High Rankings Part Two: Optimizing Your Site

Now that you've found the perfect domain name and have chosen your ideal keywords/phrases, you can begin to optimize your site. Search engines look at off-page factors, including participation in link exchange programs such as MyLinksNetwork, as well as on-page factors, which we will discuss here. SEO experts who've tested the Yahoo algorithm believe it is extremely dependent on on-page factors, such as site content, although these factors are important to Google and other search engines as well. Here are a few things that will help boost your ranking in all the top engines.

Site content - Search engines love content, content, and more content. Frequently updated or "fresh" content is favorable. Be sure your content contains lots of relevant keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize keywords in the body of your page, you can use the < b > (bold) tag or the < i > (italicize) tag. Also put your most important content towards the top of the page, since most major search engines look there first. Although it's good to use a lot of keywords and key phrases in your content, make sure the page still reads well, rather than just shoving keywords in unnecessary places. Beware of large file sizes, slow loading times, broken links, too much JavaScript, too little text, and frames. Think of your visitors as potential linking partners as well as potential customers. A satisfied visitor who finds your content to be of interest might be kind enough to place a link to your site on his/her links page - thus helping your search engine ranking. On the other hand, if your visitors are not satisfied with your content, it's all too easy for them to abandon you and head to a competitor's site instead.

Title tag - Search engines look at title tags when determining keyword density, so keywords and key phrases should be included in the title tags whenever possible. For branding purposes, you can place keywords AND the company name in the title tags. Keep in mind, however, that the amount of text you can place in a title tag is limited so choose your title text wisely.

Meta Tags - Meta tags are easier to change than page content, can contain a great deal of keywords and key phrases, and could potentially give your site extra benefit in Yahoo and other paid inclusion engines. Although Meta tags have dropped in ranking importance recently, they can still be helpful. Like title tags, meta tags are given a limited number of characters. Choose relevant keywords and keyphrases for these tags since the search engines and directories use Meta tags to determine the relevance of pages. Keywords can be separated by commas but no spaces should be used. Search engines also filter out certain words, called "stop words." These can be words such as "free," which may be considered spammy, or "the," which may be unimportant. Don't waste your limited number of characters by using "stop" words. The bottom line: Just stick to keywords and other useful, descriptive terms.

Headers - Use header tags throughout each page to describe what the page is about and to make certain words and phrases stand out more to the search engines. There are six different levels of header tags, ranging from < h1 > to < h6 > with < h1 > being the most important. Headers should contain (you guessed it) keywords and keyphrases.

Links and Link Titles - Links and link titles (also known as "anchor text") are important to the search engines. Make sure your keywords and key phrases are used in the anchor text of inbound links. It is believed that Google currently weighs anchor text more heavily than Yahoo does.

Alt text - Use keywords in alt text on linking images, since that alt text will theoretically be weighed heavier than non-linking images.

HTML - Once you've created and optimized your site's HTML code, you should validate it to compliance with W3C standards. The W3C (short for "World Wide Web Consortium") determine the accessibility standards for HTML documents on the Internet. Validation is important to search engine optimization, browser rendering and usability. If your site is not validated, you could be missing out on potential traffic. To validate your HTML, enter your website URL into http://validator.w3.org/ and fixing any errors the validator finds on your page. It might not be possible for you to fix some errors but just fix as many as you can.

In Part Three of this article, we will look at one of the most important SEO aspects: link building strategies. Link popularity is huge factor in your PageRank. For information on link exchange programs and other link building methods, stay tuned for Part Three.

In the meantime, if you'd like to boost your search engine rankings through link exchange programs, consider MyLinksNetwork, which automates the tedious link exchange process so you'll have more time to spend on other important duties.

Join the MyLinksNetwork link exchange program and instantly receive thousands of inbound links.