OPTIMISE YOUR KEYWORDS

By Alex Schultz
Posted Thursday, October 21, 2004

This article tells you how to get a top 10 ranking on every major search engine and how to eliminate 99% of your competition.

First the real basics, you need to understand the meta keyword tag. Most search engines use meta tags to index your website. So your meta tag decides which queries your page turns up on. It is inserted within the element of your page and takes the following form:

To put it very basically the keywords in your meta tag should appear as many times as possible in the text of your page and MUST appear in the tags of your page, otherwise you will have a severely reduced chance of getting a high ranking. Do not try to trick the search engines by simply filling your page with a meaningless babble of keywords or keywords the same colour as your background as these tricks are now understood by search engines and considered spamming. If you are found guilty of spamming your site will be removed from the search engine without a trace. Harsh I know but that's the facts.

SLASH COMPETITORS TO 1%
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We all have keywords for which we wish we had top ranking, for me it's "paper airplanes"; for you it may be "video rental" or "holiday resorts" or any of hundreds of very general search terms. If you find your site keeps on ending up on the fifth page of the search engines (where no soul has ever visited or ever shall) here is a trick to ensure you get a better ranking.

Once you have finished reading this e-mail go out and perform a search for your major keywords on Altavista or Infoseek or any search engine that gives you the number of pages it has found for your keywords. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pages turned up? You bet! So now you have to be sneaky. With all those hundreds of pages even if you had the highest keyword density short of spamming the search engine and thousands of links across the net it is hit and miss whether or not you'll get a top ten ranking. So come away from that fantastic, wonderful keyword, it is bad for your health and likely to give you ulcers.

Try a new search, make your query more regional "video rentals in London" or "holiday resorts in Florida". How many pages are turned out now? Modify your search terms any way you like until you have cut your competitors' pages to 1% or less of their original number, which is surprisingly easy to do. Make sure your terms are still relevant to your site, you want targeted visitors, not any random surfer who'll leave two page views after they enter. Once you have 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 a number of times so that it appears naturally and often. Don't edit your keyword inadvertently by reducing it to a common abbreviation, for example, "airplanes" to "planes". Then submit your page to the search engine, once it is listed see where it ranks and play with the content to push it up the ranking for your new keyword term, you have 100 times less opposition so your chances of getting a top ten ranking are enormously better.

Of course more specific phrases are searched for less than general terms so don't stop with one term do 10 or 20 and design a new page within your site with relevant content that contains each term repeatedly. Consider the millions of searches performed each day and if your term isn't too obscure you should hope for it to turn up a few times every day on each search engine. Consider if you had 20 terms with top ten search engine rankings and each searched for three times a day in total across all search engines. That would give 22 000 extra highly targeted unique visitors a year and that is a very conservative estimate.

About the Author
Alex Schultz runs a fun site full of easy to follow free diagrams and instructions for making paper airplanes at (http://www.paperairplanes.co.uk/) it has been featured in a number of major ezines for children and teachers and is to be featured in a major UK internet magazine next month. Go on treat yourself to a break and LEARN TO FLY...