with time – test your link requests by sending different letters and measuring the response and repeating what works.

The other half involves the offer itself – what your website (or you) can offer to the link partner that will compel him/her to link to you. If you’re looking for free links, this offer can include a reciprocal link, site-wide links or maybe just the quality of your website content. The idea here is to sell your link even before they visit your website to check if it’s worth linking to, and this can only happen if you can the right pitch.

Write an article

The idea is quite simple. To establish yourself as a knowledgeable expert in your field, you need to be able to project your knowledge beyond your own website. In this case it involves writing articles on a particular topic in your niche, and distributing them to article directories online.

While this is a crude approach, the method can be refined by offering an article to potential link partners – thus providing them with valuable content for their visitors. Article syndication is a powerful tool and if used properly can generate hundreds, even thousands of visitors for you.

A quick search within your niche can help you find article directories where you can position your article, but a better option is to look at content aggregation websites in your niche – sites which regularly post articles from off-site authors. This not only gives you a chance to build your links but also gives your reputation in this field a boost, something that you can leverage in later techniques.

Run an affiliate program

If you sell a product, or a range of products, or even a membership service, launching an affiliate program is the quickest way to get inbound links. Of course, you’ll need to promote the affiliate program beyond your own website, and you can combine the above two techniques to promote not only your website but also your affiliate program.

In addition, if you have an e-product (an e-book or software) and you sell it through a portal like ClickBank, you can be assured that your affiliates are managed directly through their website. In case you want to run your own affiliate script, you can find several for a low price and even some good ones for free.

http://www.easyclickmate.com is a good Clickbank affiliate script…

An affiliate program offers your visitors and potential link partners the chance to make money by doing a little promotion of your product. For other webmasters that could simply involve posting your link or even posting your article promoting your product on their website; a sure bet for getting a link.

Directory submissions and site submissions

Second-tier directories and niche directories are seriously under-estimated in terms of their impact on your website traffic. If you’re just starting out and looking for free traffic, steer clear of the paid listings of Yahoo and ilk and concentrate on smaller hubs. They may not receive hundreds of thousands of visitors every day, but if you can garner 10 visitors a day from one directory, and get 10 or 20 such directories to which you can submit your link, you have a free stream of 100-200 daily visitors for only an hour’s worth of work.

The same goes for submitting your website’s link on sites that have a ‘links’ page and require a reciprocal link in exchange. While this is not the best strategy to get links by, it will help you in the beginning to get some traffic and hopefully, natural links as a result of that traffic.

Paid links

If you’re looking for a high value link (for example a link from a PR 7 page) and your website is fairly new, you’re not going to get in through normal means. In this case, the offer involves money, and this can usually be judged through the site’s own advertising policies. Search the website for its media kit, or something similar. Alternatively, you can email them asking them about advertising opportunities on their websites. In this case being direct is the best approach, and will save both your time and theirs.

Of course, the catch here is the amount of money you’re willing to pay. Some websites charge a monthly fee, others charge a ‘per impressions’ fee (for example, your ad would be shown for 10,000 page views only). In these cases you won’t have much room to negotiate if you are just starting out, so it’s advisable to shun the big guns and go for the smaller fish – people who won’t ask you for too much money and will accept a combination of reciprocal linking, money and some other ‘free method’ such as an article submission. Once your website carries its own weight in traffic and Page Rank, you can target the PR 7 and PR 8 websites.

The advantage of such websites is the sheer amount of traffic they get. A news site in Pakistan gets about 60,000 page views a day. Even on a CTR (click-thru-rate) of 1%, that amounts to 600 visitors a day, or 18,000 visitors a month.

The question is, what will you do with this traffic? The possibilities are endless.

Paid listings

Similar to paid links, paid directory listings are essentially directory inclusions for your website. For some directories, like Yahoo, this is a yearly arrangement, and even then there is no guarantee of inclusion; your website must pass certain editorial criteria. On other, less known directories, the payment is simply a one-time fee plus a request for a reciprocal link.

In many ways paid listings and links are the ‘extra’ tweaks that you give to your online business. Even if you have the cash at the start, it’s a prudent strategy to pursue free linkbuilding strategies alongside paid methods to ensure that you don’t invest too much in your business before it starts to show a profit.

The key to a successful link-building campaign is the consistency of effort you put in. Cut out the hard work in finding link partners (and for that matter, niche directories) by using a linking software such as SEO Elite, with which you can simply plug in the website URL, select your search engine and get a list of all the websites that link to it, the anchor text of those websites as well as their Page Rank. Lists like these, of your top 20 competitors, should be your target link partners during your link campaign.

Link-building is a simple business. All it requires is consistency, and some hard work (which you can eliminate using a simple search engine optimization software such as SEO Elite). And with things being so easy, don’t be surprised if you follow these steps and find yourself in the top 10 results for your keyword in just a few months Click Here To Get Your Free Copy of 7 Days To Massive Website Traffic by Optimization Expert, Brad Callen

Derek Rogers asked:


How can one way link building services help you and your business? In the world of internet marketing you probably already know by now that it is a tough and very competitive world out there. There are millions of websites, literally, and each one of them are trying to get customers just as you are. While not all are trying to get the same customers as you are, they are all trying to get customers. Now, your customer base will be a competitive field as well. You have other competition and they do want the same customers.

What can you do? There is a method called search engine optimization. This method is a host of techniques that work together to boost your ranking on the search engine and get your website noticed by your customer base, people searching for your keyword. Now, the problem is that other websites are trying for good ranking on the same keyword, at the same time. They too are trying to implement a good search engine optimization plan.

One method of search engine optimization is using one way link building services. Google uses many different elements to determine page rank. Links are extremely important to Google and the more links you have pointing to your website the better off you are. However, it is not always as easy as that. One way links are very difficult to get and maintain.

There are certain criteria that need to be met. First, these links must be of high quality. The links cannot be placed on link farms; this can actually hurt your page rank. The higher the quality of the page your link sits on, the better it is for your ranking. The links must also be from different websites. This means that each website your link is on, must come from an IP address different from all of the others.

Furthermore, the links must be permanent and one way. At one point in time, reciprocal links were the most common. You link to an important website and they link back to you. However, now a days more importance is placed on one way links than any other type.

Because this is hard to achieve, you can take many advantages of one way link building services. These services are offered by individuals or companies that are experienced in building one way links. They have access to websites that are high quality and accept one way links. Using these services can get your links on websites with high ranks on Google, which is ultimately important.

Provided that you use one way link building services that are reputable and experienced, you will find that your own rank increases and your customers have a better ability to find you and your services. One way links are just one method of search engine optimization that can help increase your popularity in the search engines and ultimately increase your traffic, sales, and income all at the same time, which is important to any business.

Steve Waganer asked:


Link building service is one of the components of search engine optimization service that one can use for popularizing their business on the web.

Link building is one aspect of search engine optimization that can turn out to be the crucial factor for either the success or the failure of a search engine optimization campaign. Not everyone would be interested in doing link building manually as this is a time consuming and tiring job. But this is an important aspect of search engine optimization and needs to be done at every cost. What you can do is get an outsider company also called a third party to do the link building work for you.

There are several companies and firms that provide link building services to clients based on their requirements. Getting link building services from outside will be a great boon for your business. You may not be aware of this, but doing link building dedicatedly can work wonders to your online business. To get hold of good companies that provide link building service is not a difficult task at all, if you know how to go about it.

Word of the mouth is as good as recommending something to another person. So talk around and find out if any one you know whether it is family, friends or neighbors. If they have used link building services earlier, they will surely guide you in getting the work done in the best possible manner. You can approach the company which has done the work for them and find out if they will be able to do the work for you or not.

Remember every business is different and thus promotion means are also different. So do not think that just because a particular link building strategy has worked for your friend does not mean that this will work for you as well. Talk with the professionals who will provide link building service to you and find out which strategy will best suit your business.

Hiring link building services from a third party will benefit your business in many ways. First, you will get professional services for your business. All link building service providing companies give customized services to clients. So you can have a talk with the professionals and tell them exactly what type of link building services you require for your business.

Link building services has been preferred by several companies because this is one method in online marketing that can be done without investing a huge sum. Link building does not need one to be technically very highly qualified. An individual with basic computer knowledge can do the work for you and this is the reason why link building service offered by companies will not cost you a fortune.