Successful SEO Campaigns

Successful SEO campaigns are started with a simple look at how your website is setup. A common mistake is focusing too highly on making a website look good for customers but neglecting the way that site will look to the search engines. A common mistake is using Flash animations, or making the whole website in Flash! Using Flash for the whole website is a huge mistake. You have no content on the pages for Google to read and understand. Google will not understand the Shockwave file and will have no idea what your website is about.

As a webmaster you should ensure that your website has a Robots.txt file. A Robots.txt file is used to tell search engines to ignore certain parts of your website. You may wish to prevent images folders and other areas of the website from being spidered by the search engines. This is useful to  channel the spider towards the important content on your website and it will get it indexed more quickly. You can also use this method to divert pagerank juice away from the pages you dont need to be indexed giving your main pages more "Juice" and higher Google rankings.

Another important aspect for SEO is to ensure that you have a correct keyword density on your website. Keyword density is the percentage of page content that is your keyword phrase. You should aim for 4%. More than that could be considered spammy, especially for Google.  Less than that you may have an off-topic webpage and may not rank so well for the keywords you are aiming for. You can make use of the strong html tag to emphasize the main keywords - but do not overdo this.

To get a good Google ranking you need to have a few directory listings. Make sure you submit your site to DMOZ and other popular directories. There are many directories out there and most are of a low quality so you can avoid those.

You need to have an active website to get good rankings. You should refer to your website in online discussions, Twitter, Facebook and try to get some links off other websites in your field. This will help you immensely with getting a higher up listing in the search. Do not go overboard on this and get hundreds of low quality links which will not really get you good listings.

You can try Google Adwords you pay Google for a spot in the Google search. The more you pay the higher up in the search your website will be. This can be expensive so choose your keywords carefully. You can make use of the most specific keywords only. Longer phrases (three words and more) are usually cheaper to bid on so you might want to focus on those.