Search Engine Rank Optimization for Your Web Site

The better focused your site and pages are on a specific search term or key phrase, the higher they will rank for that term in the search engine results. In general, your site itself should be focused on a higher level, rather more general key phrase: each section of or category within your site would be built around a more specific key phrase related to the site-wide one: and each page in the section or category would focus on a very specific key phrase related to its category.

Optimizing your content for specific keywords can seem endless but there are more important and less important aspects. Do the more important ones first and come back to the less important ones later. The content factors to concentrate on are:

• Title tag


• H1 headings (and H2, to a lesser extent)


• Meta-description tag


• First paragraph of written content


• Remaining body content


• Image alt-text, titles, captions and filenames

Your key phrase should appear in as many of the above places as possible, and several times in the body content without making the wording awkward. You want it to read well for human visitors as well as be attractive to search engines.

On-site linking is a very important opportunity for search engine rank optimization which you shouldn't miss. When you link to another page on your site, and especially to pages further up in the hierarchy, use the key words you want the target page to rank for, in the anchor text of the link on the source page. Especially consider using appropriate keywords in your internal links to the home page instead of always linking to it as "Home".

As well as looking at what's on your pages, the search engines look very closely at the links coming into them - how many there are, where they come from, how closely related the topic of the linking site is to your topic, how highly rated the linking site is, and what text is used as the display part of the link (the anchor text).

So, when you work on getting links to your site, apart from "more is better", these are the factors to consider:

• Get links from sites with topics related to yours - not necessarily exactly the same, but related.


• Get links from sites with a variety of PageRank levels, from none to as high as you can get.


• Try to get a variety of anchor text used, involving variations on your target key phrases. In many case you'll have to accept the use of your URL as anchor text so it helps to have your keywords as part of the URL


• Often you can create links from sites you control yourself. In that case, try to spread them out over different hosting services (including free blogs or pages like Squidoo). If many of your links come from sites all on the same host, they may not count as much


• Look for "do-follow" links, but don't be paranoid about it, even nofollow links seem to count sometimes.

Actively seeking or creating links is one linking strategy. Another is to create content that other people naturally want to link to: high-quality , compelling, useful, substantial, controversial, funny, interesting or weird - any of them can work.

Pay Per Click optimization refers to tuning your landing page so that you get the highest possible "quality score" and pay the least possible price per click.

Generally, the way to do this is to focus the keywords you bid on, the ads you write, and the landing page you send the clicker to, around the same small set of related key phrases or search terms. Yes, that means you may have to create multiple landing pages for to fit multiple ad groups and keyword groups.