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Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then no-one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of links. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine listings.

Although no SEO company can guarantee a high ranking for your site, here are some tips for raising your search engine ranking. Using these tips will not get you to the top unless your site is the best out there, but they will at least put you into the positioning that you truly deserve. After all, the internet is basically a free market. You will naturally flow into the place that you deserve and many search engines try to insure that you do not rise above or fall below this position. This is why they are so strict, and this is why you must keep yourself on good terms with them.

1) Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. It’s also worth doing a search for websites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. The more content you have the better. It is generally a good idea to have between three hundred and five hundred words per page, but more important than a quantity of content is the quality of the content that you are providing. You cannot just put out three hundred words of jargon and expect your visitors to find it interesting and stick around for the long haul.

2) Your website’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings ? you need to do more than just that.

3) Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you do use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. The alt tags in your pictures are almost as important as text. It’s also a good idea to put some of your key words in links to other pages. In the eyes of a search engine it is almost as good to have a link to a page full of the content that the visitor is looking for as it is to have the content that the visitor is looking for on your page. If a visitor is looking for something that you are linking to and he or she finds your page, they may look around your site on the way through.

4) The title of your page is very important, and making sure that you choose it wisely will make a big difference. Terms such ‘free article on safe children’s toys’, or ‘contact the children’s toy expert today’ are good to use as titles, for example ? they would get you a high ranking. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you put them all in.

5) The navigation menu that appears on each page of your website should include your page’s title.

6) Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases ? the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too.

7) Make sure that you don’t have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely related to your site your links are, the better your chances of being ranked in a higher position.

You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if it’s only a slight change, as websites like sites that are kept updated.

9) You need to consider the fact most search engines don’t like automatic submissions or multiple submissions ? submit once, manually.

10) Always be on the look out for SEO news ? staying up to date and using the latest techniques will help you stay one step ahead of your competition.

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Anyone that deals with marketing and advertising on the Internet knows that link popularity is one of the main causes for high rankings. And as we all know, high rankings lead to more traffic, which in turn leads to higher sales. The biggest problem with doing link exchanges and using programs that automate the process is that you run the risk of gaining bad links on your site. Bad links lead to reduced link popularity and in turn can eventually lead to being banned on search engines. Everyone can agree that if you are banned from a large search engine like Google or Yahoo, then your website is in trouble. I have come across a few places that allow you to grad good reciprocal links from ranking sites. You want to do more reciprocal linking because it provides an incentive for both sites to keep the links up.

If you already have a large link directory on your site, you might want to think about using the program Arelis. This gives you the power to control all your links and make sure they are still linking back to you. It also gives you the control to find more targeted links for your website. If you want to find more links for your website, then you should check out www.Link2me.com. This site allows you to search for websites and then the company gets in touch with that website asking for a link exchange with you. It is very easy and hassle free, which I know will help everyone that is spending 60+ hours on Internet marketing. Any little bit helps. This link exchange program is growing and with the more websites that sign up, which is free, the more potential links for the members. Check it out and increase your link popularity the ethical way!

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It is more than a year now since I concluded that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was, or was soon going to become, a waste of time. I had already, 6 months before then, said farewell to spending an hour a day working on getting reciprocal links.

What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very rash moves? After all, reciprocal linking was still being expounded, by all and sundry, as an essential way to get a good ranking, and the software tools were being actively marketed still. Search engine positioning software was still being heavily marketed and is still today; keyword density was a buzz term being branded around as if it were an essential science to be practised by all good SEO conscious webmasters.

What I did was to go back to marketing basics. I had received my marketing training back in the 1980′s and had practical marketing experience with my own business from the mid 1990′s. I was not born into internet marketing alone, so could still see outside the blinkers and the hype.

A very basic but important aspect of marketing is to know your market place. When it comes to search engine rankings, then clearly a major part of that market was the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, with Google being the clear leader then, and a year later today.

I started to think 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal linking went, it was becoming a spammers’ zone. Surely, I argued with myself, Google did not really want to rank a web site highly just because the web master had the tools and the time to chase around getting reciprocal links? It just did not make sense. And the same was true of buying links. Why should a web site rank highly because they have splashed out on buying links?

What Google, and the others, really wanted was to rank the best web sites for a particular search term, and it seemed only a matter of time before they sniffed out and extinguished the abuses such as blatantly artificial link building, Blog spam, scraping and extreme SEO’ing.

A year ago, I started two new web sites without any real thought of SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to provide what search engines wanted: original content on what people were searching for. While I did provide title and description tags, everything else was just written on a go with the flow basis. The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural flow. I could just write to my heart’s content without using any tools checking keyword density.

The first of those new web sites 13 months ago was in the self improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I was expecting to be “Sandboxed” by Google because of that, and so it proved. But I just kept plugging away, sticking to my no-SEO principle. Of course, none of us outside Google knows for sure if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is undoubtedly a waiting time before a new site is thrown fully into the ranking melting pot.

In the self improvement case, the last Google update saw my site emerge from the sandbox after about 12 months. So, at last, I was able see whether my no SEO approach was to yield any positive results. Thankfully, a few high rankings were immediately apparent, including a few #1 positions. On one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the #1 position, while the site was #2 (now 1) at MSN.

Now, this is early days for that particular site, and there is much to do to get more high rankings. However, I am confident that SEO is infinitely more simple than some experts, especially those selling ranking tools, tend to have you believe.

Since I started that particular site, I have only made one major change, and that is convert all my web sites to CSS. Providing a content rich site that is easy to crawl for search engine robots is the most important aspect of the new, simplified SEO. In fact, following Google’s advice to webmasters is about all you need to do, and that is free.

Of course, those with software products to peddle will argue that I could do even better with their software. But if Google decides to blacklist that software as a manipulating tool, then all my hard work could be undone. So I will leave the others to chase shadows with ranking software, and just enjoy writing content. After all, that is what basic marketing told me to do.

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