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A little while ago I wrote a post telling you about on page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the the two most important items were the Title tag and the Domain name.

Well, I just took a look in Google to see if this blog was being indexed yet and I searched the phrase Starting Steps. Guess what, it is on the first page of Google out of 5,000,000 + pages that turn up for that term. Which isn’t bad at all. But that is just the beginning try searching for, making money starting steps and internet marketing starting steps. I was pleasantly surprised at the results.

The one that surprised me the most was internet marketing starting steps. I had 4 of the top 10 places and one of them doesn’t even have any content on it.

Click the image to see it larger.

But it’s not just Google check out these from MSN Live Search

This is all from the title tag and the domain name. Like I said the last one for coaching in the Google results doesn’t even have any content on it.

What does all this mean?

It means that if you are planning to get a majority of your traffic from search engines you should work the keywords into your domain name or create another domain with your keywords that can be used to drive the traffic to your site.

Oh, by the way check the page rank of this site. It is 0 That’s right a big fat zero, nothing, nada!

That is right, I got these placements without any page rank. Remember that when they tell you that on page optimization doesn’t matter that all you need are back links. I will undoubtedly be writing more about page rank in the near future.

There are a lot of elements to “On Page Search Engine Optimization” and there are people that will tell you that you don’t need on page optimization as long as you have back links.

Guess what that is bull!

Before you even think about getting back links you should be doing on page optimization. On page optimization includes things like:

1. Keyword density
2. Meta Tag keywords
3. Meta Tag Description
4. Title Tag
5. Keyword Prominence
6. Font Characteristics (H tags, bold, etc.)
7. Domain Name (this one is overlooked a lot)

All of these elements (except one) will help with your search engine rankings but one had more ranking power in the major search engines and one doesn’t even come into play with the major search engines. Do you know which is which?

Let’s start with the one that doesn’t really matter anymore.

Meta Tag Keywords – This is a tag that you put in the head section of your web page that lists all the keywords that you want to be indexed for. Sounds like it would be something that you would want on your website, doesn’t it? But the truth in the matter is because of abuse of this tag all the major search engines have stopped reading this tag. They now just read the content on your page. I haven’t used this tag in about 3 years and I can still get #1 ranking in Google.

Meta Tag Description – This is, again, a tag you put in the head section of your web page that describes the page itself. You would think this is a good spot for your keywords and it is but the search engines don’t put too much weight on this anymore either. But in a lot of the search engines this is what the searcher will see when you turn up in the SERP’s (Search Engine Response Pages) and if it has the keywords they searched in the text they are more likely to click on your link, which is a good thing, but it doesn’t help much with your actual ranking.

Font Characteristics – This is your font settings such as a H1 tag or a bold. This does help a little with your on page search engine optimization but not a lot. What it boils down to is that if you have a page that ends up with the same score as another page in the search engines. If you have your keywords in H1 tags and they have theirs in H2 tags with everything else being equal you will rank higher then them. All characteristics have some value rating to them but the heading tags (H tags) have the most effect.

Keyword Prominence – Prominence is how visible something is. Keyword prominence is how visible your keywords are. Remember search engines don’t see a page the same way you and I do. They only see the text of the code. The higher up in this code your keywords are the more prominent they are to the search engines. The more prominent your keyword is to the search engines the more relevant it seems to the algorithm.

Keyword Density – You constantly hear about this. Keyword density is how many times your keywords show up in the text on the page compared to how many words are on the page. For example if you are using a one word keyword phrase and you have it on your page 5 times and you only have 20 words your keyword density would be 25%. Let me tell you right now that there is no specific density that you should shoot for. All the search engines compare the keyword density of all the pages that turn up for that keyword and average it out. If you are too high you get penalized, if you are too low you might not rank. But your back links can help you if you are too low but they won’t help you if you are too high. The key here is to just write what comes naturally and you should end up with a decent density.

Title Tag – This is the most important place to have your keywords. At least for now, as more and more people start to spam this tag the search engines will do like they have done with all the other tags and make it not that important anymore. But at the time of this writing this was the most important place to have your keywords. You should put the main keyword for your page at the very beginning of the title tag.

The Domain Name - This is something that is overlooked by a lot of people. But the way the search engines see it is that if you are going to pay for a domain that has the keywords in the name you must plan the site to be about that keyword. For the search engines it doesn’t matter if your keywords are run together in the domain name (it does make a difference in the page and folder names) or if you have hyphens between the words but you have to watch out for the possibility of creating different words. I registered a domain marketerstool.com and this can be taken either as Marketers Tool or Marketer Stool. If it would have had hyphens it could only be interpreted one way.

To give you an idea about what this can do I have a domain Marketing Beginners that I didn’t do any real optimization for, I didn’t create a back link campaign for it, I didn’t create a sitemap for it, I just put it up and put Marketing Beginners in the title tag and it became #1 in Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask for the keyword marketing beginners on its own in a very short period of time. The site is now over a year old and it has naturally grown some back links but since the beginning I have been getting visitors from the search engines.

Back links are a great way to prove your site as an authority site and to boost your search engine rankings. But there are some things you shouldn’t do when it comes to back links

1. Babies Walk Before They Run – Most search engines aren’t dumb, at least the ones that count aren’t. If you have a site that is only a week old and it has 1,000 back links to it, the search engines are going to wave a red flag and say, “Just a minute, this shouldn’t be happening.” Your back links should grow naturally. This means that you won’t get 1,000 back links in just a couple of days. The main place this can really hurt you is if you are using article marketing. A lot of people are using submitters that will blast your article to 1,000 plus article directories overnight. Which on the face of it seems like a good thing but if you actually get published on all those directories in 24 hours you will be facing a possible worsening of your search engine ranking. If you are going to use a submitter try to find one that does the submission over a period of time so that you don’t get penalized for growing too fast. This really only applies to newer sites but even the older sites can be looked at if they have a 1000 time increase in their back links in a short period of time.

2. One Way is Better Then Round Trip – The main job of the search engine spiders is to find new pages, they do this by following the outbound links on your site. They don’t like it if the bounce back and forth and make no progress. This is what happens if you have too many reciprocal links on your site. Every time the spider leaves your site they are bounced back to your site by your partner’s link to you. This is something that is very easy for a spider to track and if it happens too much then you will be penalized for it. If you are working with reciprocal links limit them to one reciprocal link for every 3 outgoing links you have and boost the one way links to your site with submissions to directories and article submission.

3. Being Part of The Crowd Doesn’t Pay – There are a lot of link sites out there, some times called “link farms” that you can list you site on to get back link. Be part of this crowd too many times can actually hurt your ranking. There are a couple of reasons for this and part is that there are too many outbound links on the page and the second part is that there are too many different topics on the page. Having too many outbound links means that all the links will share any page rank the site might have this means you won’t get much. The best links come from the textual content of a page with your keywords as the anchor text (the words that create the link) and the page content being about or similar to your keywords. When you are on a link farm there is almost always a large number of topics on the page and you usually don’t get anchor text links.

4. Page Rank is Everything. NOT! – Everybody wants back links from sites with high page rank. This is actually good but if all your back links come from sites with the same type of page rank you will again get the search engines raising the red flag and looking at your site. The reason for this is there are places out there where you can buy one way links to your site. The search engines don’t like these services and if your site grows naturally you will never have all your back links coming from sites with a page rank of 5 or higher. Back links with a page rank of 1 will help your site, especially if you can get your keywords in the anchor text for the link. If you are running a back link campaign go after them all not just the high ranking sites. If you are purchasing back links make sure that they provide you with an assortment of sites with different page ranks and not just high ranking sites.

5. Variety is The Spice of Links – You have heard me say that you should you’re your keyword in the anchor text of your back link. This is very true but you shouldn’t have the same text in every back link or the same keyword in every back link. You should have a list of keywords for your site. Create a number of different links that use different text and different keywords in the anchor text. This will make your site rank higher on more keywords and it looks better to the search engines because people don’t phrase things the same way. If all the back links to your site are exactly the same then the search engines start grouping your links the same way they group duplicate content.

Remember back links are good but they can always be better. Remember the above to optimize your back link campaign.