SEO Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website in a way that it ranks in a high place for your designated keyword. It’s actually quite easy to do. The process exist from two important points: Internal factors and external factors. Internal factors is everything which happens on your website. External is everything that happens outside of your website.

The first thing which is important for an optimized website is content. Content is always king. You will never rank high for any keyword if you are not offering fresh and original content. When writing always try to keep the word count above five hundred words. This might seem like an easy target, but when actually writing you’ll soon get stuck at some point that you just can’t write any further. When writing this text, try to put the most important keyword of your website in it a few times. This is the word which you want to rank high for. Do not spam your keywords all over the content. This will not work in your advantage, but in your disadvantage. As with everything; don’t overdo it. Google will penalize you for it which will even take you down in the search results. Stacking keywords used to be a good strategy for ranking high, but Google smartened up and created a mysterious algorithm which determines how high your website should rank. Anything which will seem unnatural to it will receive a penalty. If you aren’t gifted with extreme writing talent you can even buy a few articles to offer your readers some original content.

Content might be one of the most important things when optimizing your website, there are other factors which are important as well. Always fill in a good three to five word description in the title tag. This tag is shown in the search results. Putting important keywords in this title is a must! As mentioned before, don’t overdo it. Three to five words is more than enough to give a good description of your website. There are two other tags which aren’t as important as they used to be, but it can’t hurt to add them. These tags are called they keywords and description tag. In the keyword tag you can put up to twenty (don’t overdo it!) keywords which might be important for your website. In the description you create a short description of the designated page of about 160 characters. This description will also show up in the search results, so it might be wise to give a fitting description which corresponds to the title tag.

Another factor which is extremely important are styling options. Text which is displayed bigger with an h1 tag is valued higher then plain text. Always make your content fluent by creating headers and titles with the h1, h2 and h3 tags. Even text which is displayed bold or inverted is more important then plain text.

Avoid technical stuff and stick to plain HTML if possible. The Google spider can’t read the fancy Flash and Javascript you put on your website. Especially if you use Flash or Javascript for your menu, ditch it as soon as possible. The Google spider can’t follow the links in your menu and your pages aren’t indexed.

Use breadcrumbs when creating your website. It creates a better structure in your links, but it’s also user friendly. Visitors can see where they are and where they came from.

All the above factors are on page and actually rather easy to do. The external factor is a lot more difficult to do because you need some help of other websites. You need so called ‘back links’, links from other websites referring to your website. One link from a website will count as a ‘vote’ and will give your page a certain rank; pagerank. Pagerank is nothing more than a rank from one to ten which gives some insight on how many back links you have. There are a few ways of gaining back links. The easiest way is to create solid content which people want to link to. Once again this proves that content is king! The better your content, the more people will link to you. For a blog about technology, or a specific niche this is rather easy to do. For a web shop it is really hard to get back links. The only websites linking to you are most likely link portals which have little to no value at all. Another way to collect back links is commenting on other people their blogs. You will most likely have the option to leave your link. This will drive some traffic to your website, but also counts as a back link which is what you were after for in the first place.

Search engine optimization isn’t as hard as all the ‘experts’ make it look like. You can easily do it yourself. There are thousands of tips and tricks out there for optimizing your website. Even ways which are illegal according to Google. Whichever way you use to optimize your website, content is ALWAYS king.

About the Author:

Mr. Carr is an active consultant/web developer, and is responsible for day-to-day operations within the firm. Mr. Carr is extremely passionate about technology in general and has developed websites and online companies for over 14 years. Prior to founding CMA, he launched and subsequently sold LandTek Holdings which was a successful online media and training company. See his latest site at http://www.justclickauctions.com/ which has website auctions to buy and sell websites.

Are your articles being rejected by article directories? Article marketing is a time intensive process. And you may have spent a lot of time on the articles, only to have them rejected. That is certainly frustrating.

So how can you ensure that your articles get approved? First and foremost, make sure that all your articles are properly formatted. This is easy as long as you follow the rules. So what are the rules?

Rule 1: No ultra long article titles.
Rule 2: No links in the article body.
Rule 3: No wrapping the texts unnaturally.
Rule 4: Use only simply HTML tags.
Rule 5: Format links properly.

Rule 1: No ultra long article titles.

Do not use article titles that are more than 10 words. It is not necessary to use super long titles in order for article marketing to be effective. Just use your target keywords in the titles and that will be good enough. Long titles may be truncated or may get your articles rejected.

Rule 2: No links in the article body.

Of all the rules, this is the most important. DO NOT include any links in the article body. Domain names and URLs are also considered as links, even though there is no HTML code surrounding them. So leave them out as well. All links should go in the author resource box (more on this later).

Rule 3: No wrapping the texts unnaturally.

Don’t wrap the texts unnaturally by using the hard return (i.e. hard line breaks). As you type, just let the text flow naturally without wrapping. Use the hard return only when you want to start a new paragraph. Tab it twice to leave a single line spacing. There is no need to any html tag for paragraphing. A single line spacing will do fine. The article directories will format the paragraphing accordingly.

Rule 4: Use only simple HTML tags.

If you have to use html tags, use only simple tags. Do not use complicated tags like “div” or “table”. Use the BOLD or UNDERLINE tags to format sub headers. You may also create numbered or unordered lists if you like. To be on the safe side, just omit all html tags. If you want to create lists, use the asterisk instead.

Rule 5: Format links properly.

If the author resource box, you are allowed to leave your links. The links are to reward you for submitting valuable content. Format your links properly by insert proper anchor texts within the link tags. For example, your links may say “article submission format”. That is the proper way of inserting links. Do not use “click here” as that has no SEO benefits.

Need more help? Perhaps a video may be of assistance.

If you would like to learn more about article submission format, watch the video posted below.