Schewanick Computer Services

With all of the available money to be made, and all of the rags to riches stories floating around these days, the internet has become a very, very competitive place.

With this increased competition, it has become even more important to implement and execute well designed search engine optimization strategies in order to increase your search engine ranking and gain a competitive advantage over your competition.

Unfortunately, many internet marketers have a don't really have any sort of specific search engine optimization strategy, and most of the time they are a little unclear on exactly how they need to optimize their webpage in order to position their websites to get top rankings.

With that in mind, let's look at some of the specific things that you can do to properly optimize your webpage:

First of all, watch your code - One of the most common reasons for a poor search engine ranking is bad coding. So, before you go too far, be sure to run your website through an html validator such as the one found at http://validator.w3.org

Let's move on to some specific optimization notes for the top three search engines.

MSN:

-values content more than Google does, and it allows for more keyword density (the number of times a keyword shows up on a page) -keyword stuffing (repeating the same keyword over and over) will cause your site to be dropped immediately -Keyword anchor text - internal site links are important, so link extensively within your site using anchor text that relates to the theme of the page you are linking to -Meta tags are important -Keywords - put them in your title, meta tags, twice in your description tag and five times with high prominence in the body of your page. -keywords matter in your url, folders and page names



MSN will ban you if:

-you use loading pages with irrelevant words or keyword stuffing (especially in places where users won't usually see it - like in alt tags) -hidden text/links are used on your site -use techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page. Example - using link farms.

Notes on Yahoo and Google:

To get listed in Yahoo and Google, you will need to use all of the techniques listed above in the MSN section.

As for exactly how, where and when to use your keywords, you should check and see what is currently working for your competitors. Google and Yahoo aren't giving out their secrets, so it's best to see what is working for others and do what they do.

We do know, however, that both Google and Yahoo place a fairly high significance on the number and quality of websites linking to your site.

That being said, they also place some significance on any keywords used for the folders, page names and the url of your website.

Another interesting thing to keep in mind is that both Yahoo and Google have been influenced by Inktomi (as far as how they list and rank websites and the algorithms that they use) at one point or another, which stands to reason that if you optimize properly for Inktomi, you should see some improvements in your Yahoo and Google rankings.

With that in mind, here is a brief outline as to what Inktomi likes:

Title - you want to use up to ten words here, using as many variations of your keywords s possible while still producing a readable title

Meta Description - Use around twenty words, rephrasing the keywords used in the title. I don't really like to use spaces after the commas separating my keywords. There's just something about it that makes me a little uneasy.

I have heard of people having re-occurring nightmares of getting ranked for keywords that have a space before them, instead of the actual keyword (e.g. - " cats" instead of "cats").

Body - Go ahead and repeat your title in an h3 tag.

Bold the first sentence of your first paragraph. This increases visual appeal for your visitors, while at the same time indicating a certain amount of significance to the search engine spiders. Edit your description and use it here.

Put one keyword in the alt tag of each picture you have on the page.

Keep your page between 500 and 700 words

Have the final sentence of your page in bold, rephrasing the first sentence of your first paragraph.

If you find yourself pressed for time (and who isn't these days), instead of doing all of your research on the competition by hand, you could get a program like the new version of Seo Elite (http://www.newseoelite.com) and get it to do most of the research for you.

Also, if you have a lot of pages that you would like to optimize using the same keyword strategy, check out niche directory generator (http://www.nichedir ectorygenerator.com). Once you specify where you want your keywords to go and how the page is to be laid out, niche directory generator can automatically generate the optimized pages for you.

That's basically it. Do a little research as to what is currently working for your competitors and then optimize your pages using the points listed above and watch your website's search engine ranking soar dramatically.

About the author:

Tim Wright is an SEO Expert, and all of his secrets, tips and tricks are available in his free ebook "White Hat SEO Revealed", which can be downloaded from www.phase1.ws