Five Basic Steps for Achieving Top Rankings without Chasing Algorithms
1. Forget about the search engines. Yes, you heard me correctly. The search engines aren’t and nevër will be your “ideal target audience.” They don’t buy your goods and services. They’re not who you should be trying to please with your Web pages and site. Instead, write your Web page content for your target audience.
2. Don’t ever forget the basics. No matter what’s happening in the algorithms, continue using your main keyword phrase prominently in your title tag, META description and keyword tags, link text, body, heading tags, and so forth. That way, when the algo dial is turned, you won’t have to make changes to all of your pages. You’ll always be ready.
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3. Focus your keyword-containing tags and body text on one keyword phrase only. Each page should be focused on one keyword phrase, and each page should have its own unique tags. Check here on how to learn how to optimise your content and keywords.
4. Write well-crafted content for your Web pages, and add new content on a regular basis. If content is king, context is queen. Focus on your keyword phrase, synonyms and related words, and surrounding text. Use a program like ThemeMaster if you need help determining those supporting words.
5. Remember that both on-page and off-page factors are important. Don’t sacrifice one for the other. On-page factors are your tags, body text, prominence, relevance, etc. Off-page factors are link popularity (quality and number of your inbound links) and link reputation (what those inbound links “say” about your Web page when they link to you).
What about search engine research? Isn’t it important?
It’s crucial.
Let me give you an example. At the beginning of this year, pages began falling out of Google’s index. The forums were alive with speculation and what to do about it.
Through research, we determined this was a compliancy issue. By having compliant code, the search engine spiders are more easily able to spider the content.
The solution? Make sure you use a DOCTYPE tag and an ISO Character Set Statement at the top of every Web page.
For example:
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.1 Transitional//EN">
If you didn’t know about the compliancy issues, you could have made changes to your Web pages that didn’t need to be made, wasted countless hours trying this or that, all to come up dry.
Research helps to make sure you remain on top of what’s happening in the search engine industry. It’s what sets you apart from other SEOs. You make your decisions based on research and facts, versus speculation and theory.