Strategies for Success

SEO and Quality Guidelines

SEO alone will not gain you the high page rank that you desire. Another requirement is that your website meets certain quality guidelines in order to be placed high in the search engine results pages. In fact, if you use certain "black hat" techniques, you may not be listed in the search engines at all; so clearly, it is a better idea to follow quality guidelines than to try to "fake out" web spiders and robots which crawl the web, indexing websites for the search engines.

Each web page on your SEO-friendly website must contain relevant information created for humans. The content must be meaningful and useful. As technology evolves, search engines are becoming increasingly adept at differentiating between original quality content and duplicated or automatically-generated content. Make your website unique, informative, easy to navigate, and easy for the web spiders and robots to index. Use text navigation links and place a text site map on your website so that pages are linked using text anchors which contain keywords included in your SEO plan.

Creating SEO Keyword-Rich Website Content

In order to properly develop a website that is search engine friendly, you'll want to use SEO guidelines which place keywords in the most beneficial places in your website content.

Your main page, the landing page of the site, should focus on a keyword or keyword phrase that is broader than each of the content pages residing deeper in the website. You'll want to follow the most recent W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) guidelines (www.w3.org). Your landing page should have a title tag with on or two of your most important keywords. It should also have a meta keyword tag containing the keywords around which you are optimizing your webpage. A meta description tag should also be included, accurately describing what visitors to your site will encounter. Choose the wording of your meta tags carefully, avoiding stop words such as "and", "a", and "the". You can find a complete list of stop words at the W3C website noted above.

Begin your body text by using the exact keyword or keyword phrases within the first 96 characters of the text; ideally, begin the first sentence with the keyword phrase. Use the exact keyword phrase in one or more of the middle paragraphs and use it again in the final paragraph. It is important that the text read correctly with the keyword phrase in place. Because web 'bots and spiders do not read punctuation, you can parse the words across two sentences if you wish. For example, if your keyword phrase is "dog training large breed", your text might read: "This report includes all the help you need for your dog training. Large breed dogs can be trained using the same techniques as small breeds."

Also, incorporate into your website text other keywords that pertain to your main keyword phrase, synonyms for your keywords. Similar words for "dog", such as canine, pet, puppy, or even opposite words (antonyms) can help you build rankings. It also helps to use your keyword or keyword phrase as subheadings or other places where it is logical to use bold or italics.

Each subordinate page in your website should focus on a more specific keyword or keyword phrase that is related to your main keyword and main landing page. In the example about dog training, there might be a subordinate page which addresses traits of specific breeds of dogs, using those dog breed names as the keyword phrase or part of the phrase.