Search Engine Optimization

7 Essential SEO techniques

1) Title Tag - When we're talking about SEO Technique, the Title tag is one of the best and most powerful tags that you can use. Every page should have it's own title tag, each tag should include the keyword that you are targeting, along with sub-keywords associated with the main keyword that you seek to drive traffic from.

2) ALT Tags - These tags are most often ignored completely. Who would have thought that tags, that were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn't show in text browsers, would become part of a technique to raise the keyword density of a webpage. Your main keywords need to be included in some ALT tags- be careful, over-doing this could cause you to be banned and your PR could drop.

3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool, (arguably, of course). Typically a website must have a link to it, in order to be looked at by the spiders. This means that you should have at least 1-2 links going into your site from another website that has been visited by the spiders through search engines. Increasing Page Rank, depends on the number and quality of the sites that link into yours. Keywords should be in the links, along with sub-keywords. Keep the links short; this creates an easily readable keyword term for the search engines to recognize.

4) Keyword Density - Research first - Then decide on the keywords that you want to target. Don't over do it- you should use the keywords only once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and then shoot for the density to be between 5% to 20% . Keywords should also be strategically located throughout your website. Place them in all locations. Several search engines will recognize bottom of the page or sidebar text/links and discount them, this is because many website designers will load certain sections with clutter.

5) Page Size - Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size. I just designed one that is close to 53k, this is mostly because of pictures and a flash file being used, rule of thumb?. Look at Yahoo! And Google, These are some of the fastest loading pages, and most popular, people don't like to wait - even if you have "cool" graphics and pictures. Your web page's speed is important: robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier.

6) Theme Rich in content - Search engines are looking at themes rather than just the words or pictures. Content is King - I know, you hear it a lot, but it's true! Webpages should have content that's related to the targeted market. Link your visitors to other valuable and related content within your own site. The more pages the better. A good tool that I have found to show you linking info is: http://www.UpTimeBot.com You can preload upto 20 pages and then refersh them, it shows all the vital information, along with how many pages are indexed from each search engine.

7) Cross Linking within your Own Site - You rely on other pages linking into yours - in order to get indexed; the same is true for all the pages within your site. Any new content should be easily reachable through 1-3 pages of content. Linking back to your main home page, or a storefront will help you get indexed faster and achieve a higher Page Rank.

Scott Fish

President, http://www.TopSatelliteRadio.com

Personal Blog: http://www.ScottFish.BlogSpot.com