5 Steps to Search Engine Success

1. Title Tags

The single most important “on page?factor affecting search engine rankings is the title tag. This is a snippet of code in the header section of a web document. The title of a web page is given great weight by the search engines, and for lesser competitive keyphrases a good title tag alone may be enough to catapult a page to the top of the engines.

2. Rich Content

If you are not including keyphrase rich content on each page of your website, you again face a risk of having your pages thrown into the supplementals, or having your pages outright rank poorly for your target keyphrases. Be sure to include at least one instance of the keyphrase you are targeting for that page in the body text of the page.

3. Blog

Your competition is blogging, so it’s time you jump on the bandwagon. There are a number of reasons to blog that directly relate to search engine considerations. Google and other engines generally prefer sites with fresh content over stale sites. This means that ranking well involves the regular creation of rich content, and typically this is done via a company weblog.

4. Link Bait

Generally speaking, the more links you have to rich content on your site, the better off you are going to be in the engines. The creation of a blog is a wonderful way to attract links. Other ideas for link bait include video, images, sound clips, press releases and the like. Contests, quizzes, product reviews, top 10 lists (or in the case of this article, a top 5 list), and how to articles fare very well. Also, the provision of useful tools can be a great way to attract links.

5. Social Media

Now that you have created all this wonderful link bait in the form of blogs, videos, tools, and the like, you need to make sure to get the word out about it so that people know it is there. Social media has already become one of the most powerful ways to spread the word. Social media is loosely defined as any sort of user driven content. Famous examples include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia, and the like.

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