Few years ago if you knew how to rank top ten on Google and MSN was considered to be similar to Magic, but nowadays things changed quite a lot. The art of Search Engine Optimization grew quite popular the last few years as internet marketing because essential to all businesses. Every business owner wants his website to be ranked N:1 for his particular products and services with free organic search engine listings instead of paying for traffic using Pay-Per-Click programs.
During the past 4 years, I‘ve been studying the search engine ranking algorithms and even made my own search engine in order to understand some of the key elements that are not visible from user/webmaster point of view and this proved to be quite educational. The strive for quality of website content became extremely important and nowadays its top ranking factor for all, but there are still few ways to get around it and rank well even with less popular website and here I‘m going to share with you the secret
If you want to rank well on all search engines, and here I mean all search engines not only Google and MSN, there are a strict set of rules that has to be followed and the success is almost guaranteed. There are about eight parameters, which are considered to be the most important criteria, if set properly can boost your website to the top. I‘ll make you a list here with a short description, and later on I‘ll write separate post for each of they describing how to do it with simple tricks and techniques to get more out of it as some (for example linking) are not up to you and involve a lot of other people to do it.
- The first thing you have to do is to consider what keywords you wish to rank for. Those keywords should be highly popular (people should search for them) and they should have medium to low competition (you can‘t jump into the big game with a starter website, its smarter to start low and then get the high keywords). In order to do this you have to write a description of your product/services in a way that the user describes it. Here I want to note that the user sometimes thinks differently from the manufacturer and this has to be considered carefully. There are tools like wordtracker that can help you choose more popular keywords and optimize for them
- The most important parameter is the Website Title Tag. The title should have your primary keyword for the particular page + the primary keyword for your company.
- The second most important is the Headline Tags. Your keywords should be included in the website headline and second level headline h2 for the product that you‘re describing on that particular page
- Third and also extremely important is the text on the page. The text should contain at least five instances of the primary keyword plus some modifications of it. This way search engine consider it more relevant.
- The other also important factors can help you get over some other well optimized pages if you have your keywords in the domain name, the url and image alt tags.
If you have all of those your onsite-website optimization will be great, but that won‘t get you listed to the so much desired top listings if you don‘t have the last and most important key element which give the final touch to all of the above and make the “Google Magic” work. This element is called strong backlinks. Backlinks are links to your page from other websites. Those links are valued as votes of quality for your website. If you have a lot of links/votes then your website should have quite good quality and your page rank would be high, but on the other hand if you have great website but not votes it will be situation that its good, but nobody knows about it, and therefore search engines won‘t trust you. The backlinks are the trust element for search engines and they form the most important factor in Search Engine Rankings as Organic Listings
As I‘ve promised above, I will write separate article for each element describing how to optimize it and rank N:1, but those are the overall characteristics that you have to cover.
