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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.

Remember when working on your SEO that it pays to spend a good amount of time concentrating on your home page and researching the keywords for it. However, you shouldn’t stop there…

Here is my strategy for multiplying my traffic. I get so much more traffic from my sub pages than I do from my home page.

At least once per week I do the following:

(1) Choose a topic

(2) Research keywords for that topic. I am currently using Wordtracker to shortlist my keywords and the Google keyword tool to check the search volume.

(3) Find a good keyword phrase. I want something that has at least a couple of hundred searches a month, but not too much competition. The keyword needs to be less competitive than the one for my home page.

(4) Create a page about that topic and include the keywords in the filename, the <TITLE>, the <H1> tag, throughout the body, in the alt attributes and so on. If you don’t know how to create a new page on your site, a blog post will do. Put the keywords in the blog title and 2-3 times throughout the blog post. Monetize the page with a link or information about your product or service, or at least one affiliate program, or adsense, or a newsletter optin.

(5) Link to that page from at least one other place on your site e.g. home page, blog or menu. I usually link from the home page and one of my sub menus.

(6) Social bookmark the page.

(7) Write an article about that same topic, but make it different from the page that you added. I post my article using Submit Your Article with article leverage. In half the resource boxes I use only a deep link to this new page and in the other half I include both a link to my home page and a deep link. I put my keywords in the anchor text too.

(8) Repeat for a new page…

This technique works better than trying to squeeze lots and lots of keywords into your home page.

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.

You have probably already heard of reciprocal linking, where two websites link to each other for mutual benefit, but what about three way linking?

Three way linking can easily be explained in the example below:

 You have three websites - website A, website B and website C.

• Website A links to website B.
• Website B links to website C
• Website C links to website A

As you can see, there is no direct reciprocal link here. Each website is linking to another website, but getting a link back from a different website.

The reason for doing this is because reciprocal links can easily be detected by search engines as “unnatural” links, therefore you won’t get as much benefit from a reciprocal link as you will from a one way link. Doing a three way link exchange makes this look more natural as site A is linking to site B, but getting a link back from site C.

If you decide to use three way linking as a strategy for link building I would recommend only linking to websites that are related to your own website and ensuring that your backlink is coming from a site that is also related. By related, I mean the same theme. So don’t link your home business website to someone’s dieting website.

How do you set up a three way link?

It is easy to set up a three way link if you already have two or more related websites of your own. You can email a webmaster and propose a 3 way link exchange. The disadvantage of this is that it is a manual process and it can be difficult to keep track of your links and be sure that the other webmaster has kept his or her link to your website in place.

Another strategy is to use a three way linking service such as 3 Way Links. This service allows you to automatically set up three way links with other websites. All websites are manually reviewed so you don’t need to worry about linking to bad neighborhoods.

Three way linking is definitely a strategy that you should consider using as part of your overall linking campaign along with other methods such as article distribution, forum posting, directory submission and press releases.

Visit 3 Way Links for more information.

Many people want to know “how do I submit my site to a search engine?” and some people even go on to purchase services which will submit their website to a search engine on a monthly basis (for a monthly fee of course). If you are one of these people I have three words for you…. “Don’t do it!”.

Read on and learn a little bit more about the search engines and how they work before going off and paying for some search engine submission service that will probably do absolutely nothing for you apart from cost you money.

 First of all, the main search engines are:

• Google (approx 47% of the searches)
• Yahoo (approx 13% of the searches)
• MSN (approx 9% of the searches)

None of these search engines require you to submit your website to them.

Why not…? The reason is that these search engines find websites by themselves without the need for anyone to submit them. All of these search engines have software programs known as “spiders” which basically go and visit  (crawl) different websites on the internet, following links on each of these website, which lead to other websites, which lead to more websites and so on.

All you need to do to get your website indexed by a search engine is to get some backlinks to your website. A backlink is simply a live link from one website to your website. There are many easy ways to do this including distributing articles with your resource box in them containing a link to your site, submitting your site to online directories, exchanging links with other websites, distributing an online press release and more.

Once you have been indexed by a search engine there is absolutely no need to submit your website to them once, never mind every single month. Submitting your site to search engines won’t do you any harm (apart from wasting your time or money), but it is not going to do you any good either.

So if you have already started a search engine submission campaign I recommend that you stop immediately and spend your time or money on building good quality backlinks to your website instead.

I hope that answers the common question of “how do I submit my site to a search engine”. The short answer is, “you don’t”.

However, submitting your site to manually edited link directories such as Yahoo Dir and Dmoz is a completely different thing. This will benefit your site and it is a worthwhile exercise.

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.