Steps for High Rankings: Part One

The amount of time and effort it takes to achieve high rankings will vary depending on your industry, the products and services you offer, and the competition, but there are things you can do to improve your rankings. As you will discover in this three-part article, you don't have to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) professional to get your site to the top of the search engines. Careful keyword selection, search engine optimization and link exchanges can all help boost your rankings. Here are a few step-by-step techniques that you can do yourself.

1. The Selective Stage The first step to successfully taking your business online is selecting a good domain name and optimizing your site for niche keywords and keyphrases. This stage provides the foundation for your SEO strategy.

Domain Name Selection - Domain names help build online credibility. Preferably your domain name will also be your company name, although you want a domain name that is useful for the searchers as well as the search engines. The general belief is that descriptive domains that contain target keywords will benefit from a higher Click-Through Rate (CTR) than non-descriptive domains. Register domains that contain your target keywords and keyphrases, if you can. Hyphenating your domain name helps search engines distinguish between keywords. Keep domain names short, sweet and to the point. Don't give your visitors too many words to type into their browsers! Remember that many directories, including Yahoo, list sites alphabetically, so a domain beginning with a number or with the letter "A" would be placed higher than a domain beginning with the letter "S."

Keyword Selection - Keywords should be used in the title tags, meta tags, site content, anchor text and, if possible, your domain name. Don't try to optimize for too many keywords. Choose your niche area and optimize for a keyword or keyphrase related to that area. For example, if you sell blue widgets, optimize specifically for " blue widgets" rather than "widgets." Think from the mindframe of a searcher. What terms are your potential customers searching for? It won't do you any good to optimize for an obscure keyword or keyphrase that nobody will ever type into a search engine. It might help to use a keyword chooser tool to help advise you in this important decision. Also, research what works (and what doesn't) for your competition. The more competitive the keyword/phrase, the harder it will be to rank well. As your site grows and you start to master SEO you can begin to incorporate the more competitive keywords and keyphrases into your SEO strategy. The bottom line: You want to start with niche, non-competitive keywords that will bring traffic to your site.

Description and Title - After you've chosen a proper domain name and you know what terms your target customers are searching for, you can begin writing a title and description for your site that will hopefully attract these potential customers - as well as the search engines. Writing a good title and description for your site is crucial to high rankings, as it comes into play in two important elements: your TITLE tag and your META tags. As we'll discuss later, search engines and directories use both of these tags to determine your site's relevance. When writing descriptions and titles, be sure to include as many keywords and keyphrases as possible.

In Part Two of this article, you will learn some valuable ways to optimize your site content for the search engines.