The keys to improving your SEO are important because it can bring you search engine traffic. And it is well known that the most targeted traffic you can get is what comes to you from search engines.

Understanding the keys to improving your SEO will go a long way to getting more visitors and from a much more targeted audience.

If your site is ranked high enough (on the first page) of the search results, this is a coveted place and happily is also one within reach.

With attention to just three key areas, your site can rank in these first few results, getting you more page views and highly targeted prospects.

Keys to Improving Your SEO: I. Keywords

Doing a bit of thinking ahead of time on keywords will take you a long way toward having an optimized search engine friendly website.

A general rule of thumb is to find keyword phrases that has no more than 30,000 results for at least a hundred searches per day. Too few searches indicates a low interest and too many results indicates too much competition.

When you come up with the phrases you are going to use, use them in your post title, at least once in the first paragraph or two, and at least one or two more times in the body of your article, depending on the length.

Be careful not to overpopulate your post with the primary keyword phrase, but do use related keywords throughout the post.

The keyword should be in the first and last sentence, as well as a few times throughout your post, particularly in H1, H2, and H3 headers.

You should even use them in alternate text behind images (the ALT=”part_of_the_image_tag_this_being_your_keyword”), and in your link text.

Use the long tail keywords in favor of short ones for a couple of reasons. The short phrases might seem more desirable but if you notice there are extremely high numbers of results for those phrases.

And the leads you get from the short phrases will not be as targeted as those you will get using the longer ones, but more importantly you’ll have a better chance of reaching the first page due to a smaller number of results with the long-tail phrases.

Use keyword tools like the Google Wonder Wheel to do your keyword research will help you in coming up with relevant keywords. I’m not doing a keyword research tutorial here but this is a great step-by-step on using the Google Wonder Wheel.

And you can test your post for placement of keywords through this post Term Targeting tool shown here by my friend Shaylee Greg, check it out!

Keys to Improving Your SEO: II. Backlinks and RSS Feeds

Backlinks are an important factor in your page rank, so increasing the number of backlinks is one of the keys to improving your SEO.

When your readers elect to link to your posts from their websites, or share links through other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc, this creates backlinks to your page.

This gives it a higher ranking in the eyes of search engines. Likewise, when someone subscribes to your RSS feed, this also enhances your SEO in the same way.

It also matters the page rank of the site which is providing the backlink. To find out the page rank of a particular site, just go to prchecker.info and enter the URL of the page. Most blogs have between 0 and 4 page rank.

Having people add your posts to Social Bookmarking sites is part of the keys to improving your SEO.  But there is more than just the backlink aspect to this. That is that once you have accumulated votes on these sites, it gives your page even more visibility there, also enhancing your traffic, again bumping your SEO.

This is why your use of social networking can have such a powerful impact on your SEO. The value you provide can propel itself forward into others’ networks creating syndication.

Commenting on others blogs is another way to create backlinks to your content. It not only creates backlinks but can actually drive traffic to your site, particularly from ones that get high traffic themselves. Be sure to make the comments meaningful and do not spam, or you may be blocked!

As an aside here, building links within your site is also helpful to your SEO.  Creating links to other posts within your site forces the search engines to crawl deeper within your site.

Keys to Improving Your SEO: III. Wordpress Plugins

Using some particular Wordpress Plugins are essential keys to improving your SEO.

Using blogs over static web pages, especially wordpress blogs, provides a huge benefit for SEO. This is due to the inherent capabilities within wordpress to enhance SEO. Not only that, the use of certain plug-ins can be very effective at increasing your SEO.

In particular, these plugins are recommended for building your SEO and increasing your Alexa rank (which Google uses amongst other criteria to rank your page).

1. All-in One SEO Pack optimizes your blog for SEO in a variety of ways.

2. Google XML Sitemaps makes it easier for the search engine crawlers to assess your site, increasing your rank.

3. SEOPressor is an amazing tool that has helped me to improve my SEO tremendously. This plugin is a powerful SEO companion, recently introduced, that acts like an SEO coach sitting within your editing session giving you crucial pointers.

4. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin lists related posts from within your blog under the current one, keeping your readers on your site for longer, thereby increasing your SEO.

And to be sure, having Akismet on your stie is the one more important things you can do to protect your site from malicious spammers that can acutally damage your SEO.

Additionally, Wordpress Automatic Backup is essential to keep your data backed up so that you never lose it.

As your site gains more exposure, your page rank will increase, and you’ll find that using all of these tools will have a cumulative effect your SEO efforts, so be sure to use Google Analytics with this plugin so that you can watch your improvements as they happen.

Ensuring that you use all of these keys to improving your SEO, you should soon begin seeing an increase in your page rank!

Tags: backlinks and rss feeds improve SEO, keys to improving SEO, long tail vs short key word phrases, optimized search engine friendly website, related keywords in posts, SEO for targeted traffic, wordpress plugins for enhancing SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 3:29 PM and is filed under Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.