Many webmasters and website owners found the importance of the search engine optimization (SEO). Having an optimized website for search engines is the best way to free targeted traffic. People are using every day the search engines to find things they are interested in, and getting a high rank is the best way to get visitors for free. Unfortunately not all understand the importance of SEO: some prefer to spend their money on advertising as they believe that SEO is expensive. Of course, hiring a SEO might be quite expensive, more than you plan to spend on advertising, but the results are for long term. An optimized website will keep bringing targeted visitors even after an ad campaign would end.

As many want to proceed with this SEO stuff, a question always arise: what to do to get higher ranks on search engines? I will try to offer you some of the most important variables that search engines take into consideration for ranking your website, so you can develop a SEO strategy.

First of all, I need to say that all search engines have different algorithms for ranking a website, but still some of the variables remain common.

• submission of your website to search engines

Well first of all, you need to submit your website to search engines in order to get indexed

• submit sitemaps

A sitemap is exactly what you are thinking at: the map of the site. Submitting sitemaps to search engines help them to visit all your website pages and index them, otherwise you might risk the search engine to index only 2-3 level deep

• content on pages

All search engines love content. Is actually what they index and what give the relevancy of your site, providing direct immediate value, not images or flash content. Content is what should make your site different than the rest. Some tips to be taken into consideration would be:

1. develop relevant content to your website
2. don’t copy other websites content, as search engines don’t like that and they will penalize for it
3. have your content as text, not as images or flash files, as search engines are unable to read them
4. when using images, make sure they have an alternative text set up

• meta tags

Meta tags are a description of each page. This is what usually search engines read first. It’s been agreed on a standard that meta tags shouldn’t be very long descriptions, to have no more that 250 characters.

• keywords

Keywords are of very high importance too all search engines. A keyword would be a word that could get somehow the essence of a page’s content. Each page should have such keywords, all separated by comma, and the total keywords to have no more than 150 characters. Some things to have in mind when choosing the keywords:

1. keywords must always be in the content of the page (using a keyword not present in the content of your page might be seen by search engines as spam - and would result in a low rank)
2. keyword density: keywords should be some of the most used words in the page content (in this case as well, density is important, but you don’t have to use keywords such as “and”, “but”, “in” or anything like that even if they might be the most used - keep in mind the essence of the page content)
3. research on keywords: you should research how often are searched some keywords in a period of time (there are some programs to help you do that). Keywords along with key expressions research might help you in choosing the right ones to get the most traffic from search engines. Remember that searching “free software” or “software free” will give you different results even on the same search engine
4. keyword difficulty research will help you find out how difficult would be to rank for a keyword, based on the competition
5. keyword typos would be likely human misspellings and typos of words, such as instead of searching “keyword” to type “keywofd”

• page titles

Page titles are also shown as titles in search engine results. The title offers relevancy to the content, and having the keyword included in the title text is highly possible to increase your rank in search engine results

• search engine friendly links (SEF)
  

When developing a website, static or dynamic, you should keep in mind making friendly URLs, as search engines tend to rank these URLs better. So, instead of having a link that would show no logic like

“http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content=3&itemID=23/”

a better one would be

“http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=Search_engine_optimization_variables/”

Note that having the title of the page or some keywords included in the URL instead of having some numbers with no relevancy to the page content will help in getting higher page ranks

• website architecture

Having a clean website (HTML clean as well), with internal links that makes the navigation easy, using the text link anchors for bringing in front the relevant content in a page will help search engines rank which content or part of the content is most important; therefor, in the case someone will be searching for something related to the content that search engines have ‘noted’ as most valuable, your rank will be higher. Having a smaller number of links on a page is preferable of having to many (don’t try to get 100 links on a page, otherwise search engines will take you as making link spamming)

• backlinks

One other variable search engines tend to use in ranking are the backlinks. Backlinks are external links that points to your site or a page in your site. As your own site, the other website are also ranked based on the same algorithms. The higher the rank of the website pointing to you means higher quality of the link. Also, the higher is the number of links pointing to you, the higher your rank would. But please note that the quality of the link is more important that their number. Therefor, 1 quality backlink might help you get higher ranks than 100 no-quality backlinks.

Some tips in getting more backlinks:

1. develop quality content to which other would like / want to link
2. submit your website to directories
3. press releases (whenever you make an important change, bring a new product, make a new partnership you can send press releases stating that, with your link included. There are many online companies that can do this for you for a small fee)

• search engine marketing (SEM)
  

Search engine marketing (SEM) will help those with not a good rank on certain keywords to bring their website in top of the line as sponsored links. This will also increase the relevancy of those keywords with the search engine used for advertising.

These would be the main variables search engines use in their ranking. As I said at the beginning, search engines use however different algorithms in this process, therefor some variables might have higher importance with one search engine than the others.

I will try to have soon in this article posted the differences among the search engines in this area of ranking.