Search Engine Optimization For Regular People

One of the best ways to get instant traffic to a web site is to pay the search engines to get listed, using “pay per click” advertising.

Of course, the better your pages are, the more likely the search engines will list them for free, and let people click all day without charging you a penny.

You may have heard of this Page Rank thing. It is a google score between 0 and 10, and the higher the number, the better your page is. No one really knows how PageRank is scored, not even Larry Page (one of the key guys at Google). I can show you some simple things you can do to get better search engine rankings, and a better Page Rank.

Interested? Lets get into the simple seo stuff you can do to get higher rankings, better Page Rank, and all that stuff.

1. Get links pointing to your site with rich keyword anchors.

This just means that other sites have a link to your site, and the text people click is a keyword that others search for on the search engines.

A great way to do this is to write informative articles and use the author box to link back to your site, then submit your article to many article directories.

2. Make sure your keyword is in the title tag.

The title tag is what you read at the very very top left of your browser. Make sure your keyword shows up there.

3. Start your headline with your keyword.

Your headline is the big text at the top of your page (normally). Your keyword should be in your headline.

4. Include similar keywords on your web page.

Some folks call this semantic indexing, but you can ignore those big words, and simply write meaningful stuff on your page, and you will have related words that tell the search engines that this is stuff that humans should see.

5. Remove code from the top of your html.

To look at your page in html mode, open it, and then right click and choose “view source”. What you are looking for is stuff that isn’t readable, like javascript code and “css” descriptions. Move that stuff into other files, and include it from your page. Get the help of a techie if you don’t get this part. Basically, you want Google and the other bots to read writing you can read, and nothing else. If the top of your page is filled with programming junk, you will not get ranked in the search engines.

6. Use fully qualified links to internal pages.

This means instead of linking to flowers.html, you should link to http://www.yoursite.com/flowers.html. This makes the search engines visit your other pages, and list them in their results.

7. Keep your website fresh.

If you page is old and stagnant, the search engines will drop your rankings, since they don’t know if it relevant any more. By keeping your site fresh and changing, they know it is a vibrant, living site, and that makes it worth listing higher in the results pages.

Try these tips out, and watch your search engine results rise higher and higher. It is simple when you know what to do.