The Key To Getting Good Search Rankings - Part 2

In part 1 of The Key To Getting Good Search Rankings we went over the specifics of the various “types” of phrases, and quickly discussed how you can optimize for each of them. Today we’re going to look at some examples of good search engine optimization.

Title Tag/Header Tags

As I have said before, the title tag is absolutely vital to getting a highly ranked page. The most important thing is to make your titles really keyword rich, and to avoid using common words like “and,” “or” and “but” as much as possible. Here are some examples of good page titles.

“How To Shave Your Beard”
“Why Buy Sparkling Mineral Water?”
“How To Install Java On Apple Mac OS X”
“Tire Removal 101″
“The Key To Getting Good Search Rankings”

As you can see all of the titles use good phrases, they are keyword rich, they don’t have too many common words, and more importantly, they are specific.

Your header tags, like H1 or H2, should be the same as your title. In the case of a blog, the post’s title should be in enclosed in H1 or H2 tags.

Content

Throughout your content you should write your target phrase at least one time per paragraph, assuming your paragraphs are at least 5 lines. If you write shorter paragraphs like me you shouldn’t use it as much or you could get punished for spam. Here is a quick example of two paragraphs that would rank highly.

Many brands of sparking mineral water are nothing more than tap. Many of themsell for more than $10 a bottle. But if you act now, you can get the Sample Brand Mineral Water for a mere $5 a bottle!

If you act not we will give you an additional 1 2 3 bottles of Sample Brand Mineral Water for free. Our water is from the flowing mountain waters of Colorado. Every drop is carefully chosen for its clarity and taste, so you only get the best tasting water in the universe. Act now and save big $$$.

Those paragraphs would rank highly because they are keyword rich. They both contain the brand name, good keywords, and a lot of the text is bold.

HTML Correctness

One often overlooked part of SEO is how your pages are formatted. If your HTML code contains errors, the search engines may not be able to parse your page correctly. Always remember, the HTML documents should look like some LIFO format. LIFO is “last in first out”, which means the last object to be put in is the first out out. With HTML the last tag you open must be the first one you close, until you reach the final tag.

To make sure your HTML documents are formatted correctly, why not try the W3C validator?

Alt and Title Attributes

Whenever you post a link or an image, make sure you use the alt or the title attributes. Many search engines read in that text and use it for search engine placement.

Get Rid Of Duplicate Content

If you use blogging software like WordPress you probably have a bunch of duplicate content. Luckily this is pretty easy to get rid of. Below is the robots.txt file I use for this site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */category/*

This will keep the SEs from indexing the /feed/ /trackback/ and /category/ directories used by WordPress, which is where most duplicate content occurs.

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