Questions about SEO

I have been building my own websites for a while but have never been able to place top 10 in the search engines. I have read about SEO and even tried to optimize to achieve better positioning without any results.
Can anyone point me to the right direction. I really don't know what I am doing wrong. I am not a professional developer, I am self taught, but have been writing html for years. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

Could you put a link to the site so we can have a look ?

 

I had a problem like you a few months ago. I have tried two of main SEO toolkit - Web CEO and Webposition Gold. I like more CEO. It is more professional to me but Webposition worked well.

Tomecki

 

Have a look at Google's guidelines, in particular the "don't use webpositioning gold" etc

Clare

 

check your keyword density.

 

I never was able to obtain any quality positions in the serps until I started adding anchor text links

 

You mentioned a prog that virtually guarantees non-appearance in G

 

there're so many factors:
onpage: keywork in title, link text, in bold
link text from backlinks
size of your site,
frequency of updating your site.

for starter, the alternative is to try a few less competitive keywords, but eventually go after your main keywords when your site has eough strength.

 

For me it worked well, but looks very unproffesional.

Tomecki

 

This is the site I read through, sort of a tutorial when I was getting started: spider food I know JK is planning to update it soon but much of the info still applies.

Have a look through that tutorial and perhaps search for 'seo tutorial' or something like that for some more tips.

The main thing that seems to work is getting word based links (like the one above to 'spider food') from other sites to help you rank well.

If you have 'spider food' in your title, header tags, body copy, description and keyword tags, and in word based links from other sites you will power along in the search results for 'spider food.'

Most importantly though: What ever search term you want to rank on, go to sites in those results and get word based links (text links / anchor text) using your keyword phrase (exchange links with them or buy links from the other sites). This is the most influencial factor.

Then keep reading forums like this to stay up with what other strategies work and changes you need to keep up to date with.

You should also read up on this topic: 'topic sensitive pagerank'

 

What would happen if one repeatedly used webposition gold to check only the competition's ranking?

 

You should learn basics of SEO to rank your websites higher in Google. SEOMoz is a great website to learn SEO. You can start learning SEO from this website and after that explore SEO forums. SEO forums are great for practical knowledge. I too learn from others experience.

 

You should check on Google you will get a write answer.

 

phpmx,
I think you didn't optimize your on-page, if yes then build maximum quality do follow back links how?
Go for google webmaster guide line..

Good Luck!

 

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