Getting a good ranking in search engines is essential. If you do well you'll be bringing in traffic, and most importantly sales - people who have searched for a term that you have the answer for. Whether you're selling cars, computers, teddy bears or garden hoses, the principles are the same. What follows is my advice for improving your search engine ranking.
Some Truth First
Many sites and companies you will find offer services saying they will get you to the top of google. Promises of #1 rankings and lots of traffic from it. All this, frankly, is untrue. They may well get you such rankings, but usually by means frowned upon by Google and other search engines. If you're caught you'll be banned or have your rankings punished - as simple as that. You will also find that some of these companies will get you to the top for keywords that are not exactly what you want to be aiming for.
Be The Best
The simple fact is, search engines want to offer users the best service possible. When someone searches for something they want to give to them the best website that is related to what they entered. The best deals or the best advice. Quite simply, if you are at the top of the rankings but your site is not what the user is after (ie they don't think you are 'the best') then they will leave - simple as that, they'll just go back and try the next result.? Therefore the best thing you can do is to 'be the best' in your field. Offer the best advice, the best deals and the best website experience. If your site is worth visiting then you'll see an increase in visits and sales, whether you're ranked top or not.
Choosing your Keywords
It is worth planning your keywords right from the word go. You'll want to target maybe 15 or so 'key phrases' of two or three words each. Some should be quite general to your field, others more specific and 'niche'. If you're struggling to get ket phrases it's worth using a keyword suggestion tool to spark some ideas.
Content Content Content
You want to sneak these key phrases into your content, page titles and content titles where you can. Try not to go over the top, but add them in where they can go. For example, instead of things like "Welcome to Sparky's" as a title, try "Welcome to Sparky's, The online electrical retailer with the best cables on offer" - notice how I got electrical retailer and cables in there without it sounding like they are just there for a search bot - Be descriptive and informative with them.
Content is King on the internet, and the more of it there is, the more a search engine can pick up and use for searches. You want to try and get as much information on your products as you can. Maybe write some articles relating to your field, adding extra value to your site at the same time.
Use Your Page Titles
Page titles are very important. I am talking here about what goes in your <title> tags and appears at the very top of the browser window. When reading a website, search engines value different tags with different importance - title is the most important. Make sure you have a different title for each page, and get the important stuff at the start. A good way to do this is instead of putting "Sparky's Online Store - Cables" put "Cables - Sparky's Online Store", making the word cables to most important thing on the page.
User Your Page Titles
Next down on the HTML tag importance list is header tags: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, h7. Therefore you want to give each page it's individual title within a h1 tag, and use the others for subheadings etc, placing your keywords in them where you can.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags are hidden tags in the head of a HTML document that describe a page for search engines to use. These have depleted in their importance over the years as they are open to abuse. It is still worth including a description and keywords tag just in case though.
No to Flash and Informational Imagery
Search engine spiders find flash files difficult to interpret - they are not mere text files like HTML documents. They struggle to access the text within if the even bother at all. Similar can be said to images. If you have text in an image a search engine cannot read it. Make sure you do not have important information in such images or flash movies. With images, make sure you always include an alt="" attribute describing the content of the image.
Backlinks
Backlinks are a very important part of search engine rankings these days. Search engines such as google will look at all the links it finds on other sites that point to your site, and look at the text that is used to link to it. The more incoming links you have, the more important your site is deemed. Equally, if the page linking to you has lots of incoming links, it will see that as a more important incoming link. It can get a bit complicated to explain, but put simply, the more people linking to you the better.
Good ways to get backlinks can be directories, related sites, blogs, social bookmarking sites or advertising. Remember that links from sites related to your site are far more valuable than ones from unrelated sites, so try and get quality over quantity. It also helps if you get keywords in the link too, instead of a link simply reading the name of your site.
Domain Name
Domain names can also play a part. If you can, it's worth getting a good one from the word go, and get a keyword in it. For example, www.sparkys-cables.com will do better than just www.sparkys.com.
Search Engine Friendly URLs
Some search engines struggle to read dynamically generated pages - typically with URLs that look something like: www.site.com/index.php?page=1. It is also helpful to be descriptive in the URL too, instead of using an ID to find the page, use a text based descriptive one. You can use mod_rewrite on apache servers (there is a similar thing on windows servers) to rewrite URLs to be friendlier to search engine bots, so you come out with something like www.site.com/page-name/
Well, there you have it, some tips for optimising for search engines. SEO is an ongoing thing, and takes time to get the results you want. Keep at it, try different things out with keywords and keep looking for those backlinks.
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