What does it take to get top 10 search engine placement? Well, to put it bluntly, it takes a combination of having the knowledge to do what needs to be done to properly optimize a website and a lot of hard, diligent work to promote your website in the search engines.
First, let’s discuss what needs to be done. You can find this same basic information in many places on the internet and it is pretty consistent no matter what source you find:
- understand your keyword strategy – The first thing you need to decide is what are the targeted keyword phrases that you want to optimize for your website? If you cannot answer this question, you will have a very difficult time getting top 10 search engine placement. This is the first step in optimizing any website or blog because everything else is built off the keyword phrases you decide to target. Selecting your keywords is the natural progression of everything else that follows to get the page ranking you desire. After you have selected the keywords, you will be able to initiate a promotion program that targets the phrases you want to use. The promotion includes writing your content for your blog, optimizing your pages, defining your meta tags, using anchor tags and much more. Without a good understanding of your targeted keywords – based on a thorough research of competitive keywords – you will have a very difficult time getting top 10 search engine placement. For keyword research, I prefer two different tools, Market Samurai.
- strong SEO optimization – There are just some basic things that you need to do for every page on your website or every post on your blog. These include making sure the meta tags (title, description and keywords) are used correctly, that you properly use header tags, and the content you write is keyword relevant, meaning that the page content matches the meta tags and headers. They all have to work in unison and all should be optimized for every page on your website. This sounds so simple, but it’s hard to believe how many websites I see that do not follow these basic SEO principles.
- don’t forget about off page optimization – It’s not enough to just optimize on page, you need to be very diligent about developing back links to your website. There are several ways to do this including submitting articles or submitting to social bookmarking websites. You can post to forums and other directories using your keyword as the anchor text, which is very important, because in effect you the anchor tags you use tell the search engines what you think are the most important keyword for your site.
- know your competition – Study what your competition is doing – what keywords they are using, how they are optimizing their pages, where they are generating their back links, etc. If you don’t have the proper tools, this will almost be impossible to do. We recommend Market Samurai which is an integrated suite of search engine optimization tools that will provide you with a wealth of information and will greatly help you analyze your competition in a quick and efficient manner.
It is not impossible to get top 10 search engine placement for your targeted keywords if you follow this process above. Search engine optimization is not difficult unless you don’t understand the process. Once you do understand the process, and follow it on a consistent and diligent basis, you will find that you will be able to get top 10 search engine placement faster than you might expect.
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