How you do get your site at the top of the search results?

SEO is not an overnight process and takes much training, practice, reading and more. There are no shortcuts

Traffïc from search engines is widely considered the best (and cheapest) way to generate traffïc to your site. The increasing popularity of search engines has led to the development of a whole industry that revolves around ways to "optimize" websites.

The end result is that many people think that only "professionals" can help their website rank high within search engines. But, the truth is that anyone can structure their site so they rank high for many keyword phrases.

Below, are 8 simple steps that you can take to optimize your web pages. By following these, you will improve your chances of increasing your rankings:

1) Target 1-3 keyword phrases for each page: A huge mistake that many beginners make is cramming numerous keywords onto every page. Instead of doing this, you should focus on one specific keyword phrases for each page. That way, you can make sure that the page is focusing on that one word without any distractions.

2) List your major keywords in the links back to your site: Many search engines, Google being the most famous, have started to take into account the words that are mentioned in the title tag of the links that point to your site. So, a great way to improve your rankings for your keywords is to place it in the title tag.

3) Make your first 100 words on the page keyword rich: Another mistake that most webmasters make is to have a menu on the left-hand side of a website. Since search engines primarily focus on the first 100 words of a website, a left side menu is a misuse of valuable space.

Instead of doing this, you should have your title, description and web copy within the first 100 words of your site. An easy way to do this is to have your menu on the right instead of the standard left-hand side

But, since the left-handed menu is commonplace, you can also choose to put your first 100 words above the left-handed menu, so this text will be the first thing read on your website.

4) Insert the keyword into your title tag: In the source code of most pages are "header tags" (also known as Meta tags), which help search engines understand the content of the page. Each page should have different Title tags and the keywords used should match the page it is on

To fully optimize your website, you can tweak the source code of the page. The first step is to insert the keyword in the title tag. (This is what is shown in the results of a search engine when your site is listed)

5) Insert your keywords in the description tag: The description Meta tag is almost as valuable as the title tag. The information in this tag is listed directly below the title tag in search engine results. As a result, a good description can make your website stand out from other listings. To get the prospect to clïck on your site, it is important to write a snappy description while using your keyword.

6) Insert them into your keywords tag: Like the title and description tags, keyword tags are used to help search engines understand the content of your web page. Although this Meta tag has become less popular, it doesn’t hurt to put your keywords hëre.

7) Place your keyword in the header: When writing the actual text of your site, the first part should be the headline. Whenever a search engine scans your site, it rates all words in the headline as being more important then the rest of the web copy. To take advantage of this, you should have your keyword in the page headline. But, since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it so that it is smaller.

8) Write your keyword enriched web copy: Once you have set up the structure of your page, you can write your web copy. While creating the text, you want to include the majority of the keywords at the top and the bottom of the page. In addition, the keyword should be included a few times in the middle. Basically, the common saying is that the keyword density should resemble an hour glass shape.

The total web copy of your page should be about 300-1200 words. Also, the keyword should be about 5-12% of the total words of the page. The percentage varies according to each search engine, so you might want to play around till you find the best results. And be sure you have a sitemap and an xml sitemap.

OnTheAvenues SEO Expert

1. Keyword Use In Title Tags – “Notice number one – that you have HTML title tags that reflect the key terms you want your page to be found for. That’s been the advice since I first starting writing about SEO back in 1996. Eleven years later – and even in the age of it’s all about links — it remains the top ranked tip by so many experts. – Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land.

2. Global Link Popularity of Site (The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web – both link quality and quantity) – “Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that’s a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.” – Lucas Ng (a.k.a. shor), Fairfax Digital online marketing analyst.

3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link – “Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another person can make about what your site/page is ‘about’.” – Mike McDonald, WebProNews

4. Link Popularity within Site’s Internal Link Structure (Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page) – “As mentioned on my blog, you can pulse a page’s rankings by including and excluding links to it from your home page.” – Russ Jones, Virante CTO.

5. Age of Site (Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines) – “We have seen new sites flourish as long as they have a clear connection to the ‘parent’ site that has already gained trust.” – Chris Boggs, Search Engine Land Associate Editor.

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site (The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword) – “We seem to have moved from analysis of simply anchor text, to including surrounding text and probably even page theme.” – Caveman, SEO/SEM Consultant.

7. Link Popularity of Site In Topical Community (The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world) – ” I’ve seen one of my sites goes from #39 to #1 right after I got 1 link… from the #1 spot on the keyword I was trying to get” – Guillaume Bouchard, CEO NVI Solutions.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text (Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page) – “If you are writing about ‘dogs’ then you should naturally use keywords related to ‘dogs’ within your content. If you don’t have keywords within your content it can become hard to rank for those terms.” – Neil Patel, Pronet Advertising.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site – “This is why people bought PageRank 7 site links for lots more than PageRank 6 links. The links were very valuable, and the information on how strong they were was very valuable (this is why it’s also very hard to GET an accurate read on anymore without an SEO shaman). – Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl SEO Consulting.

10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site (The frequency and timing of external sites linking to given domain) – “I don’t think getting fifty links overnight will kill you. Especially if those links are bringing traffic and from quality sites. Getting 100K links overnight and having no visitors or search queries as a result smells abit fishy no matter how you look at it.” – Rae Hoffman, Principal, Sugarrae SEO Consulting.

This isn’t reverse engineering, says SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin, who called a virtual quorum of the top 37 minds in the SEO business. It’s a list of 35 factors that make up, in Fishkin’s estimation, 90-95 percent of what Google’s algorithm is looking for when determining rankings.