There are many tricks to improve your rankings within a search engine. We all can look these up on the internet. What you may not realize is the most popular words can also lower your rank as much as raise it. Here are some tricks that have worked in the past but may now lower your ranking.

1. Use of the word “sex”
2. Hidden Hyperlinks- links which are the same color as the background
3. Fake links- some sites put links on unrelated areas to increase traffic. Irrelevant links lower your rankings.

Lowers rank

1. Time it takes to load your page
2. Lack of browser capabilities
3. Excessive Javascript and/or text in flash
4. Lack of tags to keywords
5. Unrelated content in your site
6. Repeating content, be original

Raises Rank

1. Using your keywords in your articles with the right dispersion percent
2. Multiple link levels, using 1 link for 20 pages is frowned upon in the SEO community
3. Visibility, use referral links to other sites with similar content
4. Knowing the competition, look for the original angle that your competitors have not used. They use keywords too. Find a different way to use them.

You can judge your ranking ability by how Google ranks you. They are tough and they are always raising their standards. Once you’re on top keep watch.

Trends come and go as easy as the weather. A popular trend right now is using Analytics. Analytics are tracking sites which help you analyze your web pages. An analytic provider is an interactive way to engage your customers in a painless survey. Most importantly analytics lets you unearth what trends and preferences your patron’s desire.

Benefits of using analytics include fast and flexible ways to use your reported data. With this site you will be able to see how your sites are doing. What time of day you are getting the most hits. Available graphs let you track your progress over different periods. Available time tables include the overall performance, day to day performance, weekly and monthly performances. All the information you will need for improvement right at your fingertips.

The automatic calculations reduce the time needed to administer the site significantly. Analytics allow you to judge which of your sites if performing the best. Analytic providers include; Google, Amazon, WebTrends, and Ebay. This fast and easy method is worth the time to set it up. And the set up time is minimal. Less than an hour depending on how many sites you add. Analytic providers are an asset.

Designing a website can be a daunting task if you’re new to the game and have little time to research the proper ways to develop a site that is both user and search engine friendly. After all, what good is a website if no one can find you? Below are some things to avoid if search engine traffic is a priority.
Frames are pages within a page. Search engine crawlers, spiders, or bots read a frameset as one page with very little content. Just because you can’t see the frames distinctly when viewing a page online doesn’t mean the search spider sees the site as a human does. If you want to see the site as a crawler does, right click on the main area of the page in question and view the source code of that page. You must avoid frames especially for main/home pages of a site.
Flash is a very cool and hip way to do a page as it can incorporate interactivity and entertainment into a site or page, but it has little value to a search crawler. But the fact is a search crawler cannot read flash page or component so all of that content and interlinking you worked so hard to develop earns you nothing in terms of search value. Your viewers may love your site, but you’re unlikely to attract new viewers without the help of the search engines. One caveat: it’s okay to mix in some Flash, but stay away from pure Flash for your website if your goal is to attract the masses.

Search crawlers can’t execute lines of code therefore they won’t be able to navigate your site if you implement a lot of Java script to guide users. The purpose of a crawler is to inventory a website to report back to the engine what it found. Once the search engine has a pretty good inventory of a site, it can mix that site in with the search engine results pages for a given keyword phrase. Try to make the crawler’s job as easy as possible by limiting the amount of scripting navigation per page. If you insist on using scripting for navigation, make sure you have some form of HTML navigation visible as well. At worst, have an HTML link on each page to an accurate site map for your site.

Most search engines will not list dynamic URLs in their results pages. Dynamic URLs are typically used for database driven sites or script based sites. The above paragraph outlines the reasoning behind avoiding scripts, and dynamic URLs are no different. If you must use dynamic URLs, try to have a main page that doesn’t so that the search engines can find you.
Search crawlers frequently get stuck within image maps and can’t accurately inventory your site. Stick with standard HTML navigation schemes if at all possible. When designing your site, keep in mind that it needs to be easy to navigate for users and search engine crawlers alike. A slick site is of little use if no one can find you especially a search engine crawler.

Meta Tags - They’re Back!!

In the beginning of search engine optimization, there were meta tags.

That beginning line of code on websites that began with and closed with was the perfect place to list all of the pertinent keywords related to your site. Search engines would then use this to help determine where to rank the page. Sadly, spammers quickly learned to abuse this useful piece of coding, and search engines began to ignore them.

The good news…. they’re back!

Many of the primary search engines are beginning to factor in meta tags once again, along with several other factors to help determine a page’s ranking. Thanks to new algorithms used for ranking, spammers are no longer able to manipulate their page’s ranking so easily.

So, how do I use meta tags exactly?

As mentioned, meta tags are those beginning lines of code between the open and close tags. Even though meta tags are invisible to web viewers, they contain important information about your website. “Keyword” tags are used to identify the relevant words and phrases that should lead Internet users to your site, and the “description” tags are used to further describe what your website content is about. With this in mind, here are five suggestions to follow when creating your meta tags:

1. Meta tags should be different for each of your website’s pages. You don’t have the exact same content on each of your pages, so it makes sense that each page’s meta tags should be different as well.

2. Your meta tags should focus on what information is really on your page. Don’t waste your time trying to fool the search engines.

3. Separate your keywords with a comma only - no spaces.

4. When deciding which keywords to put first, place the most relevant words at the start of the tag.

5. When writing your description tag, use complete sentences and include your most relevant keywords and phrases.

Some webmasters, thinking meta tags were dead, have erroneously removed them from their source code. Don’t make this same mistake! Thanks to new ranking algorithms countering spammers who’ve abused the meta tag system, meta tags have returned as an important piece of the search engine optimization puzzle.

Having the right keyword is difficult at best. The phrase you might use to search out an item could be vastly different from your patrons. Finding the right keywords to use takes time and research. However, you have several of those resources right readily available.

• Look at your competitor’s keywords and phrases

• Speaking to customers to find out what words they associate with a product

• Your own familiarity with the product

• Keyword search tool programs

• Use the customers perspective/go to your site and search for a product

Keyword programs take a phrase and spit out several other phrases based on the original. We already know using the right keyword or phrase is the key to delivering a product. The more phrases and words linked to that product the more business you receive.

These two products are great examples for cutting down time and effort finding all the different keywords and phrases

There is a product called Keyword Tumbler, this program takes your phrase and makes up several variations of the original. This program is freeware here at this link: http://www.keywordtumbler.com/

This program called Rapid Keyword on the other hand will actually generate the possible typos of the phrase or word and compare other sites and their use of the same keywords. http://www.rapidkeyword.com/