What is your ritual for creating a web page to rank high in the search engines?  Do you spend time counting the keywords in your meta tags?

Do you obsess over the number of outbound links you have, thinking they might be hurting you in some way?  Do you copy your competitor’s meta tags hoping you can steal their rankings?

Maybe you’re puzzled by the lack of traffic you’ve been able to receive from popular search engines like Google and Yahoo.

If any of this sounds like your SEO habits, you’ll want to watch this video…

People often stress over domain name choice because they worry if they choose a certain name, they’ll only be found for the keywords in that domain and nothing else.

While the domain name is important for branding, letting people know what your site is about etc., don’t stress over getting every “important” keyword in the domain for fear of alienating other phrases.

If there are secondary keyword phrases related to your main theme you’d like to rank for, then you can still target them by publishing other articles that focus on these words.

The search engines are getting smarter. They don’t just rely on your domain name and meta tags to determine where your site will rank for certain keywords.

(That is soooooo 1999.)

They look at the complete picture. The content of your homepage, additional pages, how often your content is updated and more importantly off-page criteria all play a role.

In fact, off-page criteria has become a much more important factor in how your pages will rank.

What is Off-Page Criteria?

In other words, how other sites link to you is far more important than how many times you mention your main keyword in your body, meta tags, etc. (Also called backlinks or inbound links.)

So you could list “blue widgets” in your meta tags 3 times, mention the phrase 20 times on your homepage and even choose the domain blue-widget-101.com.

However, if there are no quality sites linking to you using “blue widgets” in their link title or description, then it’s going to be hard for the search engines to deem your site popular for that phrase.

When you see a site at the top of Google for a particular phrase, a big part of that is the number of related sites who have voted for them by giving them a complimentary link.

How Do You Get Complimentary Links?

If you want to simplify it, it really comes down to how useful and interesting your site is to your target audience… plain and simple.

People generally link to sites they find useful, informative, unique, or entertaining, and in some cases, all (or some) of the above.

Look at your site through the eyes of other Webmasters? Why would they want to link to you? Does it offer something fresh and unique or is it just like all the other sites in your niche?

Every time a site in your niche links to you, that is considered a vote for your site. And the more votes you have over time, the more popular your site will be according to the search engines.

And links coming from related sites that are already “popular” in Google’s eyes are even more credible.

Sure, your body content, title tags and other on-page criteria still play a role, but Google (and other engines) are much more interested with how others describe and link to your site.

Continue to follow the basic meta tag guidelines on every page (check selfpromotion.com), but don’t get caught up in all the tweaking and keyword placement to try to please Google and every other engine out there.

Don’t write for the engines. Write to please humans.

And if they like your site, chances are, the search engines will follow.

Literally.

Get it?