When it comes to search engine rankings and achieving a higher rank on search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft Bing , many website owners simply don’t know what to do or where to start. Establishing a website on the internet doesn’t necessarily mean visitors and customers will come knocking, nor does it mean your website will achieve a decent ranking on the search engines. So what can you do to achieve the rankings you desire on the search engines and how does that search engine ranking translate into website traffic?
The answer to these questions can be provided by helping you understand a few simple techniques utilized quite frequently by the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. These simple techniques will help you optimize your website or blog to make it easier for search engines to find and index the content you post. Implemented properly, and adhered to each time you post new content on your website will have a dramatic impact on the ranking your site receives on the search engines.
Each time you post new content on your website or blog, you should always adhere to a step-by-step process to ensure you’ve done everything required by these search engine optimization standards to help you gain a higher ranking on the search engines. The process should go as follows:
- Topic Research
- Keyword Research
- Title Tags
- Meta Description
- Meta Keywords
- Write the Content or Article
- Ensure Keywords are Present in Your Written Content
- Include Anchor Tags
- Syndicate Content
Lets take a look at these steps to better understand what each one involves to help you start achieving higher search engine rankings.
Topic Research
Most website owners already know what their website will be about when they first set it up. If you know what your target market is, simply provide content on your site that meets the needs of your market, but do the necessary research required to support your content. Doing so provides value to your sites visitors and will ensure your site is accurately providing the information and content they seek. Providing accurate information on your site that is relevant to what your site is about is loved by search engines. The more frequently you do this to ensure your site and the content you are providing is relevant to what your site is about will boost your search engine rankings significantly over time.
Keyword Research
I can’t stress enough how important keyword research is to your ability to achieve higher rankings on the search engines. Use free tools such as NicheBot Classic and Google Adwords Keyword Tool to conduct research on the various keywords that are relevant to the content you are writing. Look for a combination of keywords that receive high search usage among the search engines that are relevant to your content. Once you’ve identified a set of keywords, make sure to write those keywords into your content. For example, this blog post is about search engine rankings… Look through the post and see if you can identify how many times the keywords “search engine” appear in this post. You’ll notice they appear quite frequently 
This is done so search engine spiders know in detail, what the page is about and will give it a higher search engine ranking due to the relevance of the post to its title and topic.
Title Tags
Title tags are extremely important to your search engine ranking. It is well known in the search engine optimization industry that ensuring your title tags contain keywords words relevant to the content on a particular web page that it is describing will grant you a much greater opportunity to achieve higher search engine rankings. Always ensure you write enticing, yet descriptive titles to all your web pages and blog posts. As an example, the first two words of the title for this post are key words that receive a great number of searches every month on the search engines and are very relevant to this post. You’ll also notice the title of this post is displayed in the title bar of your browser which is managed by the title tag of this page. Bottom line, well written, keyword optimized yet descriptive titles for your pages and posts will go a seriously long way to helping you achieve a greater ranking on the search engines.
If you are a blogger and use WordPress, install the Thesis theme. It is by far the best overall theme for WordPress because it is extremely flexible allowing you to customize your title tags to better optimize them for search engines. Not to mention, you have complete control over the customization of the theme to make it look however you want. Thesis also allows you to customize your meta description and meta keywords for each page and define additional search engine optimization settings to help you increase your ranking on the search engines. Or, you can install the All-in-One SEO plugin for WordPress which provides some of more basic title tag and meta tag customization features.
Well, that about does it for part one of my three part series on search engine rankings. Stay tuned for tomorrow where we’ll discuss three more of the search engine optimization techniques necessary for you to achieve higher rankings on the search engines.
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See you tomorrow!
Sean Smith
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