Below I have listed some basic yet very important tips to help raise your business’ exposure on the internet. These tips are focused mainly on those trying to achieve higher rankings on Google and other search engines.
1) Learn to Build Back Links
There is nothing more important to your long and short term success than link building. Anchor text is critical when people link to you. Kindly ask them to use your target keywords instead of your URL. A great article that goes into detail about link building is webconfs.com. Make sure to submit your site to DMOZ and other directories. You are probably going to want to do this as soon as possible as this can take a few months to get listed. Link exchanges can be good, and can be cheesy. Use them correctly, and if you find somebody that is of use (High Rankings & SEO) link to them. Never be a part of a link farm, or a web rings. They simply don’t work and can harm your ranking. Paying for links is also an option. You must be careful because Google & Co. are not thrilled about this easy approach.
2) Keyword Research
Don’t waste your time optimizing your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. So in other words find some good quality keywords, that you will focus that precious time of yours on. Some good tools to help with keyword research are Trellian.com, and Google Adwords tool. A good rule of thumb is to target a wide range of keywords rather than trying to hit that 1 major keyword. Here is an example: Instead of making a dumb choice of trying to rank in the top ten for “Cars”, try “Used cars in NY”, “Stolen cars in Troy”, etc.
3) Research Your Competition
My absolute favorite tool for this is SEO for Firefox, this is a great tool by the guys at SEOBook.com.
This tool gets the following info from the other guy.
- .edu links
- .gov links
- Age of their site
- del.icio.us
- Alexa Ranking
- Dmoz
- Whois
By the way, you are probably thinking if this is ethical. You should worry about that if you are the suit in the compliance department. Also, everyone else with a brain does it, so that makes it right.
4) Title tags and meta tags
Meta and title tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. The title tag will be seen on the top of your browser and, also on the SERP. All other meta information is used by the robots indexing your page, and by the browser rendering your page. Meta information is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with and consists of page description, page keywords, and the content type.
Title tags should contain your keywords and not the name of your company ( Unless your company name has your keywords inside it ). Fixing the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings. Also, the words in the title tag are what appear in the link on the search engine results page (SERP), changing them may result in more clicks. This should not be mistaken with listing every keyword in the book.
A great tool to check your work and make sure that you are doing things correctly is this Meta Tags Analyzer.
5) Content
Write good, relevant content. A good tip is to always target your content for viewers and Google and other search engine results will come naturally. This is also a really good way to build links. When writing your content make sure that you have a good deal of keywords throughout the article. The keyword research tool will help you with this. Don’t place your keywords too many times throughout your article as this can be seen as “keyword stuffing” and is not fun.
6) Submit a Site Map
Google and other robots love to be able to properly crawl your site. I use Google Webmaster Tools, and also have the ability to closely watch for any errors that may hinder good search results.
7) Site Stats
It is not the most enjoyable thing in the world to do however, it is important to validate your code. This is not only a good practice for higher rankings, but is also important for overall site accessibility. Site load time can play a role in rankings as well, and from personal experience there is nothing more frustrating than having enough time to go for a jog while waiting for a website to load. Spend the extra 10 dollars and get a good domain name server. The final statistical factor in my opinion is to be sure that your site is laid out properly and never link to sketchy web sites!
Heading Tags
Properly use heading tags throughout your articles, and make sure that you put your keywords in there again! Search Engines put a high emphasis on this and it also goes hand in hand with the previous tip.
9) Links
There is nothing more important to high rankings and steady traffic than good quality, relevant links.
10) Don’t be stupid
There is no easy way out. Achieving a high ranking on Google and other search engines, takes a great deal of time. You need to be patient, and if you do not see results in a few months, make some adjustments and go forward again. Good results should be considered a steady rise in the SERP’s, and not necessarily the end all results that you have hoped for. I will soon have a related post on the top things NOT to do.
