March 20th, 2010 by Dan

If you are ready to start increasing your success online with your website and you are tired of not getting the best rankings with the search engines, it could be time to switch up your marketing goals and start on a new path. If you are like a lot of website owners, you have probably tried a lot of other marketing plans and invested a lot of money into making them work, only to have them not deliver what they say they will. If you are ready to really start getting the search engine rankings that you need, here are some great ways to start using ethical search engine optimization techniques as part of an overall strategy to help your rankings improve with the major search engines.

1.    Choose Wisely – the keywords that you choose should be based upon a lot of different factors. You should aim to create a short list of SEO keywords for each page and product that you are going to be targeting. To help get started, it can be easier if you go through each page and develop a set of keywords that you think best describes the content and products – what would you search for?  Once you have a list of the potential keywords that you want to use, you can start to search for them and use an online tool to see what kind monthly search volumes they have. You can also find online tools that can help you create more keywords based on the original ones that you have selected. You can use variations of the words like changing the tense, order and punctuation of the words to create a more valuable set of keywords that people search for more often. Stick to no more than 5 or 6 keywords per page.

2.    Stay on Task – when you are choosing the keywords that you are going to use when SEO copy for your web site, you want to make sure that you are staying on task and only using keywords that are directly related to what you are promoting. Even though you may find certain keywords that seem to be doing well in the search engines and getting a lot of traffic to web sites, you only want to use them if they actually relate to your own business. You can use online tools to generate potential keywords based on the industry that you are in and the kind of business that you have online. If you choose keywords that are not relevant, you won’t be doing your search engine optimisation campaign any favours, as search engines want the content and keywords to match up on sites they rank well.

3.    Tools for Monitoring – being able to see how well each of the keywords perform is necessary for the success of your campaign long term. There are some online tools that you can use that will help you keep track of the keywords and be able to see which ones are doing the best – such as Google Analytics. As mentioned previously, make sure that you have the right meta tags on the right pages of content. If you do not have the correct keywords in your content, search engines are not going to be able to see them and that can prevent you from getting better search engine rankings.