Use Overture Keyword Selector Tool to research your keywords for popularity and relevance, and then add them to your TITLE, metatags and headers (H1, H2 and so forth). Meta-tags... hmm. What was that again, you wonder? Metatags are keywords used to help identify your web content. These words are listed at beginning of each page source of your website. A visitor who clicks page can't see your metatags, but web crawlers can, and that's how you get bumped up on search engine ladder.

You should be meta-tagging EVERY page of your website, not just homepage, so you can ensure that every section gets indexed properly. Each of your pages contains unique content, right? Well, chances are somebody out there is hunting for it. Let yourself be found.

More about page titles: web marketers are realizing they can make their websites more easily searchable by standardizing their page titles. Some examples: About Us, Services, Contact, Links. Web researchers and web crawlers both know to look for these words when searching for information on net. Add these to your pages to make them easy to index.

A final tip on website optimization: savvy marketer knows not to put a Flash intro on his homepage... because Flash designs aren't keyword-friendly. If you'd like to smarten up your look with one of these, go ahead and use it on another page, but save your homepage for standard, keyword-rich content. It's best chance of improving SEO rank so don't waste opportunity! 3. Optimize Your Web Ads Here's a neat trick: if you advertise your URL on another website that holds a high SEO rank, you can 'get your name out there' by piggybacking on their popularity. This works for print ads and banners just as well as it does for article marketing I mentioned earlier. Attaching your link to one of top ranked websites increases hits to your site, resulting in better search engine position for you! The idea, again, is to run ads that are full of those popular keywords, so they'll be picked up by website indexers. In short: Search Engine Optimization is really snowball effect in action... momentum gaining on itself. It's worth learning all tricks that will bring your website up ranks and keep hits coming! If you're still new at web marketing and website design, why not get a brief tutorial from someone who's well-experienced and well-versed in topic? After that, only place you can go is up!

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Now, obviously a "good" site links to you, it will have a better effect on your website's popularity. Say, for example, a PR 3 website puts a link on their links page to your main page. That link will be considered a PR 2 link to your site (PR - 1), giving you a PR of 2 on your main page. If, however, a PR 0 site adds a link to your site, there is almost no change. A link from a grayed-out site, which means they have a negative PR, will actually be a detriment to your PR, as they have been deemed a site not relevant to anything (or relevant, but banned) by Google. Of course, a link from a PR 7 site to your own will be drastically more effective in boosting your PR than even 20 PR 3 links would.

Getting Good Links

One of most important things to remember about getting a high PR ranking is to get links from "good" sites. These include sites that are directly related to your own site in some way, and preferably sites with a high PR of their own. Good examples include award pages and directory listings. With relevant links coming from related sites with a high PR, your site will not only gain PR fast, but will gain in real popularity. High PR sites traditionally have high traffic due to their link volume and content. If there is a link to you, it is a sign that you have a good site on a related topic with good content as well, attracting visitors who didn't find exactly what they wanted. More visitors means more PR, which in turn gets you more visitors. You can see how important good links can be.

Try to steer away from sites with unrelated topics, as these will probably not help much, if any with your traffic, and may actually bring a penalty to your PR. Other sites to steer away from when trying to work up your PR would be FFAs, or Free For All link programs. These sites allow browsers to enter their link into a huge list (sometimes of thousands of other sites). Usually you will find that these sites have been "grayed out," or given a negative PR effect by Google, bringing your PR down if you have a link from them.

Doorway pages are another thing to avoid. These are shorter, shallow sites that are created simply for putting as many keywords and links as possible on their pages in order to "farm" PR for higher rankings on Google. These, in general, once they are found are "grayed out," as well as sites they link to. Enough links from these will assure that your site will not show up on Google's search at all.

Getting Good Content

Good, original content is not as hard to obtain as some might think. By writing articles for your site you can provide pages of completely relevant and unique content, as long as articles are on subject. A few articles will give you plenty of original content to get a fairly good "relevance rating" with Google, which contributes to your PR rating, and it will not trigger dreaded "duplicate content" tag that will doom your site to obscurity.

In addition, if you can get enough relevant content together, you can eventually become recognized as an "expert" in field. With that status, you will get enough traffic to boost your PR even more. People are always in need of information, and if you provide good enough information, you will find yourself getting links from all over internet.

PR in a Nutshell - an Overview

Basically, with enough unique content and relevant links, you can have a high PR site and be ready to take on internet. Overall, things to keep in mind are to stay consistent with your main topic, both in links and in your content, and stay away from "no-no" sites mentioned above. If you can do these things, you can gain a high PR and a good ranking with Google in a relatively short period of time.