Tactic #1: Select Great Keywords

Your first priority should be to select great keywords that describe your organization and the content within your Web site. It might be tempting to save time by developing a list of keywords, some specific and others broad, and then applying all of them on every page throughout your Web site. However, you will achieve greater results by selecting 10 custom keywords or phrases for each page of content within your site. For example, select 10 keywords and use them exclusively on your home page, followed by 10 different keywords for each subsequent page of content.

When selecting keywords, avoid words that are broad or vague. Broad or vague keywords provide little benefit because likely too many other pages are currently indexed in the search engines using those keywords. To illustrate, lets use AVSGroup.com as an example. Open a new browser window and go to Google. Search on the term Web Site Design. Look at the upper right corner where Google displays the number of pages currently indexed for the keywords. Google has already indexed about 22 million pages for Web Site Design.

Instead of competing against 22 million pages for Web Site Design, AVS chose to optimize a page of content for Web Strategy Development. This phrase precisely describes one of AVSs Web services, and because fewer pages are indexed, there is a greater likelihood of achieving a high ranking. To illustrate, go back to Google. Search on Web Strategy Development. Google has indexed 623 pages and AVSGroup.com is the number one ranked site.

Tactic #2: Convert Keywords into Traffic

Once you have selected great keywords, the keywords must be incorporated into the right locations within your Web site to drive more traffic. Some of the best places are within your sites page title, META description, and META keywords. Google, Yahoo, and MSN look for keywords in these locations to help properly index a sites content.

If you are unfamiliar with how to view a page title, open a new browser window and go to AVSGroup.com. The page title is the white text that appears inside the bar at the top left of your browser window.

Next in importance is the META description and META keywords. Both are used to describe the content found on a particular page. To locate the METAs, open a new browser window and go back to AVSGroup.com. Click on the View drop down menu within your Internet Explorer window. You will see several options including View Source. Select View Source. This will display the HTML used to create the AVSGroup.com home page. At the top of the page, you will see the META description and META keywords.

You will achieve the greatest success if you develop custom page titles, META descriptions, and META keywords for each page within your Web site using the keywords that you selected earlier.

Tactic #3: Link Building

Link building is an SEO term that means requesting other Webmasters to add a link to your Web site within their Web site. This usually takes place in two ways. Webmasters will sometimes add your link within their own sites content because your Web site could be a valuable resource to their site visitors. You can also encourage Webmasters to post your content onto their Web site provided they include a link to your Web site within the credits.

For the first example, open a new browser window and go to http://www.viroqua-wisconsin.com/. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a link that reads Web site design and development by The AVS Group. This link provides AVSGroup.com with additional traffic if someone were to click the link, but more importantly, the link helps increase our Page Rank. More on Page Rank later.

Next, open a new browser window and go back to Google. Search on the phrase e-mail marketing tips. You should see a link that reads Learn Successful E-mail Marketing Tips (it might even be the number two ranked site). Click on this link and you will find a Web site that is featuring one of The AVS Groups Resources articles. This is an example of leveraging your Web site content by permitting other Webmasters to post it and provide a link back to your site. Scroll to the bottom of the article and you will see a link to AVSGroup.com.

Your link building activities increase what is known as, Page Rank. Page Rank is a measure that Google uses to evaluate the relevancy of a Web sites content. If you have hundreds or even thousands of Web sites linking to your Web site using these two examples, Google will consider your Web site to be more relevant. You will earn a higher Page Rank score, resulting in improved search results for your Web site against sites that might even be optimized for the same keywords.

In closing, this article shared three key tactics within our SEO model that you can use to improve your search engine rankings. Because of the complexity of SEO, please let us know if you would like to learn more about our full SEO model. Our Web experts will demonstrate the various tactics within our model and discuss the results.