How To Rank High - SEO Made Easy!

If you've been in Internet marketing for any length of time, than you know the importance of Search Engine Optimization, of SEO. Unless you're strictly Pay-Per-Click, than getting good rankings is important.

Unfortunately, for many, SEO is something of a mysterious 'Black Art'. The reality couldn't be further away. SEO in it's most basic form is pretty simple and logical. In fact, taking care of just a few things like your tags, keywords, and backlinks, will do it all for you.

A while back, I came across an excellent "checklist" for search engine optimiztion by Edwin Reyes. If you use this list, you will find yourself doing much better in your SERPs rankings.

Print this checklist out and keep it handy as you work on your sites, and especially when you're getting ready to develop or launch a new website.

These tips can mean all the difference in the world for you, and that should translate directly into revenue and traffic.

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.

1. Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content.

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site's primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (Lynx source distribution directory)

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit The Web Robots Pages to learn more about Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site's reputation.

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.

Showcase Listing

by Tony Burton

Internet Marketing is something that is a must in the online business world, not to mention the basis of many home-based business opportunities. You can make the prettiest website in the world, but if no one can find it, it's value is zero. A long term strategy that pays off well is to do Search Engine Optimization for your website. This includes on page and off page optimization. One problem I see all the time is when a website developer makes a website for a client, and their Title Tag for the website is "HomePage", or "Searing Glow HomePage".

For google, the title tag is extremely important. That is the text that people will be reading when they are browsing the search engine results pages. How is google going to know how to index your website and list you under the correct keywords if your title and other content on your website are not search engine friendly? If you sell shoes, then you need to have something like "Buy Shoes Online - Nike, Puma, DC shoes". Do you get the point? The you have to feed the search engines the information so they know where to index your website.

A Showcase Listing service will get your website optimized correctly using keywords that get traffic and business. Like I said earlier, if you do not market your website, it is not going to be seen.

A lot of business owners have no idea how to actually do search engine optimization. Of course, you could try to go online and learn it yourself, but it is a very time consuming trade to learn from ground zero. You can get SEO services from people who know what they are doing, and that way you can focus on running your business profitably instead of trying to learn how to optimize your website.

There are a lot of variables to deal with when you are running a search engine optimization campaign for a website. That is why it is best to hire people who know what they are doing in order to obtain the results you are looking for. A number of people will try to do SEO themselves, only to fail and end up hiring a professional.

Tracking your website traffic is an important aspect of SEO. Although it is nice to use Google's keyword tool to estimate traffic, it is better to analyze your incoming traffic to estimate the potential search volume of a keyword. Say for instance, you notice that 25 people are finding your site through the keyword "Blue Rubber Widgets", and your website is only in the 10th spot for that keyword, then you know that if you are ranked for the first spot that your will increase your traffic tremendously.

(http://nawny.com/2010/04/marketing-with-showcase-listing/)