Organic Search Engine Optimization – 17 Tips for
Better Pagerank
Author: Michael
Sweet
Optimizing your website so you will obtain a high
search engine results position is what SEO Techniques are all about. It
is reported that 65% of all websites visited start with a search from a
search engine.
What is Organic Search Engine Optimization? Simply put, it is designing
each page to not only be pleasing for the users to read but also
pleasing for the spiders. Always keep in mind that a good measure of a
site’s importance is the usefulness of the information to the users.
There is no need to go to some overpriced firm to get your site ranked
well in the search engines as most of theses techniques can be
accomplished by anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML. Organic Search
Engine Optimization will help your page rank well and drive traffic to
your site without the expense of using PPC programs or placing banners
all over your site as well.
There are no tricks here, just a bit of work and some time. So let's
get started by reading the following list of Organic Search Engine
Optimization Techniques!
1. Domain & File Names:
Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary
keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy
to remember. You can also try to use your keyword or keyword phrase as
the name for the actual filename of the page you are creating as well.
2. Keyword Phrases:
Use keywords that are being searched for. You can check your keyword
phrases with either the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool or the
Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how often they are being
searched and then incorporate these phrases into your content. You can
also look at Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions for suggestions for
different keyword phrases.
3. Keyword Density:
Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization.
Keyword density is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase are
of your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to
see what keyword density they are using. Too high of a keyword density
will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted. A
good measure of keyword density is between 3 and 7 percent. Your
keywords should be toward the top of your page and your keyword phrase
can be in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on
your paragraph length.
4. Bad Techniques:
Bad search engine optimization techniques can get you blacklisted from
a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking,
invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh
tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only,
keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density to high, mirror
pages and mirror sites.
5. Title & Meta Description Tag:
Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you
need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your
keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are
displayed the title is the first thing people see. Below the title is a
description which will be either be taken from your meta name
description content="Description phrase" or from the first sentence on
that page. Your description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword
phrases at the beginning as should your first sentence. You should have
a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You
many also what to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword
phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance.
6. Meta Keywords Tag:
The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say
Google doesn't ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway.
7. Author & Robots Tags:
The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the
site. This tag will help you get a #1 position for your company's name.
Use a generic Robots Tag on all pages that you want indexed. This
instructs the robots to crawl the page. The following is the generic
robots tag.
8. Quality Content:
Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to
tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other
sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind
9. Quantity Content:
The more the better. Just remember your content will need to be both
quantity and quality.
10. Changing Content:
You can do this by hand or with a script. For example you can have a
php script that draws five paragraphs from a pool of twenty paragraphs
when the content is different each time the php page is accessed. By
creating dynamic pages with a script randomly drawing different content
from a database, you can get several different home pages indexed by
Google and optimize for several different keyword phrases.
11. Avoid Dynamic URLs:
Are your pages served via php, asp, or cf? Some search engines may have
a problem indexing them. Try to create static pages whenever possible.
Avoid symbols in your URLs like the "?" that you will often find in
php, asp or cf pages.
12. Frames:
Many search engines can't follow frame links. Make sure you provide an
alternative method for the search engines to enter and index your site.
13. Site Map:
A good menu system is really a site map. A well constructed menu system
that is on each page and contains a link to every page on the website
is all you need.
14. Site Themes:
All of the top 3 search engines look for site themes or a common topic
when they crawl a website. If your site is about one specific topic you
will rank better than if you have more than one theme or topic on your
site. By using similar keyword phrases in each page the search engines
will detect a theme this will be to your advantage.
15. Site Design:
You may think, “what does site design have to do with organic search
engine optimization”? Well if your website has a bad color scheme that
is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all
of your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site
attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic
header and menu bar the same place on each page. These things will keep
your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site
with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard
find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has
brought to the site. Use W3C Link Checker to make sure all your page
links are good. If you have broken links on your site this can effect
the ranking you are given. Put a proper doctype on each page. If you
don't have a proper doctype on each page Internet Explorer will go into
quirks mode and display it different. Use The W3C Markup Validate
Service to verify that your pages are Validate HTML or XHTML code. The
W3C validation will verify that your HTML or XHTML is not broken. This
validation shows you any broken code that could keep your webpages from
displaying properly in all the different browsers and browser versions.
16. Separate Content & Presentation:
Put all your presentation code into Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This
separates the presentation from the content and makes your html files
up to 50% smaller. It is reported that the search engine bots prefer
this and the more content you have compared to presentation in your
file, the better you get rated. Read why tables for markup are stupid
for an overview.
17. Robots.txt File:
While this file is not really required it should be included so that
the search engine bots don't get 404 errors when they look for it. Just
include the following 2 lines and drop it in the root.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
For more help with Organic Search Engine Optimization, please visit Help My Pagerank
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/
organic-search-engine-optimization-17-tips-for-better-pagerank-91804.html
About the Author
Michael Sweet owns and maintains Help My
Pagerank.com
For more help with Organic Search Engine Optimization, please visit Help My Pagerank