How to Improve your Google Listing and any other Top Search Engine Listing

If you can improve your Google listing or any other top search engine listing, you will also improve your website traffic. Not that it is free traffic as many claim, since there is always a cost somewhere, whether it be in the software you use or the eBooks you buy to learn the techniques, but once purchased and learned, you can apply it forever.

There are many things you can do onsite to improve your SEO, and also several offsite techniques that can be used. Amongst the latter are article marketing and website directory submissions that can not only improve your Google PageRank, but also get traffic through direct clicks to your site from readers of your article or your directory listings. Most people are by now aware of these, though not necessarily able to apply them to their maximum effectiveness.

It is the former, the onsite search engine optimization techniques, which most fail to understand. Although the mechanics are fairly simple, the principles behind them are generally not understood, and it is that understanding that can make the difference between having to follow instructions and being able to apply them under various conditions to improve your Google listing any time you like. The same applies to getting any other top search engine listing.

Some of the on-site SEO techniques you can apply are listed below, and keep in mind that Google lists individual web pages and not entire websites as web directories do.

* Use LSI (latent semantic indexing) principles when writing your content. Many trust to endless repetition of keywords in order to let the search engines know the main focus of their web pages, but search engines, and Google in particular, will react adversely to that and down-list you. What they are looking for is contextual relevance of your content rather than having keywords thrown at them.

* Sensible internal linking can maximize the PageRank of your more important web pages. Each page starts with a Google PR of 1, and a site with, for example 50 pages, can be linked to allocate these 50 PR points in such a way that your home page, for example, can be allocated a lot more than its initial allocation and therefore have a better chance of a high listing.

* Control the search engine spiders to suit yourself. You can design your website so that the spiders read all of your page text - that is the contextually rich syntax - before finding a link to lead them astray. It is good to use keywords as anchor text, that enables visitors to click to other pages on your website that relate to the keyword, but not to lead the spiders, and visitors, away from your website. Basically what that means is to use intelligent internal linking as suggested in the previous paragraph.

* All of this is in addition to the usual website SEO that most people should be aware of, such as using your principal keyword for each page in your Title tag of the Head section of your HTML, using the same keywords in the H heading tags in your body text and using a proper Description tag in your Head section - the Description and Title appear in the search engine listing.

All of the above is very basic SEO, and in itself will help you improve your Google listing and any other top search engine listing. However, that is not all that is needed to secure a Page #1 listing, let alone a #1 position. There is a lot more needed on-site in addition to all the off-site techniques that you must use.

A top listing depends very much upon the number of back-links from other websites, including article and website directories, blogs, Squidoo lenses and social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and also your videos on YouTube, and you should have your pages tagged on social bookmarking sites such as Furl, Del.icio.us and hundreds more.

If you can learn how maximize your onsite SEO, get as many back-links as possible and as many of the various types of online entity that are mentioned above, then you will have gone a long way to improve your Google listing, and earn yourself a listing a high as Page #1. A top search engine listing will do wonders for your website traffic and your online business.