Tim Anderson, the author of this article, kindly agreed to let me use his article to illustrate the techniques for improving your search engine rankings. If you are developing a website, you will need to search for other pages to demonstrate the techniques that Tim is describing in the article.
The content of your website is very important. Remember that Google will consider your pages more relevant if the content matches some of the major search phrases, as stated in the copyright notice above. Some of the techniques you can use include using the keywords, using related keywords in the page content or the alt text etc. In the last technique, the text of your web page will actually show up as the keyword when it is displayed in the SERPs.
Tim Anderson has created this great tool which is available on the internet. It will automatically crawl your website to find the key phrases that are most relevant to your website and display these key phrases on your website. Tim recommends that you use this tool after you have completed the main content of your website and as part of your onsite optimisation activities.
It is a great tool that will tell you what key phrases are used most frequently by surfers and it will also show you what key phrases are used less frequently. I have not used this tool but if you want to use it then it is available on the internet and is free to do so.
The tool is part of the SEOTools suite. The SEOTools website states this tool does not contain proprietary data. If you do not know what that means then you should not use this tool. Also the SEOTools website states this tool returns a ranking “best practice” from 250 million searches in Google.
They state the actual best practice is different for each search engine. The best practice for Google is to use the keyword in the title tag, in the heading tags and in the content text. It will also tell you whether a given keyword is a preferred or a nonpreferred term.
I say preferred because surfers do not always use preferred terms, they just use it when they get confused. They will scan the page to find the preferred terms and then use that term. In other words surfers look for preferred terms and then stick with preferred terms. As a result preferred terms tend to be more profitable.
After the core content is complete, it is time to look at offsite optimisation. The first stage of this stage is link building. This involves building links to the pages of your site that have the key phrases that you have measured with the SEOTools tool.
The reason that you build links to the pages rather than the index page is that the pages have been indexed by the search engines and have a better chance of showing up in the search results pages. Google will always rank the pages of the site higher. In addition building links to the pages of the site that have the key phrases will improve its relevance to the key phrases in the index page. Onsite optimisation is now completed.
The next stage in the process is link creation. This stage involves building links from other websites to your site. Tim has stated in other articles that link building is the cornerstone of successful online marketing and that it should amount to at least 20-25% of the total cost of your website.
This does not include backlinks from other websites but if you add backlinks from other websites then this number will increase. It is not as important as link building. The key point is to build it and then keep building it. The more links you have pointing to your site, the more trusted it will be. If your site is trusted, then Google will reward you for being such a trusted site and you will have better results with them.
Link building can include blogs, forum posting, blog commenting, social bookmarking and article marketing. The best way to build links is to post good content on relevant sites. Try to create content that people will want to read. If you are creating content for your site then your content will be valuable, even if your links point to your site.
Remember, there are many places to post your links. Most are free but a few must be paid for. As a rule of thumb, post links from relevant sites and from websites that are related to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site, the more trusted it will be and the higher its relevance.
To find the best places to post your links, start with the same sites Tim used to find the top spots. Then move to other sites that were ranked higher in the past and finally to sites that are not yet ranked but have links that are of high quality. The process does not end there. Start blogging. Keep building your links. Remember, the links to your site have to be relevant to your site. Links should be linked to the content of your site. The more the links, the more relevant it will be.
When you make sure your links are relevant, then you will have a high quality backlink to your site. Then you will have the best link building.
