SEO and positioning your website to rank top spots in the search engines require some careful planning. Just like setting up a business or going to war, it requires strategizing for optimal results. Diving straight into the internet without any clear game plan is time-wasting, dangerous and more often than not, a futile attempt to rank any website for maximum targeted traffic. Let’s dwell a little deeper into some useful SEO and positioning tips to get your web pages indexed and ranking faster.

1. SEO and Positioning Tip 1 – Determine Your Objective

What is your objective in optimizing your website? Is it for maximum general traffic or targeted niche traffic? Once again, webmasters are unable to get this part clear. Many think that driving as much traffic as possible to their websites is the way to go. Unfortunately, this is a big pitfall. A web site may attract loads of traffic but yet don’t perform as well as another with little traffic but making more sales. Know what your objective is, to sell more products or to get more people to visit your website. If you are building an interest-based website or hobby website, perhaps getting maximum general traffic is the right solution for you.

2. SEO and Positioning Tip 2 – Plan Your Keywords Right

This is applicable for all websites that intend to tap into free organic traffic. By that, I mean SEO and positioning high in search engines for specific keywords. One clue for you before you compile your keyword list is to understand that search engines rank individual web pages, not websites. The systematic way to do it is to first look at your objective of SEO and positioning. If you are targeting a niche market, for example SEO tools, target the niche keyword SEO tools for your home page, and drill into this main keyword for related keywords such as SEO Elite, effective SEO tools, etc to target for each internal web page.

Don’t make the mistake like many webmasters do in targeting one main keyword for the entire website. The smart approach to SEO and positioning is to target a list of low competition, moderate demand keywords and rank well for them. This would potentially drive more targeted traffic, than to blindly hit at one main keyword.

3. SEO and Positioning Tip 3 – Simple Well-Thought On-page Optimization

Use your keywords in the meta-tags, web page title, sub-headers and web content. Make your web content unique. A keyword density of 3-6% and word count of more than 400 words is ideal for on-page optimization. Create a sitemap page to make search engines spiders love your web pages. This helps in indexing the internal pages fast.

4. SEO and Positioning Tip 4 – Effective Off-page Optimization Techniques

Building link popularity of a website is far more crucial than any other factors for SEO and positioning for top search engine ranking. But pay attention to who your link partners are. Trade links with websites in a similar niche, and high Google PR if possible. Links from authority websites such as educational or government websites, ie domain names with .edu or .gov extensions are valuable. Buying links from link partners is perfectly fine if you can verify the quality of the websites. Search engines nowadays can be quite demanding and look for quality more than quantity of links.