Let’s take a look at 5 proven and simple SEO strategies that you can implement today, or modify, in order to improve your search engine rankings.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are great and chances are you are probably already using them. Making sure that you are using them correctly and efficiently is another story. Let’s look at the title and description tags as the keyword tag is weighted less in the search engines, specifically Google.

In your title tag you want to use your keyword at least once. If you are using a Wordpress blog, you can use the All in One SEO Pack and it will allow you several different setups for the title tag. You don’t want your site name in it, or “Welcome to my site” or forget to put something in there and see “Enter title here”. You want your page title (if a single post) or your main keyword here to appear on each page.

The description tag is what appears in the search engine results and is very critical. You want to make a description that has your targeted keyword(s) in it at least once, but is very appealing and teasing to draw the person into your site. Don’t reveal to much information here, make them want to click into your site.

**Important note about your keywords. Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a site’s ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as “keyword stuffing” and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.

Navigation Links

You want to put your navigation links to the bottom of your code. Why? When the search engines read your sites, they begin at the top of the code and work their way down. Usually this equates into a top to bottom, left to right sequence. If you fill up the first parts of your code with navigation links and other worthless stuff, the search engine spiders will just pass you over because they think that your site is full of links. They also won’t easily rank you for your real content that you have in your site.

Alt tags

If you have an image, you need an alt tag. This is basically a description for the image. The search engine spiders can’t see what the picture is about so you need to tell them. This also comes in handy when people search for that product or what ever the image is about through image search engines, such as Googles image search.

Keyword placement

You will want to use your keywords in the first paragraph or two and the last couple of paragraphs as well. Sometimes you can lose the fact of where to put your keywords. One way to put your keyword and increase your link structure is to put your keyword as the link at the bottom of your site in the © Copyright section. See the bottom of this site for an example.

Anchor Text

The anchor text that you use can help you, or it can hurt you. One thing that the search engines take into account is finding too many anchor texts being the same within a short amount of time. If you vary your anchor text, it will help. It won’t hurt your seo of your site and link building efforts.

An example would be if you were linking to a site for ford tractor parts. If you vary your anchor text to read “old ford tractor parts”, “ford 8100 parts”, or “starter for antique ford tractor” you are still showing the relevancy of your links.

Don’t ever use “click here” or “visit my site” as those aren’t keywords that pay.

Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, little tricks that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your website’s keyword ranking. Every little bit of knowledge that you can learn about search engine optimization will pay dividends in the future.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

I hope this helps you to better understand a key component to search engine optimization techniques that will provide you a better understanding for success.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only ten to twenty hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all. You need to increase search engine traffic to your site to be truly successful.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.