Good honest SEO is the future.  Make your site’s content as relevant as possible for your target audience and you should be rewarded with the visitors you are after.  Forget about keyword spamming and other such tricks (admittedly I achieved my first top ten ranking via dubious means) – there are numerous ways in which you can optimise your site that will not be frowned up by search engines and cost you your ranking at a later date and which will put you in good stead moving forward.

As well as taking care of your own site, it is also important to know that your ranking for various keywords can be affected by external links to your site.  If you can get yourself a number of links pointing at your site with good relevant keywords in the title tag and anchor text of the link, then your site is seen as relevant to these keywords and your ranking can potentially improve.

For example, if you’re in the business of selling “cheap knock off dvds” then if you can get your links to your site that are along the lines of

You could well see your site climb the rankings for those keywords, the idea being, the text used to link to your site from another site will have keywords relevant to the content of your pages in and around the link.  This can be a very powerful SEO technique, particularly if you are able to control the attributes of  a link on an external site.

The other thing to bear in mind, is because of how spiders treat external links to your site, you can start appearing in search engine rankings for keywords that do not appear anywhere on your site!

One example of this is the Adobe Reader download page – at no point do the words “Click here” appear on the following page:

www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

But search for the term in Google and this appears top of the pile, why?  Well, there are probably thousands if not millions of websites out there with a link that goes something like “you will need adobe reader to view this pdf so click here to download it”.

Another interesting one I discovered recently was “website” – in at number two above the official Wikipedia definition of the term is the site of graffiti artist Banksy– as you can imagine, it’s heavily graphical, built in framesets and barely contains any text – hardly the kind of fayre the googlebot would get it’s teeth stuck in too yet it still ranks highly for a term that doesn’t appear anywhere on the site!

The power of the blog should also not be underestimated, I can imagine there are one or two blog entries out there that chastise the work of the current US President and to avoid any confusion as to which George Bush they are referring to, a link would be conveniently left to this page:

www.whitehouse.gov/president/

I know that it may seem a crazy notion that someone would do this, but a quick Google search for “worst president” has the official home page of George W currently appearing at no. 7, and I’m pretty certain the White House’s webmaster wasn’t instructed to optimise the site for those particular keywords.

Think on.