Improve Search Engine Rankings
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Keyword Research Analysis

One of the most fundamental factors to improve search engine rankings starts with keyword research and analysis. You should take care in selecting the most appropriate keywords relevant to the content of your site. A fundamental step that will improve search engine rankings and get more visitors to your site is to try predicting what your audience would type into a search engine to find your site. Properly designing your web pages with keywords phrases will improve your chances of achieving a favorable ranking and being seen by someone typing your keywords into a search query.

You can use free Keyword research tools at Google adwords or there are more specific and easier to understand free Search Engine Keyword tools found here

Keyword Research Strategies, Tools and Density

Keywords in the URL
If possible include a keyword in the pages URL address. Search engines consider the keywords within the sites address very significant.

Keywords in the titleTitle
Your keywords should definitely appear in the title, as most major search engines give the title very high relavance when indexing a site.

Keywords in the Opening paragraph
Your chosen keywords should also appear within the first paragraph. Many engines give greater weight to where the keywords appear. If possible use your keywords in H1 tag, first sentence and first paragraph to be given a higher ranking.

Keywords in the Body of the document
Search engines will also factor in how often the keywords appear within the document (Keyword density). A general guideline for the recommended keyword density is 3-5 percent. It is important that your keyword density is not significantly higher. Simply repeating keywords will not help as many search engines will consider this against the guidelines and ban the site. Here are some excellent Search Engine Keyword Research Tools for Keyword research and density analysis. You can also use the free Keyword research tools at Google adwords. Or to simply determine the relative popularity of keywords you can use the overture keyword research tool

Keyword Links
Another strategy is to create good keyword/phrase content on other pages within your website. As automated Crawler based indexing systems will spider through the pages of your site and evaluate the content of your secondary pages as well to determine your sites overall ranking.

Keywords in theMETA tags
META tags (keyword and description) used to be very significant in how the engines ranked your site. Many engines no longer consider them relevant. However, considering that some still do, it is still worth the effort to add your keywords to these tags.

Web Site Engineering

Designing your site following W3 standards will help the search engines accurately index your website.

Crawler-based search engines follow the links when they visit web pages. This means that, unlike directories, you are likely to end up having several pages listed with them. When designing your site, also ensure that you have good internal links to and between your secondary pages. Try to use your keyword strategy thoughout your entire site as this will improve the likelyhood that you will rank well in crawler-produced results. In maintaining your site, make sure that you avoid dead links as they will limit the crawlers ability to spider through your site. Spiders also have difficulty seeing and following graphic based links as they are designed to look for text. One way to ensure your links will be followed by the crawler based engines is to also include text based links on your page (like I have on the bottom of this page).

Keyword use with (Flash, Frames, Javascript)

It is important to remember that most search engines are Crawler-based. They robotically "spider" through the linking pages on your submitted site and index and create their listings automatically. As a result, when designing your pages to get a high ranking it is important that your index or home page limits the use of Flash, Frames and Javascript. Although these techniques can produce very attractive effects, sole reliance on these techniques will harm your chances of getting high search engine rankings. Automated indexing engines have difficulty seeing the page content on sites that exclusively use these techniques.