Like reciprocal linking, inward links to your website can be an effective strategy to increase your website’s visibility to Search Engines. Inward links are links pointing to your websites from other websites without providing a reciprocal link from your website.

There are many techniques to improve inward linking. Many of these have enjoyed success with Search Engines. The most proven technique for inward linking is through Ebooks. You can offer interesting and educative Ebooks for free to other websites and they could install them on their sites. The Ebook you create would have a link to your website. This will allow a spider to crawl through that link and visit you website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have a link to your website that would increase the probability of your website being listed with a crawler based Search Engine.
Other techniques include posting newsletters, white papers, news stories and press releases to other websites, particularly industry specific and general portals. The newsletters and press releases would contain a link pointing to your website, thus, increase its visibility to crawlers.
Affiliate programs also help in improving inward linking. In affiliate schemes, you provide incentives (usually a commission on the sale of your product or service) for other websites to become affiliates (i.e. carriers). These affiliates then generate you direct traffic; the added bonus comes in the form of those inward links to your site. Affiliate Programs create powerful alliances between your web site and your various “affiliate” web sites. Providing affiliate links to your website would improve your website’s search engine ranking. It makes your website more visible to crawlers.

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While Meta tags are not the complete answer to the question of “How do I improve my search engine ranking?” they can help with some search engines. Since there are millions of pages with Meta tags, you can add all the pages you want and still not control a sizeable percentage of the pages on the World Wide Web.
What are Meta tags? They are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Other than the title tag, information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, Meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.
Meta tags may help you with some search engines, so you’ll want to consider adding them to every page you create. On the other hand, you can find many highly ranked web pages without Meta tags. For example, Meta tags have no effect on how humans will view your pages and enter your information into directories like Yahoo.

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The TITLE tag is an important one for search engines like Google, as that is often the first one indexed and it is given higher weighting in the relevance rankings. You have to pay attention to this tag. Keep it short (lower than 40 characters) and let the tag have material relevant to the keywords used during search. As an example, if you had stuffed your Company Name as the TITLE tag, it would not help. The visitor that you want to attract is unlikely to be looking for your Company name in the search string. Think creatively as to what keywords people would use if they were looking for goods or services that your site offers.

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Two Meta tags that are important are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION. You have to be very careful about how these are developed and positioned. Frequency and location of the keyword that is being searched are important criteria that determine relevance and hence page ranking. The search engine would generally consider the page more relevant if the keyword that is being sought is in the TITLE tag or is in the KEYWORDS tag near the top of the page. Similarly if the sought after keyword is found being repeated in the page, it may give the impression that this is a more relevant page and improve ranking.
There is a caveat, though. The above is only a general rule that has been often followed by many search engines, but then there are many variants to it. Several players in the SEO industry have tried to proclaim that this is the gospel truth and hence it has spawned a large number of experts that suggest and resort to keyword stuffing and spamming (repeating long strings of keywords). The result can often be just the opposite. Some search engines penalize pages that have keyword spamming. Some will just ignore these pages. Some engines also do not read Meta tags. The intelligent method today is to stay away from spamming and to use tags judiciously. Blend your technique to attain the right frequency and location, but stay away from any excess or spamming.

You can provide an in-depth list of words and phrases in the KEYWORD Meta tag. These words should have some relevance to the specific page or, at least, to your website. While you can vary the case of the keywords, you’ll want to concentrate on the lower case because over 90% of the searches either use lower case or are conducted on search engines that are not case sensitive.
These keywords should contain variations on the same theme. If your site was about gardening, you could use garden, gardening, home and garden, home gardening, vegetable garden, and herb garden. These are all words that might be used in searches for information that your site might provide. The keywords Meta tag is not intended to replace the actual text on your website. This tag is simply to aid the spider in collecting accurate information about your web pages.

The DESCRIPTION tag is used by search engines like Inktomi for the page summary that is displayed on the results page. This summary is what the visitor will read and decide whether he/she wishes to enter your site. If the description is just full of repeated keywords, it won’t do you any good, even if your page is ranked high. You still do not have a visitor. May be you have put off a visitor.

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This is probably the only other prominent Meta tag. This is a very peculiar tag in the sense that it indicates what web pages should not be indexed by Search Engines. The Robots tag is inserted in between the header tags. An example of the Robots Tag is given below:
<HEAD>

<TITLE>This page should be kept out of Search Engine listings</TITLE>

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”>

</HEAD>
By default, a crawler will try to index all your web pages and will try to follow links from one page to another. This can be prevented by using the Robots Tag. Most major search engines support the Meta robots tag. The Meta robots tag also has some extensions offered by particular search engines to prevent indexing of multimedia content.

There are other Meta. tags apart from the ones explored above but most of them are simply ignored by almost all search engines.
To sum up, some search engines will give you a boost if you have Meta tags. But don’t expect that to necessarily be enough to put you in the top ten. Meta tags are mainly a design element you can tap into, a crutch for helping information-poor pages better be acknowledged by the search engines.

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This is an important step in the SEO exercise. What keywords do you need to emphasize and include? How do you choose the most relevant keywords that will be used by your target audience? Pose yourself the question: What would my target visitor be looking for and for which queries I would like to lure him/her to my site? Imagine those queries, as many of them as you can think. Apply this to all categories of visitors that you are targeting. Then list those queries and formulate your keywords from those.
Let your creativity develop grammar and synonym variants of these keywords. The same would apply to descriptions; however while keywords have to match closely with search strings, descriptions should be drafted to allure the visitor after he has seen your listing. It should tell the visitor that your site is indeed offering him best information or outcome for what he is looking.
Select phrases (at least two words), rather than single words, as there would be too many contenders for single word searches. You are much better off focusing on specific search keywords and using longer phrases.

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The location of keywords on your website is vital. You may have placed keywords at only a few locations but if they are inserted at important positions, your search engine ranking may be boosted. The most important position is the Title of the page. Ensure that your keyword is placed in the Title.
Another proven strategy is to place keywords towards the beginning of the web page. For instance, inserting keywords in page headlines, other sub-titles, and introductory paragraphs would certainly help rankings. Avoid using images or tables at the beginning of the page. This will only shove keywords down on the web page, and in turn harm your search engine rankings.
Amongst other strategies, “stemming” is another important technique for placing keywords.

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Positioning Meta tags and keywords into web pages for better ranking should not be confused with spamming. Whatever you do, avoid spamming and keyword stuffing. Search Engines have mechanisms that can spot spamming and as a result ignore such web pages. The key is to insert just “enough” keywords into the web page so as to make the content relevant. Keywords have to be consistent with the entire content of the web page. In other words, do not insert non – relevant keywords just for the sake of improving page rankings.

Many webmasters believe that adding more graphics to a web page would make it more attractive. This is a misconception. A web page should be rich with HTML text rather than graphics. This makes the site more relevant as Search Engines can easily scan text.

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Search engines often look for variants of words from a stem and this is referred to as stemming. Thus ‘play’ can also lead to a search for ‘plays’ or ‘playing’ or ‘players’. Similarly singular and plural forms of words and case can lead to different results for some search engines. Some advisers suggest that Capitalization is a better bet in choosing keywords. However, the wiser counsel is that these variants do not make that great a difference and one should prefer lowercase. Most searches are made in lowercase. Moreover, many search engines are not case-sensitive.

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You may like to know what are the most popular search words and strings, so that you could choose top keywords related to your own site. Some resources that help in this are discussed here.
Place your subject term in Overture’s free Search Term Suggestion Tool. The result will be a list of all search terms related to the word you inserted that were most popular at Overture. The list is in the order of popularity. Thus you know what most people are looking for. Wordtracker has a fee-based service that lets you do the same based on Meta search engines such as Dogpile and Meta Crawler. Supplement this effort through the Related Searches feature that is seen in many search engines. Sites such as AltaVista, Yahoo, HotBot and others have this feature. Place your subject or one of the target keywords in the search string on these.

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