The first thing you need to do is decide if you're selling yourself, an author driven website, or selling expertise, a topic driven website.
Once you've made your decision, you'll need to do your keyword research on your topic. If you're creating an author driven website, you'll want to make sure that you include your name in your keywords.
Here are the strategies you need to implement:
1. Optimize your website. You'll need to optimize each page individually, so if you have a large list of keywords, then you can optimize each page for a different keyword phrase.
When you've finished optimizing your site, you'll need to implement your search engine strategy.
2. Submit your site to the major search engines. Although the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are more or less true search engines because they spider sites, if you're not linked to any other sites, these search engines won't find you.
You can have other sites link to you, but the problem here is that it may take awhile for the search engines to find your site and spider it even if you are linked.
You can significantly speed up the process simply by submitting to the major search engines manually. If you use a sitemap, you can submit your sitemap to both Google and Yahoo and have your site spidered within a few days.
It may take a few months to get your site completely spidered, especially if it's a large site, but again, a sitemap can help you with this process.
3. Build backlinks to your website. Find writing directories and other places where writers, and readers, hang out and post a link back to your site. The more links you have pointing back to your website from other relevant resources, the higher your rankings will be, and your Google page rank will be higher.
You can also find general directories to submit your website. General directories can help you with building higher page rank for your site.
4. Write articles. Although some writers disagree with using articles as a promotion technique, claiming that you should only write articles for pay, I disagree.
When you write articles, you are giving readers a taste of your writing. You are offering value.
Articles can also help you build tons of one way backlinks to your website through article directories, as well as build a following for your writing.
Which had you rather do: get paid $25 for an article and only be paid once, or earn money every month, over and over for the same article by using it to drive traffic to your website?
5. Participate in forums and communities. I know. This is a tough one. Many writers are introverts, or they're not interested in marketing.
If you want to sell your writing, you have to market. Although search engines can get you in front of your readers, search engines don't buy. Readers do.
Google, MSN, and Yahoo all use their own methodologies and/or algorithms to calculate the relevance of your pages, but here are a few common factors that are accepted by most to guarantee good rankings in renowned search engines.
Analyze your pages, and start the process today; remember to resubmit your changes when you are done, and the traffic will start to flow.
1) Keyword Density
Try to achieve a 3.5% to 7% keyword density for each of your pages. This means, your keywords should get repeated 3 to 7 times per 100 words written. However, do NOT overuse your keywords on the same page. Related keywords may help further.
There was a time when random usage of keywords was accepted by major search engines. This led to utter chaos and visitors hardly got to read what they were looking for. This was brought to the notice of search engine webmasters and it changed the rules overnight. Today, it is considered spam and the offender is punishable by law.
2) Keyword Phrase Choices
It is next to impossible to get a high rank for a single keyword, so make sure you aim for some lower-demand phrases too. The keyword 'coffee' has been listed in Overture as getting searched 370830 times a month. 'Coffee' as a keyword has an immense competition. However, a key phrase like 'coffee club' shows just 1813 searches. Getting a number one rank for coffee would of course be wonderful, but having a moderately good rank for several lower-demand keywords must be an essential part of your search engine optimization strategies.
3) Original Content
Google can penalize websites that offer exactly the same content, and this can result in lower ranking for all sites. In extreme situations, the website may be written off from the search engine forever. How many times have you seen multiple sites meant to promote the same old resale rights product? All of them display the same old sales page. The cleverest thing for you to do would be to simply rewrite the sales letter and submit that page to the search engines. This is vitally important SEO tip. Make sure you put in connected words and phrases; not simply the targeted keywords. Originality always sells. And it sells more than any other strategy ever used.
4) Linking Right
Make sure all your links use proper text. How many times have you seen "click here to visit" on a website? Simply changing the link text will cause your page to rank higher in all the search engines. You may also select connected phrases as link text. An interesting text link raises the visitor's curiosity and increases the value expectation of the product.
5) Repetition of Key words and Phrases
Do ensure that the key phrases and keywords that you select appear multiple times in every one of your paragraphs and the entire content as a whole. Remember to put in connected phrases and keywords to help give a boost to your SEO. Do not let yourself get attracted to keyword stuffing which is the other name for indiscriminate repetition of the same keywords again and again.
5) Update yourself by visiting SEO news sites to stay in tune with the latest trends. The engines keep on shuffling their formulae and strategies so you can do good to get yourself updated on the latest news.
6) Alt Tags
When adding a picture or an image to your webpages you must add connected key phrases and words to the alt tags. Taking this simple step helps in boosting your PR.
Reviewing your site from time to time, implementing the necessary changes, and keeping abreast of the newest trends in Search Engine Optimization will definitely ensure your site achieves a top ranking for your chosen keywords and key phrases.
Both Jinger Jarrett & T J Madigan are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Jinger Jarrett has sinced written about articles on various topics from Marketing, Site promotion and Home Based Business. Want to know all of the strategies for marketing your business on the internet for free? Get a free ebook copy of Jinger Jarrett's "