SEO – Self Help Search Engine Optimization

Every website listed in the search engines has a position, or ‘ranking’, and each one of these rankings can change very quickly, in some cases as often as weekly or even daily. One day your website’s in a good position, then the next you’re wondering what happened to it. Staying on top of this situation is a must for any SEO professional – you need to become a search engine ninja. If that’s what you want to do, then you need to keep these things in mind at all times:

• Good SEO requires frequent updates and ranking checks.

You might have a good spot today, but all it takes is for a few new sites to open, and before you know it you’re back down at the bottom. If you pay attention to your rankings, then you have a shot at fixing things that go wrong before your rankings fall too far.

• You should check all your links weekly to make sure they work.

Maintain high-quality, relevant reciprocal links and check them weekly to make sure they’re working. Remove any dead links, as search engine crawlers may mark you down if they find them on your site.

• Tweak and assess your website on a daily basis.

You need to continually assess and tweak your listing to keep your site in its proper place – that is, at the top. This ensures that your site is in the best position possible, and helps you keep your competitive edge.

• Maintain the content on your website.

Update your content weekly at the very least, to make sure that search engine crawlers come back frequently. Even the smallest changes will be picked up on by the search engines and will help to maintain your ranking. If you can’t write, find someone who can: you need content.

• Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in SEO.

If you can’t decide what you should be doing or you don’t want to keep up with SEO on your own, you could consider hiring a specialist. Consulting with an SEO specialist will still allow you to make your own changes to your website and learn which things work best, but you’ll have someone to answer your questions if you need them.

You should review your SEO techniques at least every few months, to see how the algorithms have changed and to devise new plans and strategies for increasing your rankings based on those changes. Any SEO ninja will tell you that there are only really two major search engines that you need to worry about: Google and Yahoo. You can do well even if you only have the time or energy to focus on these two engines. Being an SEO ninja is hard work, but it can be very rewarding if you’ve got the dedication for it.

In order to get your site recognized by the main search engines and obtain a high page ranking, you need to be able to get your site noticed by engines like Yahoo and Google. While there are several more search engines out there, these are the big two that you want to get noticed, and ranked, by.

One way, a very big way, to get noticed is to create incoming links that are going to stand out to the search engines. How do you do that? See Smart Linking, but more about it later. You have to be honest with your links, you have to link to a relevant site, you have to use strong anchor text in your link to get noticed, and most importantly, IT HAS TO BE RELEVANT.

Today, search engines use spybots and cookies to bounce around the internet checking all of the information and links that are out there. A couple of years ago, search engines didn’t have that ability, so web masters could create links that were not truthful or relevant to the sites he or she were linking to. They used business directories like DMOZ and many others.

Now a web master has to be careful with his or her links. In order to create smart and effective links, a web master has to choose a site to link to that is relevant to his or her own site. If I have a site that sells ink for ball point pens, I would not want to try and link to a site that buys scrap metal. The bots and cookies would check the links, find out that they have no relevance to one another, and give me little or no credit towards my page rankings.

That is the key in smart web marketing: using smart incoming links. Another factor that makes links smart is anchor text. If I link to a site, the text that a person would click on to come to my site is called the anchor text.

For my pen ink site, I might want to link to the site that sells the ball point that goes in the tip of the pen. For my anchor text, I wouldn’t want to simply put “Click here”, I would put something like: “For the best ink to go with the best ball point, visit me.”

Why is that “smart incoming linking”? Because of the relevance and the anchor text. Search engines will recognize both of those factors and give my site a higher pager ranking because I am linking to a similar site. Not an identical product or service, but one that my product can help and vice-versa. One Canadian based web site Smart Linking (Canadian Text Links) has done it very well by allowing clients to choose the link and anchor they wish for a relatively affordable price.
Other factors that help make smart incoming links are linking to a site that is, itself, highly rated by the search engines and, getting your link on a webpage that has several relevant keywords in regards to your site.

While there are other ways to increase the power of your links, these are the foundation of creating smart incoming links and will help you on your way of achieving a higher page rank.