Improve your website ranking, by employing even some of these SEO tips you will be able to achieve a lot more from your website, these tips and tricks will show you how to evaluate the competition for any topic you have chosen whether you are updating an existing site, building a new site and even if you are in the planning stage of your website or blog.  A good SEO plan can help your site to rank higher in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, bringing more traffic to your site that would not be possible from other methods of promotion such as social networking, word of mouth and other real world promotion techniques.

SEO is not as difficult as you might assume and these quick SEO tips are easy to employ for both your on-site (on-page) search engine optimization and offsite optimization.

The process of search engine positioning is based on the different search engines individual algorithms, in particular Googles search engine.  Although the exact algorithm is not revealed to webmasters, over time many have found successful methods that can be used to boost website rankings, these SEO tips will help you to improve your website or blog by making it more search engine friendly while remaining a useful resource to your visitors.

SEO Tips for Evaluating Your Competition:

There are many different terms, which you can use to give you a little insight into any sites that are already ranking in the top page of Google for your keyword.  You can use these search types to find the information for any website, including your own, which can come in useful when keeping track of your own SEO progress.

If you want to find out what websites are in the index that include all your keywords in the page title simply type “allintitle:your keyword here” without the quotes, the results should return the top ten websites that include all of the words in your keyword or key phrase.

To find the websites that include your exact keyword, in the correct order, in the title, type in “intitle:your keyword here” (without quotes) these results should return all the websites that use the exact keyword as you have typed it, in the correct order.

If you want to find all the websites with your keyword in their URL, type “inurl:” without the quotes

If you want to find out which pages are linking to sites using your keywords as anchor text, type “inanchor:your keyword”

To find out what sites are linking to a specific site you can search with “link:http://website.com” to find out which sites are linking in.

To find out which sites are linking into an entire domain and sub domains type “linkdomain:http://insert-website-here.com”

The above are useful ways to find out a little about the competition level of a keyword before you decide to target that particular keyword, however you must remember that will all SEO techniques and all statistics provided by any source that there can be errors and miscalculations, ensure that you do in depth research for any project you undertake.

There are many other methods that can be used to find out more information about your competition.  Some people will look at the volume of results returned and will target keywords that have fewer results, although this is not an accurate way to judge competition as search engines will return many results that are not even targeting your keyword but simply mention it somewhere in the content, making the volume of competing sites seem much higher than it actually is.

You may also want to check the page rank of the sites ranking on the first page for your search term, there is much debate about the use of page rank in SEO and many people dismiss PR completely while others use it as a basis for their SEO plan.

SEO Tip – Site age, in general it is worthwhile checking the age of the sites listed in the results for your keyword, as a rule most sites that are a few years old are harder to beat than newer sites, this is because google views these sites as having some authority, mainly because they are still around and ranked when many websites fail to make it past the first year.  For this reason if you are considering hosting your own website, register your domain for more than one year to gain a little more trust from google.

SEO Tips for Content Creation – On-page SEO

There is always much discussion about keyword density and keyword stuffing, however you do not need to worry about any of these if you follow some simple guidelines when writing your content.

Firstly, you should always know what keyword you are targeting; you will then use that keyword in your post or page title.  The best practice is to use it once in the first paragraph of your content and again in the last paragraph.  You keyword can be used elsewhere in your content where it would naturally occur.  When writing focused content it would difficult to exclude your keyword from the body of text, you do not need to add it on every line for effective SEO, it can be used as appropriate but you should also include other terms that are closely related to your main keyword, this is a good way to gain addition traffic from variations of your keyword.

Your keyword should be used as a tag, if you have a blog, or in your Meta keywords in the html of a site.  Whichever you have you should insure that if you use a term as a tag, that term should be included in the content and vise –versa.

Using emphasis and bold.  It is thought that search engines place importance on terms in your content that are formatted, such as making a word bold, you should do this once with your main keyword, you do not need to bold every appearance of your keyword but it should be included once.

Using Header tags, there is often confusion about where to use header tags in content, if your site title is your H1 tag and your post title or page title is the H2 tag then you can use H3 and below in your content.  The use of heading tags will help to define your content as well as giving you the opportunity to add your keyword again.

SEO Tips – Relevancy and Linking in Content

As with header tags and using bold, links in your content will also stand out to search engine spiders.  It is good practice to link to other pages in your site in your content, with relevant anchor text, not only does this emphasize some of your keywords in the link itself it also passes a small amount of authority to the page you are linking to.  The more relevant the better, group similar pages together by adding keyword relevant links in content to your other pages.  Many people make the mistake of using terms such as “click here” or “read more” as the anchor text in their links, for SEO purposes use keywords.

Add Tags and Categories in Your Blog

If you have a blog you should always use your keywords as post tags (only if they are mentioned in your content) this helps your content to get indexed not only for the post itself but for your tag pages too and using a tag cloud adds more keywords to you blogs sidebar.  It also helps to group your content together making it more user and spider friendly.

Tip – If you are using wordpress, install and activate the all in one SEO pack.

Images – use your keywords in your alt image tags, you may also want to rename your image files with your keywords.

As far as on-page SEO is concerned if you follow the above SEO tips your site and contents stand a much better chance of being ranked for the terms you hope to rank for.  If you keep these in mind when creating your site and content there is little else you will need to do.  Much of search engine optimization is performed off site.

SEO tips – Off site SEO

The process of promoting your site largely consists of what you do outside of your blog.  A well optimized site will help search engines to determine which search terms you want your site to be listed for, but off-site promotion will tell them how relevant your site is to those queries and how high up you should be ranked.

This part of the process can take the longest to see results and needs to be done carefully, there are many different methods to improve your sites popularity online but the biggest factor is link building.  To promote your site effectively and successfully you need to develop a link-building plan.  This is where many website owners fail.  They are unsure of how to go about building links, where they should be aiming to get links from, how often they should add links and what types of links will work best.

You can search online for many link building resources and you will find many lists of directories to submit your site to, search engine submission advice and link exchanges, but what is important in link building that many people fail to realize it that although quantity will help you to rank, if your links are not coming from the right sources you may have to chase hundreds of these types of links to achieve small successes.  If you point too many links to your site too quickly you could end up being penalized for spamming and if you do not point enough, your site may never be found.

Quality links will pass much more authority to your site that forum posting and commenting on bogs, which is not only spammy but also very time consuming.  Link exchanges are ok as part of your plan but are not very effective without other types of links to back them up.  A lot of webmasters tend to stick to one type of link building technique and wonder why their ranking does not improve greatly.

Many people choose to employ an SEO firm to do their link building but for a lot of people this is far too expensive an option and while it may work for a large business it is not necessary for most website owners.  SEO can be learned and with experience, can be a very effective way of ranking your site high in the search engines.

If you are struggling to get your site noticed by search engines there are still options available to you. Most people however give up when they do not see the results they wanted.  It is not an easy process to learn and at times can be frustrating especially since many sites will offer very different advice on how to proceed.  It is worthwhile to consider joining a paid membership site that will teach you the methods of offsite SEO such as the keyword academy, which has a good reputation and offers many benefits to help you achieve success.  The trial period for one months membership is $1 (you can cancel at anytime) and you can have full access to all the information on the site, including step by step video tutorials which will explain the process of building a profitable site from start to finish, as well as a members forum where you can get help on all aspects of building sites and SEO.

If you have found these SEO tips useful please consider linking to us or feel free to leave feedback in the comment section.  For information on how search engines work, see Search engine positioning