SEO and Positioning your Website for Top Search Engine Rankings
December 8, 2008
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.
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