Top 10 SEO Tips to get High Rankings
Are you interested in having good (and lasting!) Search Engine ranking results? Within 2-3 months? Then this post is for you.
A lot of companies are offering guaranteed top 10 results in Google, MSN or Yahoo. But for how long will these results last? You will not get a claim in that direction. Because … usually firms that guarantee such results are using so called ‘black-hat’ tactics, that will get you punished in the end. Google might even throw your site out of their SE results.
But here are the Top Ten Tips for onsite white hat Search Engine Optimization that will give you good results and are excepted by all SEs.
Search engines have certain algorithms to assess a web page and to determine the importance and the message of it. Here are ten white hat “tricks” to get high rankings for essential keywords for your web site or web page.
1) Choose your Domain Name – Essentially there are two ways to go here: a keyword-rich domain name OR a remarkable domain name. A keyword rich domain name, like Online-Money-Tips.com, has the advantage of having some essential keywords in the domain name, which many SEs seem to favor (especially Google). The second option is preferable when you can think of a domain name that “sticks”, is still free and can be branded, like MoMoney.com or Geewiz.com. It can have more impact on readers and may be more memorable.
2. Choose your Page Name – This is essential in getting high SE results. If you are writing an article about pink elephants, choose an URL like www.domain.com/pink-elephants/ or www.domain.com/pink-elephants.html. You might ask: is pink_elephants.html as good as pink-elephants.html? Hmm. Good question. Google has got some good algorithms to determine what a user has been searching for. According to Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, the winner is the ‘dashes’ version. But I have also gotten very good results with the underscore …
3. Optimize Your Page Title, h1 and h2 Headers – The Page Title is the 3rd most important part in determining the ranking of a page. If your main keywords are not used in the main URL, you must use them in the Page Title, preferably at as the first one or two words. Just try a search for, lets say, “white hat” you will see that the top 10 results either have these two keywords in the domain name OR as the first two words in the page title. Do not repeat keywords and keep your title short (40-60 characters).
H1 and h2 are html tags used for Headers in your text (as are h3 to h7, but h1 and h2 are most important). Use them sparingly and wisely, with your keywords contained in it, and they will work wonders.>
4. Keep track of your keyword density – A term not known by many, but misused it may bite you. The Wiki explains it as follows:
the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords
The most important thing here is to write creative, good content. Then take care of your keyword density and make frequent use of the keywords you are optimizing for. However, make sure that your keyword density never exceeds 5% for pages with long copy and 10% for pages with little copy. If they do, you might get penalized by the search engines and your ranking will go down. To find out what the keyword density is you can use this free Keyword Density Tool.
5. Placing and styling your keywords – Usually, the text above the fold (at the start of your article or web page) is considered to be the most important part and given the most weight. So use your prime keywords several times in the top of the page. And be sure to have 2 or 3 (sets of) keywords appear at least once in bold or italics in your article, but don’t overdo it!
6. Add meta information – It is getting more and more debated if this is still useful. Google seems not to pay much attention anymore to the META “keywords” tag. But in my experience, the “description” tag still is very useful. Both for ranking results in Search Engines as for what users see in the search results. See below for an example. If your web page does not have a META description tag, the first 1 or 2 lines of text on the web page is used in the Search Engine Listing.
7. Use ALT tags for images -Every image in your web page can have a description called the “alt text.” You do not see it on the web page, but the SEs can read them in the HTML of the page. You can add ALT tags to any image on your web page. Example:
<img src="parrot.png" alt="photo of rare green parrot"/>
I usually add ALT text sparingly, only to images close to related parts of text, using keywords that are used in that particular piece of text. The optimum would be that the alt text still describes the image in a relevant way, so you will not be misusing the original function of the ALT text.
8. Site Design Quality – Search Engines like well laid out, well coded sites, with good navigation and user experience. Make sure your pages are viewable on all major browsers. Use Flash, JavaScript and Frames sparingly, although there are still many frames web sites which rank high (I even optimized a frames site and got great results within 3 weeks). Validate your web pages and check for dead links regularly. In short: go for a high quality web site and the Search Engines will reward you, with lasting results!
9. Collect incoming Links – This one should actually be on the 3rd or 4th place in this list. And it is one I should work on more myself. Links to your web site are very important. Especially links which contain one or more of your main keywords. So if your business is Online Money Tips and your domain name is www.onlinemoneytip.com you should have incoming links on make money online for example.
Yesterday I saw a link campaign from John Chow, trying to get a high ranking on ‘make money online’ with a link exchange contest … well it works, he surpassed Problogger already 
10. Add outbound links – From your key content pages, include links to the best content sites you can find, related to your main topic. Linking to authority sites shows that you are trying to help users find the best content and will help you with SEO. And it might help to enhance your own authority. Something you should also work on. more about that in another post.
For dessert, here is a link to an excellent SEO test article by Mike from mikeindustries.com. He conducted a little experiment to see which on page variables influenced ranking the most. With some surprising results …
