how to optimize for search engines

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Optimizing for search engines

I divide search engine optimization into two distict parts, both of equal importance as doing one without the other will void your optimization efforts.

The first part is selecting keywords that you are planning to target. The second is achieing high ranking for your website (get good search engine position) on those keywords.

The following section of this website talks about these search engine optimization techniques in detail.

Selecting keywords and keyphrases

The first step of optimization is to select target keywords or rather keyphrases. This is a very important task and the rest of your search engine optimization efforts will be in vein if you have not thoroughly done this.

Perhaps a good way to start would be to try Adwords keyword tool, which can help you suggest keyword variations and at the same time give idea of how many monthly searches there are for a particular keyword variation. Once you have identified some keyword phrases, consider the following techniques for narrowing down your keywords, which help decrease competition for a keyword.

As has been already mentioned in the section about selecting topic for a website that you need to try to identify keywords that are popular search terms but have little competition. One other important factor to keep in mind is that sometimes you can significantly decrease competition by narrowing down your target keywords, which simultaneously attracts more relevant traffic. You can narrow it down geographically, thematically, etc. I will give you an example that will demonstrate this point. For example, if you target a key phrase "business cards", you are going to be competing with some 110 million other websites. But if you are selling business cards in Florida, people from China who happen to come to your website are unlikely to be interested in your services. So, if you target "Florida business cards" you are already competing with 15 million. If you say "Hallandale business cards" you are already down to 200000 results and that's quite doable. Business cards is one of the most competitive key words, I used this example to demonstrate the potential and importance of selecting more specific key words.

Once you have selected and narrowed down your keywords try the Adwords keyword tool again and see if you are happy with the result. If not, continue the process of refining your keywords.

When you have selected your keywords, make content pages dedicated to these particular keywords. Try to keep within 2 - max. 3 keywords/keyphrases per page. If you try to target too many keywords on a single page, you are unlikely to achieve very high rankings for any of them.

Do not expect all visitors to find your website by one page devoted to one keyword. Say, if you want to achieve 100 000 visits per month, you have much better chances of creating 100 pages and getting 1000 visits on each of them, then having one page so popular you get all that traffic through keywords on that page. If you create 1000 pages, you are improving your chances to increase the traffic. Sure, writing 1000 pages of content sounds like a formidable task, but you don't have to do it all yourself. With dynamic websites you don't have to create all the content - the content creates itself or visitors can create content for you.

Achieving high search engine ranking

Once you have identified your target keywords you will need to put some effort into achieving favorable ranking with search engines, i.e. getting your site up in the search results for selected keywords. There are two groups of factors that affect your site's search engine position - on-page factors and off-page factors.

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