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Simple SEO steps to increase your search engine rankings |
One of the questions I get asked a lot is 'how do I get to the first page of Google'. Another way of asking the same question is 'How do I get good rankings in the search engines'. There are various SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques and methods involved in doing this and frankly, for someone new, it might sound a bit like rocket science and you might not have given attention to this previously.
A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.
At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase or act on your Most Wanted Response (You do have a Most Wanted Response, don't you? That is the one thing that you would like customers to do when they visit your site. Normally when you have an ECommerce site, the MWR is that they buy something. If you have a website advertising services and products through an offline type business, your Most Wanted Response would probably be that they contact you or sign up for your newsletter).
The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization, or SEO, is about.
In order to attract more traffic through the search engines, there are basically two main things to do - both are important and the one is useless without the other.
I am talking here of On-Site factors and Off-Site factors:
'On-Site factors' means that you make small changes to your website pages. You can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly - especially in the local (i.e. South African) search engines like Ananzi and MSN.
By 'Off-site factors' we mean that you should look at marketing your website on the Internet through getting other sites to link to you.
In the rest of this article we will look at 'On-Site factors'. If you want more information about marketing your website on the Internet using both On-Site and Off-Site factors, I recommend that you sign up for my free e-coruse on marketing your site on the Internet - why don't you subscribe right now? The information that you will get out of this 10 part course will help you avoid making costly mistakes with your website, as well as teach you the secrets of getting high rankings in Google.
Click here to sign up now! (The sign-up form opens up in a new window)
But onwards then to on-page optimisation factors:
The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.
The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.
Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.
The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.
Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.
To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.
Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.
To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.
Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.
If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.
Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization (SEO) company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.
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