SEO: The Top 10 tips for getting better rankings

Compare the task of choosing keywords for your website as a marketing task similar to that of choosing which TV shows your TV ad should feature in, or to choosing which websites your banner should appear at. The context in which your users learns about your company and products the first time (a search on a search engine for a specific keyword), together with the message represented in that context (your title and metatag description) is crucial when it comes to converting these users into buyers once they actually click on through to your website.

If you sell octopussys and optimize your website for searches on "octopussy" without knowing that 90% of your target group are searching for the word "squid" instead, you are doomed. So you need to find out what your most relevant users are searching for before you choose the keywords for your website.

Another factor to consider is the competition for your keywords. If you sell cars it will be more than difficult to rank high on the generic search terms like "car" or "cars" - but maybe more specific keyword phrases like "used ford mustang new york" are relevant to your product and it will definitely be easier to achieve a good ranking for this combination.

You can experiment yourself by using the Google Keywordtool and the Overture Keyword Selector Tool to research your possibilities

Links are an increasingly important factor for achieving good rankings on search engines. And not just any links will do. Forget about link farms, paid links, link swaps and all the other manipulative schemes that only aims at bringing traffic to pages that does not have the quality, relevancy or content it takes to achieve this naturally.

Eventually your efforts in this direction will be like wetting your pants to keep warm in a winter storm - you might see a short term positive effect - but in the end Google and the other SEs will adjust their algorithms to render your efforts useless. Just like Squidoo describes in their Fools Gold article - a factor like SquidAngels will be introduced to get rid of manipulators and spammers.

What should you do then? As always start by building great content and features on your website. Now go submit your website to quality directories where only the best websites are listed - if everyone can get listed the listing and link is useless. Then go visit other websites that have great content and are related to yours. Ask yourself: Would a link to my website make sense to the users of this site? If so contact the webmaster and try making some kind of arrangement that will put your link on one or more of his relevant pages.

Then go social marketing! Pages like Squidoo are excellent ways of getting good links. But still don't spam and I am not just saying this to convince SquidAngels to vote for this lens - again: you are just wetting your pants. Good links depends on good content!

OK - so how should other websites link to me? Pick the page on your website you want the link to point to - based on the relevancy between source and target page - and use the keyword you are going for on the target page in the anchor text of the link. Its that simple!

The most important on page factor on your website is without doubt the title tag. The title tag is a piece of html-code hidden from users on your website that tells browsers - like Internet Explorer and Firefox - what to show in the upper left corner of the browser window. Also the title tag is what Google and other search engines will display as the header/link on search results leading to your page - and the factor they rely most upon when estimating what a specific page is all about.

Write your title tag with the keyword you have chosen for that particular page in mind. For instance a page about "squid dishes" should have "squid dishes" appearing in the title tag. Be more descriptive than just "squid dishes" though, because reading the title of your page on a search engine could be the first impression users will get of your website. Don't be too descriptive cause search engines only show a limited amount of characters from the title tag...

Example of title tag: "Squid dishes from all over the world"