Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings
with On-Page Optimization

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6.  Use Lexical Words

In addition to using the keywords you have selected, it will help your SE rankings to use lexical words in your content.  Just recently, search engines have started looking for Lexical or Related words in the content of web pages to help them determine if that content has "value" or if it is "poorly written and has no value".

For instance, if you are using the word "pasta" as one of your keywords and your content reads like the following:

We have Pasta.  If you like pasta, you've come to the right place.  We have the best pasta.  Pasta you will truly love.

This phrase might normally be OK, but it smacks of keyword stuffing. 

If you were to use related, or lexical words in the content, like these:

• Spaghetti
• Noodles
• Ziti
• Lasagna
• Macaroni

and didn't use the word pasta quite so often, then the search engines would determine that you are offering valuable content because your content contains subject matter that is related to your main keywords.  Therefore, the presences of these lexical words will help you get better SE rankings.

7.  Being Unethical Does Not Pay

You've heard the saying: "Honesty is the Best Policy" and this holds true for SEO.  Google is on the watch for unethical and deceptive practices and if they discover you are using them, it will negatively affect your search results.  The practice can even get your site banned from search engine results.

Google has a list called Quality Guidelines that tells you what they consider Deceptive and Unethical.

• Overusing and Hiding Keywords
  Using hidden text such as small fonts or text the same color as the background on your pages.
• Mirror sites
  Creating identical sites that link to yours.
• Repetitive Content
  You want to have different content on each page.  If your content is essentially the same on multiple pages or subdomains, search engines can interpret this as being deceptive.
• Page Cloaking
  Hiding a page behind your front page.  This is also called building a "doorway" page for the spiders that is rich in keywords and building another page for your visitors that is not related to the keywords.  An exception to this is a "Flash Site".  Spiders don't understand Flash so in this case you can build an HTML site that opens behind the Flash Site.
• Link Schemes
  Using link schemes to increase your site's ranking.  This includes links to web spammers or unethical sites on the Web.  These links could likely affect your site's ranking in a negative way.
• Unauthorized Computer Programs
  There are programs available that will submit pages, check your rankings, send automatic queries to search engines, and do other search engine related functions.  Google does not recommend the use of these kinds of products.  They use computing resources and violate Google's Terms of Service.   WebPosition Gold™  is one such product.

You can read more about what Google recommends at Google's Webmaster Guidelines:
(www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html).

8.  Monitor Your Optimization Efforts

Good results from SEO will not be an instantaneous thing. Once you've completed the optimization work to your web page, then  monitoring your progress.  Perform searches with the major search engines using your keywords to check on the progress of your rankings.  Results will vary over time and rankings may change daily so you need to watch for a trend.

If you see that over time, your rankings are climbing, then you can congratulate yourself for a job well done.  If your rankings don't change or begin to fall, then you'll want to do some more tweaking. 

The competition for high search engine placement is extremely intense.  You are competing against millions of other Web sites and Web developers who are also performing SEO to try and beat out everyone else on the Web, including you.  You will probably not get the results you want the first time around and will need to make another round of optimization changes.  But each time, you should see improvements with your rankings.

A Quick Recap of the Eight Steps

1. Establish Good Internal Linking for the Spiders
2. Use HTML Tags For Better Search Results
3. Add ALT Text to Describe Graphic Images
4. Keep Your Content Fresh to Help Your Site Bloom
5. Concentrate on Content First, then Keywords
6. Use Lexical Words
7. Being Unethical Does Not Pay
8. Monitor Your Optimization Efforts

Click the Tutorial Next button one more time for the Course Completion.

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