2. When talking about search engine rankings many people
ask themselves questions like; how many keywords
should I put in my anchor text? What is the keyword
density that I should have on the page? Should I use
short copy or should I use long copy? Can I use flash or
not? How many keywords should I put in my "alt" text?
Etc...
3. A general statement to answer the above questions is
that "magic numbers do not exist." The most important
thing you can understand as a search engine
optimization expert is that algorithms change. Just when
you think you understand what is going to make you
number one for a keyphrase in a search engine,
something could easily change, and you might have to
spend months or even years trying to figure the new
algorithm.
4. It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm,
do something much easier instead... observe your top
competitors. All you need to do is to understand what
elements your competitors are using to make them rank
in the top positions.
10. The first thing to observe from your competitor's sites is
their inbound links. This means the number of sites that
have a link pointing to their website. You can easily
measure it by going to Google and typing:
"link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com". However do not
only do this on Google because they don't show all
actual links pointing to a site. Yahoo and MSN tend to
show a lot more of the back links to any given website.
11. Part of the observation should be not only what the
links say, but where the links come from. Think about
what the category is that those links come from. If you
start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively
searching for links coming from that category.
12. Some marketers use special software for robotic content
creation. They generate thousands of pages with links
pointing to their sites. This practice can be very
dangerous, as Google will penalize unnatural linking or
violations of their terms of service. And what happens is
that those links do not look natural. One day one site
may have 50 links and the following day have 2000 links,
which all say the same thing and come from the same IP
address.
13. If you understand how to observe, this will never
happen to you. You will learn how to look at your
competitors, and observe how they are getting linked to.
Then, just do what they do.
15. The second thing to observe is how much fresh content
the top sites have. Search engines love quality relevant
content that is added and updated frequently. You will
probably notice that the top sites in your niche have
many articles and other quality content, and are
continuously adding new content to their sites.
16. People that surf the web are usually searching for
information, so content is the "fuel" of internet traffic. If
you want to attract many potential customers to your
site, then you need to make sure that you provide
enough content which is relevant to their interests.
Updating it frequently with more quality content will
keep visitors coming back to your website over and over
again.
18. The third thing you need to observe is the keyword
density of your competitors. How many times should
you repeat your main keywords? In which part of the
web page should your main keywords be mentioned?
Again, there is no magic number, it's all about observing
and measuring against the top websites in your market.
But what should you measure?
25. Each one of these items should be measured
independently. There are tools to run keyword density
against your competitors. If you run them against the
top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets
of top rankings.
26. Again, your keyword density needs to look natural;
otherwise you may fail in overall optimization. This is
when you use keywords too often or too little. If you
look unnatural, your rankings will suffer as a result.
27. So, what did we learn here? Basically that the key to
ranking highly in the search engines is to understand
what the top 5 websites in your niche are doing and to
apply this to your own website optimization.
28. What do you do now? Get out there and start getting
inbound links for your site. Add quality content to your
site daily. And be sure that your on-site optimization,
such as keyword density, is similar to that of your top
competitors. Continue to do this every day and you will
be ranking a the top of the search engines before you
know it.
