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.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 9:03 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
