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SEO 101 - 7 Steps to top natural search rankings
1. Keyword Strategy
What terms are your endusers actually typing to find your business? Overture and Google provide keyword tools, and other third party companies such as Trellian and Wordtracker also have products. Your whole campaign rests on getting this right. Understandin your money keywords, the keys that give the greatest return and then the long tail of variations and related keys.
2. Domains
If you have not registered a domain then obtaining a domain that contains your main keyword will (currently) help your cause. e.g. www.travelinsurance.com.au . Note this cannot last however and long term building a brand will return you more in my opinion.
3. URL & Directory structure
When building your site having a meaningful url and directory sructure will pay dividends, both for your enduser and your search engine rankings. http://www.iflorist.com/en/act/item/2971/?nref=1 versus http://www.iflorist.com/en/bouquet/lillies.html.
Structure your directories and urls so the information is grouped and the urls are keyword rich. That does mean doing something like this; http://travel-insurance.worldnomads.com.au/travel-insurance/travel-insurance.aspx which amounts to spam.
4. Site Technology
Don't use flash to build your site, by all means use flash elements but remember how search engines work they take text copies of your pages and store them in their atabases for reference.
Ensure site navigation is both logical, easy to follow and that search enines can follow the links.
5. Add Content
Based on your keyword strategy build content pages for your main keywords or keyword groups. Content is King the more the better, noting it must be unique an not duplicated.
6. Meta Data
Each and every page needs unique descriptive meta data. That mean page title, meta keyowrds and meta descriptions. Don't scrimp here this is important.
7. Obtain Incoming Links AKA Link Popularity
Much discussion rages here after recent Google algorythm updates. To assist your site rankings, you need to obtain incoming links that contain in the anchor text the keywords you want to get rankings for. Register your site in on topic directories, approach similar themed sites and ask for a link exchange, publish articles, register your site in any trade sites. What you want is to be the center of the universe for your topic/products.
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