by: Alexi Kerbel
Article: "The basics of Search Engine Placement and Keyword Selections."
Steps in this article.
1 – Finding your target keywords and implementing them.
2 – Understanding where your site stands in the search engine world.
3 – Link exchanges, Outbound/Inbound links anchor text and Page Rank.
4 – Maintenance and Upkeep of your site and its search engine rankings.
It is very important to have a target when you are picking your target keywords. It’s a good idea for you to figure out what keywords are popular and which ones are not. If you are unsure go to Overture’s Keyword Selection tool and see what keywords are big and which are not, you might be surprised (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). Make sure not to go after the highest keywords right away unless they are not popular. If they are too popular its almost impossible to get them right off the bat. I don’t mean to discourage you but you should have some realistic goals, especially if your website currently is not getting the best traffic.
Once you pick your target keywords it is important to adjust your site to match your keywords. This includes adding them or remaking your tag on your site. Do not let your site’s title exceed 75 characters, and make sure it makes sense and is not just a list of keywords.
Next, add these keywords to your site as links, alt tags, and regular text. Its also a good idea if you can near the top of your site place some of them in an H1-3 tag (). If you are unsure how many times your keywords should appear, check your competitors sites.
Understanding where you stand in the search engine world can be difficult. You need to understand that search engines today are a lot smarter then you think. For example, your Google page rank shows how “important” your site is and is really derived from your sites inbound/outbound link counts. You can have a high page rank and not hit any of the keywords you want, this is because of a few things we will discuss later. Your goal should not be a page rank value, page rank simply shows you what Google sees you as, based on the amount of sites linking to you and the amount of sites you link too. (To see your Google page rank you can download the Google toolbar for internet explorer, or go to a site like: http://www.pagerank.sc.
If you’ve got a low page rank, do not worry, page rank is not updated often, and you will probably only see it change a few times a year, but your actual page rank (not visible) can change, almost weekly, if not daily.
Link exchanges are one of the most important things to do to get yourself where you want to be. There are a few rules to follow though. You should never have more then 25 outgoing links per page, if you start getting close to the 25, create a 2nd page and put new links on there. Putting more then 25 on one page will start to penalize your search engine rankings. Make sure to use a good anchor text, if you already optimized your Title tag to have your keywords, you can just use that. Anchor text is the link text pointing to your site. If you are unsure how to setup a link page I recommend signing up for a Free Link Exchange Reciprocal Link Manager Tool at: http://www.MyLinking.com. Once you sign up, add your website, and create a links page, (make sure it uses a.php extension) and then copy and paste the required code to your site template at that page or a blank page, just make sure it’s the same filename as you specified with a.php extension.
Now, you can customize your MyLinking account to prohibit certain keywords or even require certain keywords, if you’ve got a specific theme to your site you can require keywords, this will ensure that the sites you link to will be in your general traffic interests.
It is very important to link with sites that have related content to you. Search engines rank you based on the keywords your link partners have on their site as well so take that into consideration.
So, make sure to use your keywords in your link exchange text, don’t let more then 25 outbound links per page (if you are using MyLinking you can set the max per page, and create as many pages as you want, and you should set it to 24 if you are using MyLinking because it links itself at the bottom, if you have any other external links on your site like banners that you will use take those into consideration when settings your max links. And make sure you are linking with related sites. You can add links or code through MyLinking admin area to exchange links with sites.
Maintenance and upkeep of your site is very important. You should always be hunting for more links. You should always be submitting to link directories. You can never have too many inbound links. If you don’t use MyLinking or a reciprocal link manager script you should check your link partners periodically to make sure they don’t drop you. MyLinking has options to recheck every 24 hours for such events and can even re crawl your link partner’s site to see if your link has moved, etc… Make sure to stay on top of changes your competitors make, if they drop out and a new top place ranker has moved in, take not of their keyword densities, etc.. You should ALWAYS try to link to same link partner’s your competitors link to. You can see these sites by using google or yahoo and searching for: link:http://www.competitorsdomain.com (Yahoo is more complete, Google likes to hide a lot of these).
Once you get all of these down you will begin to hit a decent page rank, it can take up to 20 incoming links before your actual PR hits a PR2 or 3. (Actual PR is not visible PR as explained earlier).
-Alexi Kerbel