10 ways to improve your search engine rankings
May 8, 2008
If you’re tasked with improving your company website’s faltering search engine performance, you can do hundreds of things to make a difference. Here are 10 ideas to get you started.
- Content is king. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a cliche, cut it’s important. Don’t mess around with website content. Write each page as if it’s the only page your potential customer is ever going to read.
- Links make the web go round. Building good quality incoming links to your website increases your popularity in the eyes of search engines. You score extra points if those links use your primary keywords.
- A title tag on every page. Google lists over 34 million pages with the title ‘untitled document’. Make sure that every page of your website has a page title that’s relevant to the keywords and content of that page.
- Flash is not your friend. While it’s OK to have a couple of Flash elements on a webpage, make sure that if your entire site is built in Flash, you’ve got an HTML version of your site for search engines to spider.
- Give each page it’s own topic. Building a separate page for every keyword on your site allows you to have more pages indexed by search engines for specific search terms, and ensures your visitors get to read exactly what they search for.
- Buy now! Whether you want someone to buy from you, sign up to your newsletter or send you a sales enquiry, without a call to action you aren’t going to get much of a response. While no-one is saying your target market lacks intelligence, people do need to be told what to do online.
- Start a blog. Prospects and customers love to be able to interact with a business owner online. There are very few better ways to improve your reputation. What’s more, blogs are extremely search engine friendly, so you benefit both ways.
- Analyze keywords. There are a number of free and premium keyword analysis tools available to help you research the popularity of a keyword before you write your pages, giving you a broad idea of the number of visitors you could expect to your page and the number of websites you’ll be competing with.
- Use content headings. Instead of just writing your HTML content headings in bold writing, use H1, H2, H3, etc. and style the look of the headings using CSS.
- Spread the word. With millions of websites to compete with, you’d do well to try everything you can to spread your visibility on search engines. Try listing in quality online directories, experimenting with social media, blogging, commenting on other blogs, writing articles for article directories and getting involved in forums for a start. Every time you expose yourself in one of these outlets, there’s a chance you’ll be linking back to your own website.
