Thursday, May 21, 2009

Marketing Tips to Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly

There are a few things to you should keep in mind when creating content for your website or membership site. I've listed 7 search engine friendly tips that will help you rank well and steer clear of problems you don't need.

You've probably heard a few of them before, and I'll put them together for you to help you remember them ok?

1. First of all, we know we should use unique content wherever it's possible. You can find a great deal of content by searching and affordable PLR or low/no cost reprints too. To the search engines, unique content is at least 30% rewritten or different than any other webpage on the internet.

If you need ideas for unique content, you can get on some mailing lists, newsletters, and research topics that interest you. Compare products, ideas, and research results, review products or endorse people you like. Another casual rule is to write 70% of an article you're referring to about a particular subject.

You may want to stay with topics that are current, so it is beneficial to browse some of the bookmarking sites and social sites for new ideas. A people friendly site is not restricted to business ideas, but fresh new topics are of interest and work like "hotcakes." I like to add a little humor where its appropriate or a viewpoint that's not ordinary. Everyone has their own experiences and that's what makes them the unique person that they are, so information sharing is all the more interesting when we discuss and review them.

2. Add New Content Regularly

To maintain a high page rank with the search engines, and a quality membership site, webmasters need to regularly add new content to their websites. The freshness of a newly written blog is a desirable thing. Blogs are a great way to add content on a regular basis. Inviting comments is also a good way to increase your ranking, and at the same time may give you new ideas for follow up blog posts.

3. Keyword Use

Remember to select specific keyword phrases that are relevant to the webpage you are optimizing rather than general terms. Being more specific will get you more targeted traffic to your site, and if you're general with your terms, the competition is so great that you may not be selected in the top ranking sites for those.

Specific keyword phrases will also help you to get more targeted traffic and a higher page ranking for these phrases. Choose "long tailed" keywords or phrases so as to narrow the idea or communicate better to the reader what to grasp.

Look at what the competition is doing also. Check out at least the top ten results for your keyword phrases on various search engines. Look at the description and meta tags on your competitors pages to get some ideas.

Don't use too many keywords though. Optimal keyword density is not clear, but many recommend aiming for 3% and 7% to get the most traffic without being penalized by the search engines. You don't want to make the article look stuffed with keywords for your readers either.

Put the keywords where they will have the most notice, at the top of the page, in your first paragraph and in the title and headline tags. You'll want to keep them closer together to add search engine value, but this will not change the optimization of the webpage. Vary your keywords and don't always use the same ones so that they become very obvious or loud to the reader.

4. Create Dynamic Links

To achieve a high serach engine ranking it is important to get other sites to link to your membership site. These will be one way links, or reciprocal links, where you link to another site in return for them linking to you.

5. Easy Navigation

Don't make the readers wonder where things are or need to ask questions to get around the site. Make the information and linking structure visible and easy to find, a user friendly website. Give directions and make it easy to find a similar topic or product.

6. Attention Grabbing Headlines

Use informative headlines throughout your webpage content, including your keyword phrases where appropriate. Captivate your readers' attention and draw a picture or punctuate an idea, keeping in mind it's not too taxing to follow the flow of the article.

7. Tagging Your Webpage

Finally, remember to include descriptive tags (Alt tags) on graphics so that they make sense and explain what the graphic is, but you'll want to include your keywords if possible.

Also, use descriptive title tags on all of your web pages to show what the page is about. Limit these to 59 characters. Add descriptive description tags to all web pages, and limit them to 150 characters.

If you're blogging or article writing, you may be able to include tags at the end of your post. These tags are associated with your ID and your business or webpage and listed as searchable phrases. These are tags you won't need to advertise using PPC campaigns. They are simply posted with the article and indexed according to the post.

If writing regular content is too much of a strain for you, I've found a great way to outsource this problem. The only thing you'll need to know about this is that your own links will not be the only ones you promote. It's similar to linking though, so it can benefit the both of you to network on this. The author that writes the article gets the link and you get the content. You can get this with a free membership at MyArticleNetwork, you just put your site in and choose the topic and the remote publisher does the work for you. If you want to also submit your own blogs and articles with your own links, you can pay a small fee and they will be distributed throughout many networks.

www.myarticlenetwork.com

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