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Once you have done your keyword research and chosen your keywords carefully, the next stage in achieving a higher search engine rank is optimizing your website.

For maximum traffic you should aim to optimize each page on your website for a different keyword phrase and you should make sure that the keyword phrase that you pick for your home page or the main page of your website gets a good number of searches per month.

Here are the main places on a web page that you should put your keywords when you are optimizing your website:

• In the <TITLE> tags - this is the text that is displayed along the title bar of your browser
• In the Headline tags - especially the <H1> tag
• In the ALT attributes of images - mention your keywords in one or two of the alt attributes of any of the images on your page
• Through out the body of your web page - ensuring that your keywords are mentioned at the beginning, middle and end
• In the anchor text of links - if you have any links to this page elsewhere on your website try to make sure that the anchor text (clickable text) has your keywords in it.
• In the <META> tags - although the main search engines no longer use these tags for ranking, you may want to mention your keywords in the keywords tag and in the description tag. The description tag is used by Google and other search engines to display a summary of your site when it is displayed in the search engine results.

Optimizing your website doesn’t have to be a complicated process - just make sure you mention your keywords in all of these places. At the same time, don’t over do it as keyword spamming can have the opposite affect! 

Taking an extra 10 minutes to do this when creating a new website can mean the difference between lots of traffic and no traffic.

In most of my posts I have concentrated on different ways to get a better search engine rank.

Today I’m going to talk about how not to get a better search engine rank. It is good to know what you need to do to improve your search engine ranking, but what about what you shouldn’t do?

 (1) Hidden Text- some websites use underhand techniques such as making massive lists of keywords on their pages, but making these keywords the same color as their page e.g. white text on a white page. These keywords are invisible to a human visitor looking at the web page, but they are visible to the search engines. Search engine ranking alogorithms are highly complex, so to thing that they can’t spot a simple technique like this is niave. Search engines could potentially penalize your website for using hidden keyword tricks.

(2) Keyword Spamming - this is similar to the above, but this time the keywords are not hidden. Some webmasters think that stuffing as many keywords as possible throughout the page and the meta keyword tags will improve their ranking in Google and other search engine rankings. The truth is that this could end up having a detrimental effect on your ranking. Take a look at the keyword density of your main competitors and aim for something similar to them instead. It is also useful to note that the major search engines don’t really pay much attention to the meta keywords tag, so if you are using this on your page you don’t need to put more than 4 or 5 keyword phrases in there.

(3) Too Many Links - don’t list too many links on a single page. The Google Webmaster guidelines suggest having less than 100 links on a single page. It is also good practise to ensure that you link only to high quality sites as you could be penalized for linking to “bad neighborhoods”.

(4) Using Flash Intros - some websites have fancy flash intros. Although these can sometimes look nice, they will not do anything for your search engine rank. Search engines cannot understand flash and graphics, so if you must have a flash intro, try to ensure that you also get some text on the page with your keywords in there as well.

(5) Submitting your Site to Search Engines - although this one is likely to do you no harm, it won’t help either. The way to get a good ranking in the main search engines is with good, keyword rich, fresh content and lots of high quality backlinks to your site. I have another blog post on why you don’t need to submit your site to search engines.

(6) Using Other Peoples’ Content - this is one of my pet hates, as I have had people steal my website content a few times in the past. Aside from the fact that this generally infringes copyright laws, it is not going to help you get a better search engine rank. You have a much better chance of getting a high ranking with fresh, unique content.

(7) Javascript or Graphical Based Navigation - When creating a menu or a way to navigate your website it is best to make this text based. Search Engines do not read javascript and cannot see the text that may be on images or graphics. If you have to have a javascript or image based menu, ensure that you also have a text based menu on the same page.

Do you own a website or blog? Are you disappointed with the number of free visitors that you receive every day from the search engines? If the answer to these questions is “Yes”, then read on to find out how you can quickly and easily get a higher search engine rank.

Each of these 7 methods can make a vast difference to where your website or blog ranks in Google or any of the other major search engines.

(1) Double Check Your Keywords

If you are getting very little or no search engine traffic, this will be for one of two reasons. Either because you have chosen a keyword phrase for your website that doesn’t get searched on very often, or you may have a good keyword phrase but your site is not on the first page of search engine results for that phrase.  Alternatively you may not have even thought about keywords.

Whatever the answer, if you are receiving no search engine traffic it is worth taking a second look at your keywords. Use a keyword tool such as Wordtracker to generate a big list of keywords related to your website and take a look at two very important statistics for each keyword:

• The total number of searches in a 24hr period
• The number of competing pages

You need to be sure to pick a phrase that has a good number of daily searches, but you also need to be sure that the competition is not so tough that you will never be able to reach the first page of the search engines. It is a bit of a balancing act, but once you have found the right keyword phrase, read on for more tips about how to get a higher ranking for your keywords.

(2) Make Sure your Keywords are in the Right Places

Many people believe that you just need to list your keywords in the meta keyword tag of your web page to get a good ranking, but this is a myth. Most major search engines including Google do not even take these tags into account when ranking a web page. The main reason for this is that they have been spammed so much in the past that they are no longer worth considering.

Two of the most important places to put your keyword phrase are in the <TITLE> tag of your web page and in the heading tags <H1>. Try to mention only your keyword phrase(s) and nothing else in these tags to ensure that you don’t dilute your efforts.

You should also aim to mention your keyword phrase throughout the body of your web page. Mention it a few times at the beginning, middle and end of your web page, but don’t go over board  - a spammy page with your keywords mentioned too many times can have the opposite effect on your ranking than you would like.

(3) Check your Web Page is Perfectly Optimized

As well as putting your keywords in the Title and heading tags of your web page you should also mention them in the anchor text of some of the links on that web page or on other web pages on your site and in the alt and title attributes of links and images. Again, don’t go overboard with this.

When you have finished optimizing your page you may want to check your keyword density. There is no exact formula for the keyword density and it should normally be around the 2-5% mark. Use a free keyword density tool to check the density and compare it to your main competitors. Try to aim for a similar density.

(4) Create a Sitemap

Creating a sitemap can be beneficial to both the visitors to your website and to the search engines. It will help to ensure that the search engines can find and index every page on your website. You can create a site map by hand, but it is much quicker and easier to use a tool to automatically generate one.

Here is a free sitemap generator. 

(5) A Little Bit of LSI

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It sound very complicated, but it is a relatively straightforward concept.

LSI is about the meaning of the words on your web pages and how they relate to each other. If you have optimized your web page for a particular keyword phrase the search engines will analyze your web page to see if there are other words that are related to these keywords or have a similar meaning.

As well as putting your keywords in the right places and checking your keyword density you should think about including other keywords on your page with a similar or related meaning. This will strengthen your page overall and improve your chances of ranking well. 

(6) Understand Who your Competitors are

Even if your keyword phrase returns a million pages when you type it into Google, the only pages of real importance are the first few websites on the first page of results. Most people don’t go past the first page or two when searching for something, so you have to aim for a page one ranking. To do this you need to take a close look at who your competitors are. Enter your main keyword phrase into Google and take a good hard look at the websites in the first few positions. How well optimized are they? What is their Google Page Rank (PR)? How many backlinks do they have? Who is linking to them?

Doing this analysis will give you a very clear picture of what you need to do to beat this competitor. In some cases you may find that the top competitors are huge multi million companies with many staff working on the website and in this case you may decide that this keyword phrase is too competitive and you may want to rethink your keywords. 

(7) Boost those Backlinks

Finally and most importantly you must continually build high quality backlinks to your website. This is one of the most important factors in getting a top ranking. You can do this by writing articles, submitting your site to directories, distributing press releases, posting in forums and making comments on blogs and websites. You can get a good idea of how many backlinks you need by comparing your website to your competitors’ websites. Use a backlink tool to compare the number of backlinks on your site to your competitors.

Read about more Ways to Improve Your Google Page Rank here.

If you would like to learn about these methods in more detail or find out even more ways to get a higher search engine ranking download my report 10 Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking.