Sunday, November 16, 2008

Improve Your Search Engine Rankings - You Can Do it Yourself

Whether you are a blogger or a web master, all of us wants our blog/site to be at the top of search engine rankings. We will do our best to get this done and are constantly in the process of achieving this goal. What should we do for this? Of course, hiring an SEO firm or a professional is a good option but many of us are limited to that option. The main problem is we are limited to our spending power. So what else can we do?

Well, there are some ways for us to improve the SEO rankings for our site or blog. We already have an article which tells you how to improve your SEO ranking through intelligent use of CSS styles. In this article we will see the top 10 tips to improve your SEO rankings, which you yourself can do and should do.

Bold is Gold: Whenever you include the keywords in your content use the tags around them. But take care not to use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is enough.

Linking, Linking Linking: The more links coming in to more pages in your blog/site, the more it is worth. Its tells a search engine that you have a lot of worthwhile content in your blog/site when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site. But if all the links are coming to your homepage, it tells that search engine that you a site/blog of little value and that your links are generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

Offer Newsletters: The links with ezine publishers stay alive in their archives for many years. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines.

Text Menus & Image Links: If you can't remove the image links in your navigation bar, make sure you include text links also and that the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page.

Multiple Domains: If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way.

Article Exchanges: You've heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. Get the permission and publish someone else's article on your site with a link back to their site or article. They publish your article on their site, with a link back to your site. This way both of you can have contents and will get legitimate links also.

Using Links? Title it: Use title for your links. This helps visually impaired surfers in a way that they will know where you are sending them. Some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Get a Site Map: A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar.

These are just some simple tips that you can do for search engine optimization by yourself. There are a hundred other things and more that you can and should do for good SEO. But these tips to improve SEO will help you to significantly improve the ratings of your site or blog.

More of these articles about SEO and web design are available at http://www.techflaps.com

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