brandondawson.org

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about how to accomplish proper Search Engine Optimization. An entire market has cropped up to service the needs of business owners eager to climb to the top of google in rankings.

Many of those services use so-called “black hat” techniques that can get your site penalized! In fact, SEO is far easier and more straightforward than people seem to think, and anyone can do it.
Here’s the ten biggest things you can do to improve your search engine rankings, right now:

1. Fine tune your site’s title. If possible, make each sub-page’s title individually relevant to the specific content being presented. Keep your title under eighty characters, and include your best keywords at the beginning.
2. Tweak your content to include your best keywords more often. Be careful of over-using a particular keyword, as you’ll be penalized for spamming. Instead, do some research and include variants on your best keywords at a high freqency.
3. Tweak your META tags. Too many sites out there think they can tell a search engine what their page is about! It’s the other way around, in fact: the words in the description and keywords META tags should reflect what’s actually on the page.
4. Include keywords in URLs. If your main product is grass seed, make your sub-page for that product grass-seed.html or something similar. If you use a content management system, there may be add-ons available to automatically convert your URLs to SEF (search-engine friendly) URLs.
5. Add ALT information to all your images. Be sure to include your keywords without spamming!
6. Add TITLE information to all links, inbound and outbound. Use good keywords.
7. Submit a sitemap to Google’s and Yahoo’s sitemaps services. Sitemaps help search engines not only to understand the structure of your content, but also to find their way around more quickly.
8. Start spreading links around! Inbound links are the single most important factor in search engine positioning!
9. Vary your inbound links with different phrases and keywords, to take fullest advantage of alternative spellings, phrasings, and descriptions.
10. Refine your approach by keeping a firm eye on your website’s logs, and SERPs (Search Engine results pages.)

That’s it! Any website should be able to gain positive results by using these steps. Just keep refining and refining until you achieve the results you want!