5 Simple Search Engine Optimization Techniques (SEO)

The blood source of every ecommerce website / business is traffic, and every webmaster knows the best kind of traffic is natural organic search engine traffic. There are two very important reasons for this: (1) very targeted, and (2) It's FREE! The hard part of getting a top ranking for your site's keywords ... or is it? The purpose of this article is to provide some simple, effective, and most important search engine friendly strategies to help improve your website ranking and ultimately your traffic.

1) We will start with Meta Tags. I know you've heard of it, and probably currently use meta tags on your site.

This is goodI just want to make sure you use it effectively. We will only cover more than 2 tags: the "title" tag, and the "description" tag. We will not discuss the "keyword" tag, since the primary search engine has less weight and less on this one, and some people think that this tag has absolutely no weight. I am still using this tag, because I feel there are some advantages and disadvantages to using this tag. I've found it effective to use similar text in "title" and "description" tags, and place your keywords prominently in this tag (close to beginning and more than once).I've seen sites with "sitename com", "New Page 1", or "Welcome to my site" in the "title tag", which actually does not help their search for higher rankings for certain keywords. Also, try not to use words like "and", "or", or "the" in this tag.

Important notes about your keywords. Search engines evaluate keyword excellence, keyword weight, and keyword density when ranking a site. All three are calculated separately for pages, title tags, description tags, and other areas of the page. Keyword excellence means how close your keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to the number of times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to other words on the page. You do not want keyword weight or too high density, because this can appear to search engines as "keyword stuffing" and most search engines penalize sites that enter their keywords.

2) Place your navigation links (and JavaScript) on the right or at the bottom but not on the left, the page.

When search engines "read" your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. The search engine gives emphasis on the first 100 words or text on this site. You do not want these words to be navigation links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have a post tag with keywords at the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links / JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what's important on your page.

3) Place the alt tag on all your images.Search engine spiders can not "read" pictures or images.

The only way a spider knows what an image is by reading the alt tag. It's also another opportunity to put more of your keywords in your HTML, improving the weight / density of your page's keywords. Alt tags are easy to do and they can make a big difference in your site's keyword ranking. The simple alt tag looks like this: alt = "put your keyword phrase here." Search engines separately calculate keyword sharpness, density, and weight tag alt as well, so optimize your tags.

4) Place the keywords at the bottom of your page.

Just as search engines put more weight on the first words of your page, they also do the same thing in the last words. The common thought is this, if your site is about a particular subject, then the main point, or keyword, should, appear at the beginning, scatter across the page, and stand out at the conclusion. But if you have all the navigation links and JavaScript at the bottom, relevant page text can end well before HTML does it. An easy way to get your keywords at the bottom of your page is to include them in copyright information. For example, if you have a dog food site, you could have something like this at the very bottom of the page:

Search engines do not (like this article), penalize sites using this technique, and it would not make sense for them to do so.

5) Anchor Text from your link.

Anchor text is the actual linking text on the site. That's what users click to navigate to a particular site or page. If search engines find many links to your site using the term "dog food", then search engines will conclude your site about "dog food". This is often overlooked, but it seems to have a huge impact on your search engine ranking for certain keywords.Your anchor text should be the keyword or phrase you want to target. Try to avoid anchor text like "Click Here" or "yoursite.com"