The shortcut to the top position
1. Simplifying your URL.
To keep your URL as simple as possible, try to exclude
characters such as question marks and ampersands. Search engines
generally use spiders to locate searchable pages on web sites
but they do not index URLs with excessive use of symbols.
Some public search engines and most site and intranet search
engines will index dynamic URLs but others will not. Because it
is difficult to link to these pages, they will be penalized by
engines that use link analysis to improve relevance ranking,
such as Google's PageRank algorithm.
2. Using keywords well.
Keywords play a big part in indicating to search engines the
relevance of your site when using specific search terms. If the
relevant key terms do not appear within the text on your site,
it is less likely that your site will be matched to the correct
category.
Make sure that your text reads correctly instead of trying to
pack it with as many search terms as possible. Otherwise you
will end up with content that does not make a lot of sense.
A general rule of thumb to ensure that most key terms are
covered is to have at least 250 words of continuous text on each
page.
3. Avoid hiding your keywords.
Have you ever seen a site that has hundreds of keywords repeated
at the bottom of the page? Sometimes these words are the same
color as the background so you only notice them if you highlight
a section of the page and they show up as reversed white on
black text. This is an attempt to rank well in the different
search engines for the keywords listed there.
Search engines were used to be fooled by this. But now they
penalize big time and it can even get you blacklisted. Avoid
hiding your keywords in your web site content and prevent
including white text on a white background.
4. Avoid cloaking.
Cloaking is a technique designed to deliver different web pages
under different circumstances. For instance, search engine
spiders may pick up a heavily optimized page for a certain
keyword.
However, when a visitor goes to the page using the same keyword,
an altogether different page is delivered in an attempt to send
them somewhere else.
If you are caught cloaking web pages, your web site may be
permanently banned from search engines. Forget doorway pages
too, which are pages specially optimized for one search engine.
Although doorway pages can be effective for sites with content
that is overlooked by search engines, they are generally frowned
upon.
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