Photo by EugeniusD80
This is a guest post by Chad Peterson on winning the war with the SERPS and Big G.
While I’m no expert on SEO, he’s got some solid ideas here to stir up those spiders! Happy reading, and be sure to leave your comments below… or else!
There are many on page tactics you can use to optimize your pages for search engines. First and most important is CONTENT, fresh and unique.
I should point out that many people steal RSS feeds from competing sites to display on their page- if that’s you be warned that if it’s displaying in javascript the search engines won’t see it. Search engines see text and html… that’s it.
I would avoid using someone else’s RSS feed to populate your site with content, unless you have their consent. My advice is to add your own fresh content every 2 or 3 days. The longer your posts the better… so instead of a 300 word post write 500 words or more.
You want to win the “war” for your keywords in the search engine results.
Off to Battle- On-Page Optimization Techniques
To do that you’ll need to use some ninja tactics.
1. Your main keyword should appear in your page’s content at a 2-3% density. It is a good idea to bold and italicize your keywords every time they appear in your text, as this is like shouting at the search engines.
2. Make sure you have a title tag and that your keyword appears in it. Having one of your keywords in your domain name also helps. Also, all those image files you’ll want to name with keywords and add alt tags using keywords to describe them.
3. Use H1 tags on all new post titles. You can use bold on all new post titles too. I usually do not fully optimize a page. I’d suggest not applying all techniques at once. The reasoning is so you can leave yourself room to better the page when someone overtakes you in the rankings.
Back to War- Off –Page Optimization Techniques
Backlinks are number two in importance after content. Every link to your site is a like a vote for your site from another site. The quality of links to your site is very important.
Big these days is article marketing, but do not spam articles to article directories as Google is placing less value on these type of links. If you plan on article marketing I suggest using quality unique articles and submitting to EzineArticles, as they hold the most weight in the “backlink article directory” world.
Besides, there are many ways to get backlinks. Links ending in .edu and .gov and .mil hold the highest SEO value. There is a trust factor given to this type of linkback. Another key in building links is the pagerank of the referring page and the content type on that page. Get links from sites related to your niche.
Ninja Backlinking- The “Whitehat” Method
1. Make a Facebook fan page and Facebook group page for your site making sure that you leave links. Also in Facebook is an app called Marketplace. Add it and create an ad for your site for free.
2. Create a Squidoo lens page for your site, create a Hubpage for your site, and create a Weebly page for your site, etc. Social bookmark each of these pages, Twitter each one, Digg each one, etc. The more bookmarks the better!
3. Now go to your personal email, send a message to all of your friends with your website’s link and ask them to visit and if possible share it for you using social bookmarks. The more friends you have Tweeting and sharing your site on bookmarking and social media sites the more buzz you will get… the more buzz the faster Google will send out spiders and you’ll see lots of free traffic.
4. Then use the power of press releases, there are literally dozens of press release sites that are free, and send out a press release for your site every 2 weeks.
5. Constantly submit your sites to directories. I suggest you get a very big list of directories and cross off 2 or 3 a day. Do the same with search engines, although I would highly recommend not submitting to Google. Let Google find you.
6. Make sure your site has a sitemap and make sure your site has a robots.txt file.
7. Make sure that every page of your site links back to other pages of your site.
8. Create a resources or links page, but do not ever have more than 100 links on any page… ever.
9. Create RSS feeds for your site and submit them to RSS directories and aggregators. There are many free RSS generators, so create multiple RSS feeds for your site and submit them all. This makes search engines think that your site is important. Ping your site whenever you add fresh content.
10. Finally, make yourself a list of WhoIs sites, website valuation sites and sites like Alexa and Quantcast. Submit your URL to these sites as they help get Google to notice and index you faster. The bigger this list the more effective it will be. I suggest submitting your site to this list every 3 weeks.
There you have it… search engine domination by Chad Peterson in a few easy steps. Agree? Disagree? How about you? Got any SEO tricks or tips?