Do you find it difficult to get your site ranked in the top 10 of the major search engines for your main keywords ?

Optimizing your web site for the search engines seems to be a never ending game these days. A lot of people have trouble getting their site ranked at all . This article discusses ways of getting your site ranked well in most of the major search engines . The good times of free search engine submissions seem to be almost over. More and more search engines are restructuring their financial foundations as most of them are struggling to find enough advertisers who allow them to keep their listings free of charge. Many of the major search engines are taking a submission fee already or are considering it. There is a good and effective way around it but I will cover these details later within this article ...
 
The factors which will determine your ranking :

1.) Choice of Keywords

Is your web site really optimized for the search engines ? The main factor for a successful search engine submission is the choice of your keywords. Choose the wrong ones and your site can be listed on number 5,299,000 of 6,000,000 sites for your keyword. It is crucial that you exactly know what keywords your potential visitors are looking for ! You should not take highly competitive words and most important of all, you should not use single words as your keywords. The best way is to use keyword combinations or expressions. There is an easy way to find these combinations and I've mentioned this tool already more than once. It's Overture's search term suggestion tool and it's worth to use it every time you need to optimize your web site and when you have to add new pages to your site. This well known link is : . If you type in your main keywords, you'll get lots of suggestions for terms with similar or additional meanings. Best of all, you'll also get to know how many times the term is searched for at Overture. By knowing this, you can test this result at your favourite major search engine as well. At the results page it is always listed how many pages are found with these expressions. This makes it easy to find winner combinations . If you have the choice between a singular or plural expression, always choose the plural form because in most cases, the plural word also includes the singular version as well (at least with most plurals containing "s" at the end ) .

2.) Your Keyword Expressions in your HTML-coding I don't want to expand this point into all the details, because I've covered them already in my first article about the search engines called "10 Basic Search Engine Preparation Tips". If you're not familiar with the content, you can get it by autoresponder : In short , include keywords in your : - Meta-Tag "description" and Meta-Tag "keywords" - Alt-Tags : Use your keyword expressions for the descriptive texts of your JPEG and GIF pictures - Title : Start with your most important keywords.

3.) Your Keywords in your Visible Text Some of the major search engines have begun to ignore meta-tags and place more importance on the visible text of your web site. This demands from you that you pay attention to your Keyword Density as well. In other words, your main keyword expressions should appear more than just once in your text. If you can work these expressions into a H1 heading (very large Font Size) at the beginning of your text, you'll get more plus points from the search engines. Then weave them another two or three times into the rest of your text and you're done.

This is really important and if you have to change your existing text, do it ! I once had a client for whom I had done the web design and search engine optimization ; he just asked me if I could not change his Meta-tags only instead of the text. He liked the text as it was . My comment : "Then leave it as it is but your page will certainly NOT be found." Having heard this bad news, he decided that it would be better to let me do the changes instead of risking not to be found in the search engines..... Warning : Don't overdo the use of your keywords, as it can cause you being penalized by the search engines. They regard this method as "spamming" their index !

4a.) Reciprocal Links pointing to your Website How many sites are linking to yours ? This is the question which becomes dominant for a search engine if it wants to determine how important your web site really is. You have no links pointing to your web site, you say ? Then you can get rid off the thought to get a number one position at most of the major search engines..... More importantly, it is not enough to just put up some links from some other domains you may have obtained together with your hosting package. That will not fulfill the demand for high quality sites which should be linking to your site. In order to fulfill the high standards of the search engines, you also have to make sure that high quality sites are linking to yours. This means links from some of the free hosting services are not really what you need. You need links from some major "players" who offer content which is related to yours but which are not competitive. If you can get those links, you are on your way of achieving a high search engine ranking.

4b.) Reciprocal Links from Sites already been indexed This is the "backdoor" to getting listed in the major search engines even if you don't pay their fees: Try to get reciprocal links from web sites which already have a top position in the major search engines. If you can achieve this, it is very likely that your site will get indexed by their spiders as well, the next time their index is updated. Best of all : This works for Yahoo as well, even if you don't pay their high fee of $299 which doesn't even give you a guarantee of being accepted into their directory....!

Conclusion:
Optimizing your web site for the search engines is that necessary if you want to get lots of targeted visitors for free or for just a few cents per visitor.

The bad news is that the search engine relationships between each other have become quite complex. It is not enough anymore to just submit your site directly to Search Engine A, you must also submit to Search Engine B to get ranked well. But that is a topic I want to cover in one of my next articles .....

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