The placement of keywords and phrases is the foundation of an SEO strategy, however there are several other factors that have an effect on your search engine rankings. The last items I want to briefly discuss include links, metatags, content, and URLs.

Links
There are three kinds of links we’ll discuss; inbound, outbound, and internal. When it comes to links, inbound links, or backlinks, are the most important since they are somewhat of a measure of the popularity of your site.

An inbound link is a link to your site from another site. In Googles own words: “The best way to ensure Google finds your site, is for your pages to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google’s robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we’ll find you quickly.” Of course it can be difficult if not impossible for others to link to your content with any regularity or reliability.

Outbound links are links that start from your site and lead to another. It’s important to know that the quality of the sites you link to reflects on your site. If you link out to spamy or suspect sites, then that reflects negativly on your site and will lower your search position or even black-listed.

Internal links are links from one page to another page within the same Web site. These are another important part of your SEO plan for your site, as they will help ensure that a larger portion of your site is indexed. The search engine spiders arrive on your home page and then will start to work their way down the chain through links you have. If there are internal links, the spider will continue to mine information from the various sections of your site. So, the more robust an internal link schema you have, the bigger imprint on the search results you have the potential to make.

Metatags
Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide information about a given Web page and are not obvious to a user visiting the site. Metatags are not nearly as important now as they were in years past. Originally, the meta tags where how search engines determined a page or sites relevance, but people began to use them for keyword stuffing and spamdexing. As a result, the search engines turned to looking at the actaul content of a page instead of realying on the meta tags so much. While they are not as important as they once were, they are still part of the SEO equation. There’s no guarantee that using meta elements in your Web pages will greatly improve your rankings, it’s still worthwhile to include them.

There are several meta attributes, but the two I wanted to mention are the meta description and the meta keywords. Below is the html code:
The keywords attribute: While most search engines give little, or no value to this meta element, its still worth the time to help emphasize your target keywords.

The description attribute: Unlike the keyword attribute, most major search engines support the description attribute. Many search engines, including Google, index and use the text within the element as the description text for display in search results.

Content
As we have mentioned in our previous posts, regular, relevant, and unique content is critical, not only to your readers, but to Search engines as well. The more frequently a site is updated the higher the probability search engine spiders will revisit the site sooner. For many sites this can be a challenge, but just having a news section on your site that is updated regularly is an easy place to start. Another way to get regularly updated is through RSS feeds.

Static URL vs. Dynamic URL
As mentioned in our Keyword placement article, the page URL is an effective place to use keywords. But in order to use them the URL needs to be “friendly.”

This is where it is important to understand the difference between static and dynamic URLs. A dynamic URL is created automatically by some script or with the help of the database and typically use characters like: ? = &. A dynamic URL may look like this: website.com/design.php?category=5&product=42.

On the other hand, a static URL is one that does not change and may look something like this website.com/design/portfolio.html. Although dynamic URLs can be crawled and indexed by search engines, static URLs are known to have a slight advantage for a number of reasons:

1. Static URLs typically rank better in search engines.
2. Search engines are known to index the content of dynamic pages much more slowly than that of static pages.
3. Static URLs look “friendlier” to end-users.

Google and other seach engines are making progress in determining which parameters can be removed from dynamic URLs, so if you currently have a site that generates dynamic URLs do not panic. Eliminating some of the parameters to make it look static would be a very time consuming effort and could cause more harm than good.

As you have probably gathered from reading this series of SEO articles, when it comes to optimizing your Web site for search engines, there is no one single, magic solution. It takes strategy, time, and patience to achieve high rankings. But once your process is in place, it’s really quite painless and as you can see from the examples we’ve shown, it can pay off significantly in a short amount of time.