Being advertised on a search engine is one of the most basic ways of inviting visitors into your site. But advertising yourself is not enough you also have to ensure that you have the right amount of visibility which will get you noticed; a high ranking therefore is an absolute must. Search engine optimization is that missing link between a good and a great business, it earns you customers, keeps your website well visited and makes your investment on the site a success.

While nobody dare deny the kind of benefits you are likely to reap from being ranked high on a search engine, a certain amount of decorum needs to be maintained even here. A number of unethical practices have recently become prevalent amongst those desperate to boost their rankings. While on first glance these might seem completely harmless to you it is important that you recognize them for what they really are. The first step towards doing that is spotting what YOU might be doing wrong. Following is a list to help you through your discovery:

Inappropriate use of keywords

Sooner or later you are bound to find out that between you and the search engine, you are the one with the brain cells. But don’t go overboard with your discovery. Yes, you can fool the search engine with long strings of text into which you discreetly bury a gallon of keywords which have no relevance whatsoever with your site, but in the end you won’t be fooling the customers who will be finally using the links. Let’s face it, if the user is searching for “fish” or “fishing” he/she is most likely to not click on a site with a text like “boating fishing exotic animals site seeing great locations cruising Kuala Lumpur”. The irony is that if someone is really searching for a subject related to your site’s material even then he/she is probably going to skip clicking on your link because the description betrays no clue as to what really the site is about.

Inappropriate use of Meta tags

First things first, if you are wondering what META tags are then they are the html code that your website designer has used to create your webpage. They are also used to inform search engines as to what the keywords on the site are. So as is obvious by now certain ways of tampering with your META tags, certain ‘tricks’, let’s call them, might help you fool the search engine in ways very similar to that described above. However, your brainwave won’t get you too far unfortunately because stupid though it is, even a search engine knows not to go by appearance alone when it comes to websites, so instead of depending on the META tags alone it usually also checks up the content!

False content

As a user you have probably come across a dozen sites which seem to have long strings of text which have nothing to do with the site as a whole and probably make no sense individually either. These are what are called ‘False content’; they are put up on a site only to use a few keywords which might get detected by a search engine. Needless to say such content is a complete obstacle in a good read and even if the overall look and feel of your site is A1 every visitor will get put off by these.

While no one is taking away the fact that a good ranking is important it is probably also of some importance to gain it the right way. And tricking the visitor or disrupting their read is certainly not the way I would call right. Stick to making your website useful and make sure it has the right kind of ‘real’ content, once that is done no one will be able to stop you from getting a high ranking with the search engines.

In a layman’s parlance, keywords are nothing but words and / or phrases which people may use to locate your services, products, information or brands via search engines.

Step 1: Keyword Identification

The first activity in the keyword research process is the identification of keywords. Keyword identification means locating the keywords which are used by your target group. You look for related keywords. First, you identify the industry and then zoom into the specific field. For example, if you own this pet shop, you should take up keywords like: “cat food” and “dog food”.

Step 2: Locate Your Keywords

The second activity in the keyword research process is a more informed and technical search. It involves finding keywords that people actually use and organizing them by their popularity.

To locate keywords and find out their popularities, you can make use of the Aleksika keyword search box to know more about the search behavior of your target audience. Learn what they call things, the way they identify subjects, how broad or how precise their search generally is. These parameters become essential in looking for the right keywords.

You may also access relevant and useful ideas for keywords from the collection of top keywords containing the top one hundred keywords of the last year or maybe a keyword directory that offers keywords organized by subject. Wordtracker is one such program that allows you to look for relevant keywords.

Step 3: Choose Keywords

The method of deciding on the right keywords involves the following steps. Copy all relevant phrases and counts onto a spreadsheet. After you have made an examination of all individual words and phrases that might apply to your website, you will have every single important phrase on your spreadsheet.

Instead of making your search more vague and inaccurate, (which generally happens when you try to choose one-word keywords), it is suggested that you focus your concentration on only those keywords that can be easily managed. And that would typically mean phrasal keywords.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo all use their own methodologies and/or algorithms to calculate the relevance of your pages, but here are a few common factors that are accepted by most to guarantee good rankings in renowned search engines.

Analyze your pages, and start the process today; remember to resubmit your changes when you are done, and the traffic will start to flow.

1) Keyword Density

Try to achieve a 3.5% to 7% keyword density for each of your pages. This means, your keywords should get repeated 3 to 7 times per 100 words written. However, do NOT overuse your keywords on the same page. Related keywords may help further.

There was a time when random usage of keywords was accepted by major search engines. This led to utter chaos and visitors hardly got to read what they were looking for. This was brought to the notice of search engine webmasters and it changed the rules overnight. Today, it is considered spam and the offender is punishable by law.

2) Keyword Phrase Choices

It is next to impossible to get a high rank for a single keyword, so make sure you aim for some lower-demand phrases too. The keyword ‘coffee’ has been listed in Overture as getting searched 370830 times a month. ‘Coffee’ as a keyword has an immense competition. However, a key phrase like ‘coffee club’ shows just 1813 searches. Getting a number one rank for coffee would of course be wonderful, but having a moderately good rank for several lower-demand keywords must be an essential part of your search engine optimization strategies.

3) Original Content

Google can penalize websites that offer exactly the same content, and this can result in lower ranking for all sites. In extreme situations, the website may be written off from the search engine forever. How many times have you seen multiple sites meant to promote the same old resale rights product? All of them display the same old sales page. The cleverest thing for you to do would be to simply rewrite the sales letter and submit that page to the search engines. This is vitally important SEO tip. Make sure you put in connected words and phrases; not simply the targeted keywords. Originality always sells. And it sells more than any other strategy ever used.

Concentrate on the ON page and OFF page optimizing. On page deals with getting your description tags and meta tags similar to your webpages. One key fact not to forget is to use tags with the keywords in the content.

Off Page optimizing is probably the most important. Without this, you cannot even expect getting visitors on your site. This is nothing but an exercise to get other sites to point to your site, sites that have similar subjects.

Over the period of time, the topic of link exchange has also undergone a number of irreversible changes. Today, people are asking for money to exchange links to get higher PR sites. What can you do now? Well, you could buy maybe a couple of links at the most, if it is absolutely necessary. Apart than that, find out forums where you can post or discuss about your website. How? By simply Googling it. After that, when you get your membership, you can put your website URL within the signature box.  Another way of off-page optimization is to submit articles to article directories. Articles also help to make your website popular.

But you have to write excellent CONTENT for your specific site. This is called a one way link, meaning there will be no reciprocal links. Work this out and submit your articles to around fifty free article directories or websites; this should lead to a good PR in say a couple of months. Articles work big time and in ways that are always not apparent immediately.