I think it’s time to get some activity on this blog, and since SEO is one of the hot topics at this moment, and I’ve worked with SEO for some years now, I think it’s time to reveal some of the important SEO factors I’ve learned for the past three years.

I do own a SEO site myself called http://pagerankster.com with unique SEO tools like Pagerank lookup for multiple sites at same time, and a tool where you can submit all your sites, and get detailed ranking details, get an e-mail when your pagerank changes, and soon you can see your Google backlinks, alexa ranking, and much more.

How to get listed in Google at high rankings?

To be short: the higher your Pagerank is, the higher is your sites to be placed in Google search results (or SERPs).

Tip 1: Join forums, forums are a great way to get backlinks to your website. You can put your link in your signature, and begin posting and posting and posting…….. Remember: Your link text (anchor text) shouldn’t just be your URL. It should be your best keyword. Like <a href=http://jaxl.com>Tech news</a>.

With an anchor text like this, you’ll probably rank higher on that keyword in Google.

A little side-story: You may have heard about the “Miserable failure” Google-bombing. In short, a blogger started creating links with the anchor text “Miserable failure” linking to the official White House biography of George W. Bush on high-ranked sites. In only 6 weeks, the official biography became #1 result when you searched for “Miserable failure” on Google. So anchor texts have a HUGE share in how search results are shown.

You can also gain backlinks by submitting your link to high-ranked link-directories or other related websites.

Tip 2: The domain name itself does also have a huge share in the search results. If your domain name contains your top-keywords, it will rank high on those.

I own the domain name http://needfreelance.com, and in only one month, I became #1 in Google search results when searching on “need freelance” and “need freelance work”, I was also in top 10 when searching on “freelance”. Unfortunately, I’m not that anymore :o(

Tip 3: Another important thing is to use search-engine-friendly URLs. Instead of using http://yoursite.com/shownews.php?id=5 you can use http://yoursite.com/news/title-on-your-news.

You don’t have to re-make your whole site, with mod_rewrite, you can make those link dynamicly, so http://yoursite.com/news/title-on-your-news calls the file shownews.php?title=title-on-your-news.

Simply make a .htaccess file with this content:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule news/(.*) shownews.php?title=$1

Tip 4: Use your keyword in the <title> tag of your website. You can also use it in <h1>, <h2> tags etc.

Another good thing to do is to use <b> tags on your primary keyword in a context. For example:

Jaxl.com provides <b>tech news</b> and more.

I will post more SEO factors later on. I hope you enjoyed reading this.