This comprehensive guide will provide you with the necessary tools to secure a top 10 ranking on all major search engines and outperform 99% of your competition. Understanding the basics, such as the use of meta keyword tags, is crucial. Most search engines use meta tags to index your website, which means your meta tag determines the queries your page appears on.
Meta keyword tags are inserted within the HEAD element of your page and follow this format: <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Insert keywords here, separated by commas">. Essentially, the keywords in your meta tag should appear as frequently as possible in your page's text and MUST appear in the <TITLE></TITLE> tags of your page. Failure to do so can significantly reduce your chances of achieving a high ranking.
Avoid attempting to deceive search engines by filling your page with irrelevant keywords or keywords that match your background color. These tactics are now recognized by search engines and considered spamming. If you're caught spamming, your site will be removed from the search engine without a trace.
Everyone has keywords they wish to rank highly for. If you find your site consistently landing on the fifth page of search engine results (a place few users venture), there's a strategy to improve your ranking.
After reading this guide, perform a search for your major keywords on a search engine like Altavista or Infoseek. If your search yields tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, it's time to get creative.
Try a new search, making your query more regional, such as "video rentals in London" or "holiday resorts in Florida". Modify your search terms until you've reduced your competitors' pages to 1% or less of their original number. Ensure your terms are still relevant to your site, as you want targeted visitors, not random surfers.
Once you've found a good search term, add it to a meta keywords tag at the top of a new page with content relevant to that keyword term. Place the term in the text of your page frequently and naturally. Avoid reducing your keyword to a common abbreviation, for example, "airplanes" to "planes". Then submit your page to the search engine. Once it's listed, see where it ranks and adjust the content to improve its ranking for your new keyword term.
While more specific phrases are searched less than general terms, don't stop with one term. Try 10 or 20 and design a new page within your site with relevant content that contains each term repeatedly. With millions of searches performed each day, even less common terms should appear a few times daily on each search engine.
Imagine if you had 20 terms with top ten search engine rankings, each searched for three times a day across all search engines. That could result in 22,000 additional, highly targeted unique visitors a year, a very conservative estimate.
