Link Exchange

Search Engines analyze how pages link to each other to determine what your site is about and whether it is "important" and thus deserves a rank boost. You can significantly increase your chances of being listed higher in the search engine's index if you have other relevant web sites link to you. One way to go about getting good links is to search for your target keywords at major search engines. Visit the sites that appear in the top results and ask the webmaster if they are interested in exchanging links with you, for more information also see our tutorial on link building.

Naturally, not everybody will be keen on exchanging links with you, especially if your site is deemed too competitive to theirs and has a lower page rank. But you sure will find other complementary sites that are more than happy to partner with your site. Having said that, you can also trade links with casinomadness.de! We will evaluate your site as soon as we can and get back to you if we feel that your site provides content that is complimentary to ours.

Create HTML links

Often webmaster don't pay enough attention to how their home page is linked to the rest of the pages. Make sure you add hyperlinks that lead to major inside pages of your web site, so search engines can follow them. You can put them down at the bottom of your page. You also may want to create a site map page with text links to every page within your web site. By submitting this page you will help search engines to locate pages within your web site more easily.

Another great way to make the search engine's job easier is to link internally between your web pages in a naturally manner. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the search results, we recommend reviewing Google's webmaster guidelines.

Use an appropriate anchor text!

Let's assume a link to your site is called "Free Widgets", then many SE's will show your site in the search results for "Free Widgets", even if these words do not exist anywhere on your site! The text used to describe a link can help with search engine ranking. If that text contains a targeted keyword, then the search engines will assign more importance to that link or see it being more pertinent.

Example: compare and buy cheap red widgest at www.cheap-red-widgets.com is a small business site. Instead of having the link look like "widgets", you want to use an important keyword phrase and make your link look like "cheap red widgets resources" or something similar. They would both have the same URL, but the description determines how the search engine is going to view and index it. For more information on how to use links more effectively to your advantage there is also a link building tutorial.

The <Title> Tag

Whatever text you put in between the title portions <TITLE> and </TITLE> of the title tag will show up in the top bar of the browser. For instance, for this page we placed the following text within the title tag:

"Affiliate sites marketing tips - search engine optimization SEO"

As you can see in the picture, this is exactly what appears in the browser's title bar. You will also have noticed that some browsers supplement your title by adding their own name, in this case "Mozilla Firefox". This is just what they do.

You probably wondered what this has to do with SEO. As briefly mentioned at the beginning, the text in your title tag is one major factor when it comes to deciding how your page should be ranked by the search engine. All major crawlers will somehow incorporate your title tag text in the title of your page when displaying it in the search results.

For example, this is what our page looks on Yahoo:

You can see that the title text of this page is used as the hyperlinked title of our page when displayed in the search results.

The title tag is also used for the description when adding someones page to your "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" list. For example, if you bookmarked this page in Firefox it would look like this:

Did you notice the little dollar sign logo next to the bookmark? Having a little logo like this, also called favicon, appear next to your URL and in the "Favorites" menu is a great way to make your web site stand out from the rest. It's surprisingly simple to add one of these small favicons to all of your pages. The easiest way to do this is to create an image 16x16 pixels in size and save it as "favicon.ico" to your root directory. Most modern browsers will be able to locate the file and display it correctly. That's it.

When choosing your title just think about the key words you would like your page to be assocciated with. Try to incorporate as many of them into your title tag keeping the tag itself as short and descriptive as possible at the same time.

NOTE:

• Don't use keywords repeatedly, as their density does not matter in the title tag and you would only be wasting valuable space that could be used to fit in more key words otherwise.

  The amount of characters that will be displayed in the search results is limited, ranging from 66 character title tags in Google to 120 characters in Yahoo. For best results your strategy should be to create long titles that work for Google and Yahoo, equally.

  In order to cater for the majority of search engines the optimal lenght of your title tag should be thought of as consisting of a main section (for Google) and a secondary section for Yahoo. Make sure your main title section is limited to 66 characters and contains all major key word phrases you definately want to be found for. Your secondary title section can be up to 120 characters long and might contain additional key phrases that are indeed important, but compared to the first 66 characters only play a secondary role. They supplement the title tag and increase you chances of better rankings in those search engines that do support more characters in the title tag.

• Keywords in the title tag are not case sensitive, so you can write your title in a way that you think is most appealing!
• A title tag of about 90 charachters is sufficient, Google does not read beyond that amount of charachters in your title tag.
• Avoid using the same title tag throughout your site. Try to come up with a descriptive title that makes logical sense and is unique to that particular page! If you individualize your titles you get to leverage more keyword phrases!

Naming your URL Correctly

One of the most overlooked ways in which you can optimize your web page is to choose a meaningful name for your URL! In addition to the domain name you choose to host your web site, the name of your individual pages can have a big impact on how people will find your site.

What is a URL

URL stands for Universal Resource Locator and is basically the name of your web page that appears in the browser's address bar. They are used by search engines as an identifier of your page and are stored in their index as one of the many ways to determine what a web site is all about.

Reflect your keywords in your URL

Using keywords in your page's file name can boost your earch engine ranking, but make sure to reflect the overall theme of your page. It is important to consider keyword phrases used throughout your page (body, title tag and so forth) when naming your file to reinforce its relevance. This will keep the importance of your keywords from diminishing as they won't have to share significance with other, less important words. Simply add in the keywords your page is focused on and you are good to go. Make sure you use hyphens or dashes to seperate the keyword phrases, as search engines might have problems reading them otherwise. A bunch of keywords just put together without a semantical differentiation looks to SE's like one big word with no meaning.

Example:

Not so good: searchengineoptimazition.php OR affiliateprogramsreview.php

Much better: search-engine-optimazation.php OR affiliate-programs-review.php

You can see the difference, even we humans would have problems reading the first line. By saving your document to a page that has meaning to its name you also will still know what the page is about in years to come.

Keyword Duplication

Using key words in your domain names, folder/file names and anchor texts can certainly improve how you rank, but the precise measure is the boundary between doing well and doing badly in the search engine's results.

Lets assume you are optimizing for the keyword "money", which is a frequently used key word that yields more than one million results on Google. With a competition that fierce it might seem like a good idea to get a domain name such as

www.money-cash-dollar-bucks-coin-capital-banknote.com/earn-money-make-cash.html
(its an exaggeration and I am not saying any of you would go over top like that, but I think you get my point).

It's safe to say that this domain name is undoubtedly packed with keywords to the maximum, which won't necessarily help you in topping the search results if the content does not corrospond to the plentitude of synonyms of the word "money" contained in your address. Also, this name is very difficult to remember and most people would just give up if they had to type it manually.

It's though that Google, for instance does not tolerate duplicate keyword phraseology in a single URL. If you use them excessively in your URL the page will be ignored by the search engine. It can not be reinstated unless the duplication is corrected.

META TAGS

Meta tags in web pages are often used by search engines as an additional source of information to help them to decide how to list and class your web site. They are not always required and relevance of some of them has been downgraded in many search engines, but it does not hurt to take advantage of them either. Meta tags must be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

The <LANGUAGE> Meta tag

The Language Meta Tag defines the language used on your web page and is utilized by regional search engines, which index web sites based on language.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" content="EN,DE">

You may want to use this tag if your web site is not english or multi lingual to indicate to search engines that your site uses more than just the english language. You can define multiple languages by using a comma delimited list. The first language is your primary language.

The <Description> Meta Tag

The Description Meta Tag allows you to influence the way your web site is displayed in the search results. The text placed in this tag appears just below the hyperlinked title as brief description of your page. Some search engines will make use of this tag while others may either support it partially or ignore it completely and produce their own description of your page. By and large this tag enjoys much support and it's well worth using it. As in the case of the title tag, try to iclude the same keyword phrases that you've used in your page's title and body text.

<meta name="description" content="Your text here!">

This tag should not read like a random collection of words, but should be a brief, informative summary of your page. Try to place the most important keywords at the beginning of your Description Meta Tag to increase your chances of better SE rankings.

The <Keywords> Meta Tag

The purpose of this tag is to provide the spider with keywords that underpin the content of your document. It's thought that due to extreme misuse of this tag support has been restricted or discontinued by some search engines, though. Nevertheless, since it is still used by a number of search engines it does not hurt to take advantage of this feature. META tags are your friends and you can never go wrong by using them. When it comes to SEO every tiny edge you can get counts and should not be ignored. You never know! Including the keyword meta tag could be the contributing factor and might be all that was needed to get your page ranked higher. When using this tag it can be a good idea to account for misspellings and upper and lower case as well as plural keywords. It does not look like much, but the difference between a search for "little green widget" and "little green widgets" is like night and day. Just try to put yourself in other people's shoes how they might search for a certain topic. Google released a tool that helps to determine which alternative is more popular.

<meta name="Keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 etc.">

Ensure that the same keywords you use are all included in the title, description as well as in the content of your page. Do NOT add extra words other than these as this will defeat the purpose of this tag and water down the theme of your page. The order of your key words also plays a role, the 1st word being the most important. Keyworddiscovery.com offers a keyword research and search term suggestion tool, that can be crucial in identifying what search phrases people use to find products and services, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to your competitors.

NOTE: Words that appear in the keyword Meta tag, but not in the content of your page, might get ignored or even be a reason for a possible spamming penalty. So, just to be on the safe site only include keywords that also appear within your content!

Summary - Last Words

Finally, to search engines it makes no difference at all whether a site has been over optimized by design to cheat them or if over optimization is just the result of good intentions gone wrong!

Always try to keep to reasonable practises and do not overstep the line. Having unique and interesting content is and always will be the most important criteria when it comes to ranking high in the search engine's results. This should also be your directive! If your web site is interesting enough people will automatically find you one way or the other. It certainly helps to optimize your site and should be an important part of your work, but not be seen as THE most important task. At the end of the day, your main goal should be to deliver quality content and satisfy your audience.

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