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Has Google got your Website in the Search Engine Slums? Here are 3 Steps to Break Out.
Everyone seems to have the same trouble getting their website into the top positions in Google. They do well in Yahoo and MSN but seem to be cast out of the graces of Google. There is no doubt as to why people want their website in the limelight of Google with about 60 % of the search market.
There are usually 3 main mistakes that most people make that keep them from getting the most of their Google SEO. They may not seem like big issues to a person who has the ability to reason, but we have to keep in mind that search engines are programs and they lack the ability to reason. They only do as they are programmed to do, nothing more.
The Great News is that these common mistakes are generally easy to cure if you know what to do. We will now go through the 3 steps to check for these problems and how to correct them so that you will gain favor with the search engine that is considered the Crown Jewel of the Internet and SEO.
The 1st step is to check your links for proper anchor text. Anchor text is the clickable text of the links or Link Title of the links on other websites linking back to your site. This is the most common mistake that I see when approached by webmasters that can’t seem to hit the mark with Google. Let’s cover this a little better. When you acquire links on others sites through link exchange, articles, or the many other methods you use to get inbound links to your website. The clickable text that is hyperlinked to your website needs to be your keyword or phrase, nothing more. If you want your website to rank for Houston mortgage then you need the clickable text to read Houston mortgage, not: Mortgage loans in the Houston Texas market by yourwebsite.com. You just made that link of very little effect. Do you think anyone will do a search for Mortgage loans in the Houston Texas market by yourwebsite.com? I think not. Keep your links simple with just your phrase or keywords, nothing more. You can put the rest of the information in the description in plain text.
The next Mistake is where you get links from. Yes there are wrong places to get links and Google knows the difference. The value of links has as many as 100 different factors when being valued by Google. It is not like the old days when any link from any site carried a lot of weight. Now, do not take this out of context. All links have value, it is just that some links have more value than others and links from similar or related websites have a much higher value than non related links. Let’s use a simple example. For our example we will use a scale of 1 thru 10 to value links. You have a website about frogs and you get a website that is about birds to place a link to your website. Since it is from a site about birds we value the link at 2 out of 10. Your competitor has just 1 link also but he/she has a link pointing to their website from a website about frog figurines. So we place the value of this link at 7. You both have only 1 link and he is ahead of you, with the current scale, if you keep getting non relevant links how many would you need to beat him? Just using simple math I would say at least 3 more with a value of 2 or just 1 more from a related site with your keywords in it and a value of 8. Calculating links is fairly simple and is needed to know how many and what kind of links you need.
The 3rd and final factor has nothing to do with links but is important. Search Engines try to give the most relevant results to the consumer when they type a phrase or word into the search terms. So making your website relevant to the targeted phrase is very important, I see websites on a daily basis that do not have their targeted keyword anywhere on the site. This should not be. The first thing is to get your target keyword or phrase into the title tag, in the alt tags, and in the content a few times. You need to have a keyword density of about 4 to 6 % on average. To put this in layman terms, if you have 100 words on your page you need your keyword or phrase in the content 4 to 6 times and it should read natural. Going above these percentages might draw a flag from the search engine, Better safe than sorry. Now there are circumstances where it could be higher or lower. A good way to gage this is to go look at the top 10 sites and see what their keyword density levels are.
Hint. Find out what the top 10 sites are doing and do it just a little better. If they have a keyword density of 5 % then you go to 6 %. If they have 200 links that you would rate at 5 on the scale we used, then you need 250 at 5 on our scale or 125 at 10 on our scale.
This is all common sense. Just keep it simple and always remember that SEO is not rocket science. It is a time consuming process but worth the effort.
There are many other factors that weigh in on the SEO process and this is not a cure all for your SEO woes, but will help you get the basics of SEO working in your favor.
About the Author: Jim Corkern is one of the owners of a professional Seo Company with hundreds of websites in the top 10 for thousands of keywords and phrase.
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