Thursday, January 15, 2009

SEO What you control

By Brent Sweet

There really are many ways to get to the top of the search engines. Honestly it is a lot easier that one would think. You would be amazed at how many sites are there because they are lucky, and how few sites are there because they are seriously working to improve SEO. I have designed this article to give you some things you can do to directly impact your rankings.

First of all I want to say there are many things you can do, that are completely within your control to move yourself up. If anybody here has ever studied six sigma or anything like that you will know that you really only need to focus on things in your control. It is ultimately a waste of time to focus on things out of your control.

So what is in your control?

- The title tag is the first thing. It influences your rankings more than anything. I like to pick 5 phrases that I want to rank for then arrange the words in a way that makes sense, doesn't repeat and is less than 9 words.

- The text in your body. Use each phrase that you want to rank for in the body. I don't really care if it is in H1 tags or in Bold. I don't think those carry that much weight. When you want to get from position 2 to 1, maybe, but bold and h1 is not the difference between the 100th position and the first page.

- The actual filenames on your site. Don't put a session id or other things on your URLS, this makes the search engines not be able to find pages that were there before.

- The links to your site. Yes you have control over how people link to you. One way is to create or buy link bait. This is something that people will want to link to. Can be like a top 10 list. Real creative things get more links. I am not creative so I submit articles. This way I have full control over how people link to me and I get a lot of free one way links.

There you go, 4 things in your control. If you want to improve your rankings, work on these 4 things always. They are how you get to the top and what is in your control.

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