There are many professional Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques that if employed immediately and then updated and continued over time will significantly increase the natural search engine ranking of your website. In this article I have outlined 6 basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) key success factors that if implemented on your website will immediately improve your ranking within the search engines.

1. Perform Keyword research

This is one of the most misunderstood, and yet one of the most critical, aspects in tuning your website for good rankings. When performing Keyword research your goal is to find a keyword (a one or two word phrase) that describes the subject matter of your website. Once you choose that word your next goal is to research the web using specific keyword research tools, many of which are free, and uncover what are called long tail keywords (3 or more words) that have high searches and low competing websites.

Make no mistake about it, Keyword research is a time consuming and artful process. But this research up front will make a huge difference in your results.

2. Create an SEO Friendly Title Tag

Create a Keyword rich “Title Tag” and embed that tag in the head section of your HTML document or in the title section of your blog configuration. When your webpage appears in the search results, your “Title Tag” text will most likely be shown.

3. Create an SEO Friendly Description Meta Tag

Create a Keyword rich “Description Meta Tag” and embed it in the head section of your HTML document or within your blog configuration. This is a one or two sentence description of your webpage. This description meta tag is reviewed by the search engines and it tells them what keywords your webpage is about, hence what your page is about.

4. Ensure Keyword Anchor Text

The words that are used in your linking structure should be your Keywords. They are called “anchor” text when they are used as the phrases that are linked from and they tell the search engines what the user is searching for based on the “click” action. An often overlooked technique, especially in blogs, this is a key factor we use in search engine optimization consulting.

5. Use Full URL linking

You want to make it as easy as possible for webpage crawling programs (i.e. Googlebot) to find all of your webpages in your website. As such, when creating your linking structure ensure all of your links are referenced using their full URL.

6. Offer Quality, SEO Friendly Content

Search engine programmers are not dumb, and the algorithms they create are constantly being improved and updated to find quality content for their customers (i.e. search engine users). For long term success create a plan to ensure you have quality content that is updated periodically based on new keyword research and relevance to your marketing efforts.

What this means is while you should write your content (text) for your readers, ensure your keyword phrases are embedded into that text at a high enough level to ensure the search engines understand those keywords are important, but not so much that they think your site is a spam site. If you spam your site with keywords, your site will be penalized by low rankings or be completely removed from the index.

In summary, there are many aspects of SEO, but these are 6 techniques you can use as part of your search engine marketing strategy.

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