15 SEO Elements Needed To Succeed In Search Engine Rankings

Is your site stuck on the 27th page for the keyword you are targeting for? Have you been hoping, praying, or possibly saying bad words to your computer in hope that your efforts will generate better search engine rankings? Take a moment and reflect on the top 15 SEO elements needed to achieve top search engine rankings.

CONTENT
Content is KING in SEO! Post quality non redundant content on your page. Update your content frequently so your visitors have a reason to come back to your site. If you update and post quality content, one of the hardest SEO elements has been accomplished.

INCOMING LINKS
If content is KING, then incoming links are Queen. You cannot have success in the search engines if you do not have quality links pointing to your web pages. Notice that I said pages and note site. Each page within your site has to have links pointing to them. This will generate page rank which is an authority measure that search engines keep in consideration when generating search results.

Receiving a link is not enough; make sure it’s a contextual link that includes your keyword within it. These links will be more valuable than a link that is just your URL.

TITLE TAGS
Create unique title tags for all your pages within your site. Try to include your keywords in your title tags whenever possible. Readability should be priority and SEO second however, most of the times you can create a mixture of the two.

XML Site Map
Create an XML Sitemap. What better way to have your pages found and indexed by search engines than to hand them a list of your pages on a silver platter?

INTERNAL LINKING
Links from other niche related sites might be the most valuable, but don’t forget about adding links within your page. Contextual linking from one of your pages to another can help increase your link count. Don’t forget that these links will also be valuable to your visitors as they navigate around your site.

URL STRUCTURE
Dynamic URLs are better than Static URL’s. In other words would you rather look at a url that has a lot of Id#404&-393 or a URL that is easier to read such as dkssystems.com/top-15-seo?
Use a URL re-write and use your keywords in the URL when possible.

META DESCRIPTION
Use a meta description that includes your keywords. This is your selling point and will show up underneath your link in the search engines.

NAVIGATION AND MENUS
Make sure all your navigation and menu links work properly, nothing will frustrate a search engine spider more than a broken link. Also, make sure your menus are search engine friendly. You can do this by viewing your Google cache and seeing if the links show up. Flash is a common navigation error that results in search engines no being able to see the links.

HEADER TAGS
This one is simple, USE THEM!

IMAGE ALT TAGS
Image alt tags should be included in some of the images on your page. These image alt tags should contain keywords if it’s appropriate to the picture. Do Not stuff your keywords in image alt tags as it will have no benefit to you or your site.

404 ERROR PAGE
Create a custom 404 error page. If the search engine spiders are scanning your page and reach a broken link, they have no way to get back to your site. This will result in pages not getting indexed.

META KEYWORDS
Search engines don’t really place a value on Meta Keyword tags anymore; however I like to use them as a reminder to which keywords im optimizing for. For the people who are thinking users will come and steal your keywords... your probably right. HOWEVER, any SEO can easily see which keywords are being used by looking at all the elements on this list. It’s really not worth the anxiety to worry over.

ROBOTS.TXT FILE
This file tells the search engines what to not index. If you have a TOS page or a check out page that you do not want indexed under any circumstances, then you need a robots.txt file.

I hope you enjoyed reading the Top 15 SEO Elements Needed To Succeed in Search Engine Rankings. If you include these elements, you should hopefully see some more success in your search engine rankings.


Author Bio

Nick is a member of the DKS Systems team. DKS Systems is a Minnesota web development firm located in Golden Valley, MN. Call DKS today to find out more about website redesign , web content management systems, or quality seo services today.

Article Source: http://www.articlesphere.com/Article/The-Top-15-SEO-Elements-Needed-To-Succeed-In-Search-Engine-Rankings/184459

Read more...

Link building for effective search engine optimization

When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings. This article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.

A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.

For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.

Stay within your category, relevant content is very important to the search engines. Write an article preferably relevant in content to your website and submit the article to high quality article directories. Blogs are an excellent way to get quality one-way backlinks, Blog sites also receive tons of traffic, which in turn give your site more exposure. Posting your link on forum pages is also an efficient method of aquiring backlinks instantly.

Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.

Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to aquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of acheiving high search engine ranking.

Author Bio
Article written by the CEO of www.submit-site.org

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Read more...

What Is Page Rank?

Page ranks are defined numerically, from 1 through 10 - 10, being the highest. Very few pages have a page rank of 10, and anything above a 6 is considered very good. There are many factors that determine a page's rank, but the main variable seems to be based on how many websites link to your page. The higher page ranked sites that link to your site, the better. In other words, 10 links to your page from high ranking sites like CNN.com, Yahoo.com, etc, will easily outweigh five times that amount of links from unknown sites with low page ranks. And, just to make it trickier, the amount of "credit" your site gets from incoming links, is also divided by the amount of sites you link OUT to.

Equally important, is your site's actual content. It needs to be information that people can use and take active interest in. Having content that matches your keywords should also go without saying.

Why Is This Important?

Page rank is extremely important, in that it determines how high you get on search engine results. And just as it's helpful to have your incoming links be from reputable, trusted, relevant sites, your outbound links will also be more valuable to those pages you do link out to. This is important when negotiating for link exchanges with other sites. The higher your page ranking, the more desirable a link from your page will be to others - Including those willing to pay for said link.

Are There Ways To Generate Better Page Rank At No Cost?

Absolutely! To follow are some of the simplest steps you can take.

Build more pages: The more pages your site has, the more content it is generally considered to have. If your site only has 3 pages, the maximum page rank would be a 3. Make sure to have at least 8 relevant pages including the main page, in order to have a healthy amount of content.

Avoid Dead-end Links: Let's say you've worked real hard to get 8 good pages. Your page rank ideally has the potential to be a page rank of 8. However, if half those pages are not leading anywhere, you've got a problem. When the search engines "crawl" your site, they want to go from one page to the next. You can have a really great page, but if it has no other link on it to go somewhere new, it will be considered by the spider to be a dead-end page, which will hurt your site's page rank. Make sure every page has a door out, other than a back button (which to the bots, will generate the equivalent of a good old "Nothing more to see here" type statement). Combat this by making sure you at least have a link back to the index - or better yet, a site navigator at the base of each page with choices between the main pages of your site (ie. FAQ, About Us, Contact Us, etc). Again, these are pages that add convenience to your human visitors as well.

Create Internal Links: Remember to make links to yourself whenever relevant. For example, on your About Us page, don't just mention your online ordering system - hyperlink to the page where your visitor would need to go in order to begin an order. Not only are you creating another link for the crawler, you're also making it convenient for your guest to find that page right then and there, if they so desire.

Utilize Free Directory Listings: They may not always be big high ranking sites, but they are an easy way to get your name out there. You never know when someone might end up using one, and thus find you in the most unexpected of ways!

How To Generate More At Cost: Getting a high ranking site to link to you isn't always the easiest thing to do. Sometimes it is necessary to buy that privilege via ads. There are literally 100's of different options to choose from, however the most effective method these days is by purchasing text based links to your site. For the largest comprehensive list of quality paid link directories along with page rank statistical information visit: http://www.helpmyhits.com/paid-web-directories.php Some tips to stretch you advertising dollar as far as it will go would be linking to different pages of your website (not just the index) and also using different keywords in those links.

As you can see, page rank is a very real and vital aspect of web development that should always be kept in mind. Without it, your chances of being found easily on search engines is compromised. With it, you'll be on your way to a highly successful website.

Author Bio
Kimberly Bodane - www.helpmyhits.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Read more...

Internet Traffic and SEO Techniques

You might be wandering the reasons your web site is not getting much internet traffic. After all your web site took lots of financial and human resources, but unfortunately like so many web sites, it is quite unknown and as a result it does not get enough internet traffic to make it financially viable.

Did you know that about 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from search engines? Yes, it is true! Listing near the top page of search engines and obtaining the attention of your target audience should be a main priority for any web site internet promotion.

And the good news about this is that improving a web site position in search engine pages may be done for free. How? Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

There are many ways to promote a web site. Some promotions are paid and some are free. Among the free ones, the search engine optimization techniques enable web sites to become search engine friendly. In other words, it makes website pages to accept the search engine crawler in a friendly way. These techniques will be some of the steps one will have to use to obtain a better position in search engine's pages, when searching for specific keywords, related to services or products offered by a web site.

Search engine optimization steps for a web page:

Title:

The html Title tag is a very important element and must include the most important keywords or phrases, which best represent the products or services offered by the web page. It should not contain more than 60 characters.

Keywords:

The html meta Keyword tag should have all the keyword phrases which best represents the products or services offered by the web page. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 250 characters.

Description:

The html meta Description tag is a description of the web page, which will be displayed by the search engine. Make sure it contains keywords phrases. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 200 characters.

Keywords in Headings:

Keywords in Headings tags (h1) will be interpreted by search engines as being an important keyword relevant to the web page, and it should be looked for and indexed by the search engines.

Web page text:

It is a good practice to include informative text one every page, using natural language and appropriate keywords. It should contain more than 200 words. Informative text should be placed in the html Body section of the web page.

Keywords in Alt Tags:

Every html picture "img" tag should contain an ALT tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Keywords in Anchor Tags:

Every html hypertext link "a href " should contain a TITLE tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Robots.txt file:

Make sure there is a robots.txt file in you web site directory. This is a text file created by the webmaster, which will guide the search engine´s crawler when indexing a web site.

There are some cases in which one might not want to have some web pages indexed. This way thru the use of robots.txt, one will have control over which pages will be indexed and made available to the search engines.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /data/

HTML code validation:

Search engine's crawlers become more efficient when indexing web pages with no html errors. Beware that some html errors can make search engine crawlers to give up indexing web pages. So it is recommended for those web pages to be indexed, there should be no html errors.

Links:

Links are very important to search engines. The quality of links and whether it is reciprocal or not, are important factors in evaluating the importance of a web page. Links from web sites with higher page ranks are a plus.

Registering with Directories and Search Engines:

It is very important the registration of a website with directories and search engine web sites. It is a way of telling the world that your web site exists. Avoid using automatic search engine/directory registration.

Search engine optimization has become a very important set of procedures which helps web sites to become more relevant to search engines. To obtain an increase in internet traffic will take some time. It probably will take some kind of additional promotion too. But anybody in need of higher internet traffic, free search engine optimization might be considered his first option.

Roberto Sedycias
IT Consultant

Author Bio
This article can also be accessed in portuguese language from the News Article section of page PoloMercantil
Roberto Sedycias works as IT consultant for PoloMercantil.
Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Read more...