Ten Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
- Sunday, February 1, 2009
I thought it would be a good idea to give some VERY BASIC pointers on improving your search engine rankings. It is important to note that there is no exact science to improving your rankings. There are only steps you can take to make your website “optimal” for search engine success. They call this search engine optimization or SEO for short.
As a small business in Naples, Florida you are probably feeling the crunch right now. So I believe now is a great time to find inexpensive ways to promote your business and your website. Performing SEO on your website is a great place to start.
So let’s get started with some basic search engine optimization tips!
- Figure out what people are searching for.
You can probably guess what your potential customers are searching for right? Not necessarily. You need to do some keyword research. Start by thinking about who your customers are. What words and phrases do they use to describe your products? They won’t necessarily know your industry lingo.
Brainstorm an initial list of phrases that you think your customers are using to find you. Then use free tools to research them further. Google has a great keyword tool found here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- Write good copy.
What is good SEO copy? Good SEO copy makes sense to humans and search engines. Write copy that explains your product, engages your site visitors and compels them to buy, but use your keyword phrases in the process. Don’t repeat your keyword phrases to the point where it sounds unnatural, but use them where it makes sense.
- Help search engines find your pages.
Create a site map. Think of this as a table of contents for your website. It can be helpful for human beings and search engines that become lost. List all the pages of your site as links with a description of what that page is.It is also a smart idea to have good internal link structure within your website. Utilize text navigation in your footer. Search engines might have trouble following fancy flash or javascript navigation, but if you include alternate text navigation then they can still find your other pages.
- Compose good title tags.
Most search engines will use your title tag and a few sentences from your page copy for display in the search results. They also look for keyword phrases in your title tags. The idea is to compose a title tag that is going to compel a searcher to click your listing and help your search engine rankings.
Our title tag is:
Naples Web Design from $699 – Integrity Networx
We have used our keyword phrase “naples web design” and by mentioning $699 users might be intrigued enough to click through to our website.
- Get some links.
Search engines like to see other websites linking to yours. A website linking to yours is “casting a vote” for your website.
Therefore it is a good idea to have others link to you. Start with organizations you belong to. Do they have a member directory on their website? Make sure your link is there. Are there industry specific directories that you can be listed in online? Submit to those. You can submit your website to general directories. Some are free and others charge a fee. You can also exchange links with businesses that you partner with. For example: Realtors might exchange links with mortgage brokers, home inspectors and title companies. If you exchange links, make sure you do it with a reputable website that is truly going to be a helpful resource to your visitors.
Link building is a very broad topic and I have only briefly touched upon it in this post. So stay tuned for more link building discussions in later posts.
- Optimize your links.
Now that you are working on links, it is important that you know that search engines read the “anchor text” within a link. Anchor text is the text that appears in the underlined portion of a link. If your website is about “Naples Real Estate” and that is a phrase that you are targeting, then some of your inbound links (from other websites) should contain that phrase anchor text.
Search engines also read anchor text within your website. Let’s say you have a page featuring Naples condos and you have optimized that page for the phrase. On your home page you might mention that you specialize in Naples condos and then link to your condo page from within your page copy.
Submit to Google and Yahoo maps to appear in local searches. It’s Free!https://www.google.com/local/add/
http://local.yahoo.com/
- Start a blog.
Blogs add useful content to your website and that will attract visitors and search engine spiders. Updating your blog regularly will bring search engine spiders back to your site frequently. Search engines love fresh content. Links from within your blog posts to other pages of your site can help the rankings of those pages as well. You can also optimize these links as described in item #6. Also, if other people find your blog posts useful, they will come back regularly to read your blog through an RSS feed (we’ll touch on that in a later post). Lastly, useful blog posts, can become viral (that’s a good thing). What that means is people will comment on their own blogs about your post, forward your post to friends and link to it. All of this will help your search engine rankings.
- Submit an XML sitemap to the search engines.
Submitting an XML sitemap will insure that the search engines know about your site and know about all the pages on your site and are able to index them. Once you’ve created your XML sitemap you will need to upload the file and submit to Google and Yahoo.
Create an XML sitemap here:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Submit them here:
www.google.com/webmasters/tools
www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
- Beware of bad linking.
With all of the talk about the importance of inbound links, you might be tempted to go out and indiscriminately get as many links as you can. If you decide to exchange links with a website, make sure that the website you will be linking to is something that will be a good resource for your website visitors. Additionally, make sure the page where your link will be placed is not filled with hundreds of other links that have nothing at all in common with your site. If you see links for questionable products (i.e. Viagra) then do not exchange links with the site. Also do not participate in linking schemes where you are promised hundreds or thousands of backlinks overnight. The search engines may penalize your website for this. The best practice for obtaining backlinks, is to slowly and steadily acquire high quality links from authoritative sources. See item 5 for more information.
Labels: Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO 
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