Improve your search engine rankings
 

Improve your search engine rankings - vBulletinSetup.com

So you?ve decided to create a Web site. The first thing you?ll want to think about is search engine optimization. Using proper SEO will ensure your site gets great placement in search engine results. You can hire someone to help you or use SEO yourself.

Here are some tips on improving your search engine rankings:

1. Select and use strong keywords. You?ll want your content to be rich with keywords, but don?t go overboard. If you use too many keywords search engines will pick up on it and your site won?t rise in the rankings. If you use too many keywords, your site could be excluded altogether.

2. Compare to other sites. You?ll want to see what those with great placement are doing on their sites. Search for sites that are similar to yours. Take a look at the sites that have received high placement in the search results. While on the web page select ?view? and click ?source.? This will give you the opportunity to analyze the keywords and tags that were used.

3. Use keyword tools. A keyword tool is helpful in determining how visitors search for sites related to yours. By using a keyword tool you?ll be able to see how many hits a site would get using certain search terms. You can use the popular search terms you find to get better search engine placement.

4. Have working links. Make sure all the links on your web site work. If you have dead links on your site, it negatively effects your site?s placement in search engine results.

5. Submit your site to directories. There are several free directories you where you can submit your site. Others charge a fee. Don?t overlook paying this fee though because this increases your changes of having search engines list your site.

6. Create a sitemap. Creating a sitemap and submitting it to search engines will guarantee that all the pages of your site will be included when the search engines crawl the site. You can use a free program to create a sitemap.

7. Create backlinks. It can take awhile for search engines to find your Web site. One way to promote it is by using backlinks. Backlinks are links that point back to your web site from a different web site. Ways you can get backlinks are to write articles related to your site?s topic and submit them to free article sources such as Ezine Articles. At the end of the article, write a little bit about yourself as an author and link to your site.

8. Use reciprocal links. Find sites that are related to yours and ask the web site owner to place a link to your site on their site. In return you?ll do the same. You can contact sites that are complementary to yours. For example, if you have a site that sells a variety of hats, you can have links placed on sites that sell coats and jackets. You can get in contact with the web site owner by looking for the contact information on the site. Send an email and ask for a reciprocal link.

Great tips brandon!

Thanks a lot, 5/5, very useful.

Thanks, learned something new.

Perfect timing - I just had need of exactly this!

1. Select and use strong keywords. Keywords are, indeed, important. I'd even go so far as to say it's THE most important facet of SEO. However, keyword density (too few or too many) is a myth. The search engines don't reward or punish based on how many times you use a certain keyword, and you will never be excluded altogether for using a word too much. Write for humans first, and the algorithms will generally decipher intent. The place to concentrate on your keywords is in the anchor text of links to a page (both external and internal) and in page Titles.

2. Compare to other sites. By all means, explore your competition . . . but you will learn next to nothing by doing a View Source. The algorithms try very hard to look at what the visitor sees to determine relevancy, not at what the programmers see. Meta-tags are mostly ignored and hidden text is either ignored or penalized.

3. Use keyword tools. Again, this is good advice to follow, but vastly over-simplified. For example, you generally do NOT want to target popular search terms until you are already ranking well for less popular search terms. Popular search terms are highly competitive, usually far too much so for a site still in the toddler stage of development. Popular search terms are usually also too generic to convert well. You need to find the keywords that you can realistically compete for and that will bright the RIGHT traffic. Doing that is as much art as science.

4. Have working links. Your visitors would very much like you to have working links. The search engines could care less. Dead links will NOT negatively affect your rankings (at least not directly; irritating your visitors, however, will indirectly affect a lot of things).

5. Submit your site to directories. Today's search engines consider links into your site as citations, votes that essentially say someone liked what you did. So, yea, you want to get links, and directories are a good place to start. Here's the thing, though: The easier it is to get a link, the less that link is probably going to count as a valid vote to the search engines. If a directory gives you a link just 'cause you asked, it doesn't mean they liked what you did. Such a link won't hurt you, but it won't help much either. If a directory charges for links (as opposed to charging for a review, like yahoo.com or business.com does), the engines have probably already de-valued those links and won't count them at all. The search engines are dead-set against paid links.

6. Create a sitemap.. Submitting an XML sitemap to the search engines will NOT guarantee that all your pages will be included. All a sitemap does is help the spider find the pages, it doesn't force the spider to crawl them. Generally, a spider crawls pages based on perceived importance (as determined by links, both internal and external). If your navigation is good enough for a visitor to follow, it is generally good enough for a spider to follow -- and a sitemap will be completely unnecessary.

7. Create backlinks. Right. Links to your site are the single most important thing that contribute to good search engine placement. Getting good links, however, isn't all that easy. Again, if a link is easy to get (if anyone can write and publish an article), it's not going to count for much.

8. Use reciprocal links. Need I even say it? If a link is easy to get, it's probably not worth getting. This is especially true of reciprocal links, which Google has been de-valuing for well over a year now. They won't hurt you (bad neighborhoods excepted), but reciprocal links are a complete waste of time. Spend that ten minutes creating some good content instead.

where is the best place to put the sitemap file?

will it make any difference if i place it in more than one directory?( www ..... forum ....etc)?

Thank you very much :)

Hmmmm I dont know about Ron Carnell, but I just want to thanks Loco M for the informations. Well some SEO expert, they don't want you to do the right thing which they want you hire them to do it for u :)

in the root :)

thank you everyone, and glad it's been useful to some :up:
I'm working on an extended version of this article, so watch out for that :p