Top 10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking
By Darren Dunner (c) 2007
My top 10 ways to improve search engine rankings are based on 7 years
of banging my head against the world wide web's search engines and reading
numerous books on top 10 SEO tactics.
Let me say first of all that there are a lot of books, sources and tutorials
that make promises of getting your website into the top 10 spots on the
major search engines. Most of these are self promoting and the end result
is that you have to hire these people to accomplish the things they say
you can do on your own.
So I want to preface this by saying that this article on how to improve
search engine rankings is not necessarily a do-it-your-self guide. In
fact, the art of SEO can be time consuming and irritating to say the least.
Some methods require the help of companies like mine so I write this in
hopes that you will understand what it really takes to gain exposure,
realize what you can do on your own and determine when you need assistance.
One final point I want to make is "Don't use any SEO Company that
can't explain what it is doing and that makes claims of using secrët
software that you can nevër see or use". Yes, SEO can be complex
but not to the point that you can't understand what is being done. A good
SEO company is able to educate you on what is being done and explain that
it is best to leave some techniques to the experts.
My 10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking
1. If you are using a shared host, ask your host for a dedicated IP address
for your site. This means that no one on the net shares this IP with your
site. It is yours and yours alone. Many shared servers have tons of related
sites on them. Having your own IP separates you from those sites.
2. Make sure your site validates as a search engine friendly site. The
best site to use for this purpose is The World Wide Web Consortium. Their
markup validation service will tell you if your site conforms to W3C standards
and whether or not the search engines can read your site. If your site
has errors, these may stop the bots from properly indexing your site.
3. Make sure you have a contact page with an address and telephone number
and a form of some sort so people can contact you. Don't líst your
email on the site unless you want spammers to send you tons of junk mail.
Make sure the förm you use on the site uses captcha (challenge-response
system). Have a Privacy Policy Page and Terms of Services page and ensure
that they have at least 300 words of text each. Most sites have these
pages, but I strongly recommend you not copy. Find examples, but use your
own words and include keywords related to your site. Make the pages personal
to the reader.
4. Every page on your site should have at least 300 words or more. Don't
write a 2 paragraph page that has little to no real information. Provide
details and give examples.
5. Create a FAQ or Tutorial page on your site. Make each subject link
to its own page and focus each page on 1 or 2 keywords. As a start, try
to add 10 of these types of pages to your site. You can come up with ideas
for FAQ's or Tutorials by reviewing your industry and trying to determine
what people might not understand about it and the kinds of questíons
they might ask. Then post the questíons and the answers. This is
an easy way to add great content to your site and to help potential clients
feel secure about your service.
6. Add a blog to your site. Have your blog designed to match your site
so that as it draws traffíc your readers know this is your main
site of business. This will add value to your site, plus improve your
search engine rankings. Create categories and write frequently about your
industry to keep your readers interested and your content fresh.
7. Create Link Bait using your blog. There are very few services that
offër this on a professional level and it can be very complex. I
suggest leaving this service to the professionals because it requires
time and knowledge and can be difficult and frustrating to do. The idea
is to add unique and detailed content about your industry which creates
enough buzz through various channels to motivate others to refer and link
back to your blog. This can be a huge asset to your business because many
writers love to provide plugs to quality content.
8. Post to Directory sites that have good inner page rank, especially
on the page where your site will be listed. Use unique anchor text for
each posting. Again, this may be one of those tasks best left to professionals
because, if done correctly, your site's search engine ranking can be dramatically
improved and, if done incorrectly, can be a waste of time, effort and
money.
9. Text Link Brokering is another creative and effective way to build
more anchor text back links. Find related and quality ranked sites that
will líst your site in text format. Generally, this requires a
one time, monthly or yearly fee.
10. If you have a product or service to sell, offër affilíate
incentives. Post these incentives on affilíate forums and elsewhere
to generate interest in getting others to promote your service for you.
Be sure you have a solid affilíate back end in place to provide
your affilíates with dependable stats and access. Then, have people
write reviews on your program's tracking and payout reliability to generate
additional buzz.
The 10 points noted above are by no means a complete líst of what
you could do to improve your site's search engine ranking, but if you
focus your efforts on these 10 areas, rest assured you will see both an
íncrease in traffíc and higher rankings.
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