How To Increase Your Search Engine Rankings

Getting listed higher on search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo are the big three) is a major key in the online success of a company. Although these companies are constantly changing the way some factors influence a websites ranking, there are some techniques that will always be important.



When talking about search engine rankings many people ask themselves questions like; how many keywords should I put in my anchor text? What is the keyword density that I should have on the page? Should I use short copy or should I use long copy? Can I use flash or not? How many keywords should I put in my "alt" text? Etc... A general statement to answer the above questïons is that "magic numbers do not exist." The most important thing you can understand as a search engine optimisation expert is that algorithms change. Just when you think you understand what is going to make you number one for a keyphrase in a search engine, something could easily change, and you might have to spend months or even years trying to figure the new algorithm.

It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm, do something much easier instead... observe your top competitors. All you need to do is to understand what elements your competitors are using to make them rank in the top positions.

The main elements to getting top search engines rankings are:

 

  • Number, quality, and relevance of inbound links pointing to your site
  • Fresh, relevant, quality content (needs to be added frequently)
  • Keyword density of your home page or any page you want to rank highly

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    Lots of Links

    The first thing to observe from your competitors' sites is their inbound links. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to Google and typing: "link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com". However do not only do this on Google because they don't show all actual links pointing to a site. Yahoo and MSN tend to show a lot more of the back links to any given website.

    Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think about what the category is that those links come from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category.

    Fresh Quality Content

    The second thing to observe is how much fresh content the top sites have. Search engines love quality relevant content that is added and updated frequently. You will probably notice that the top sites in your niche have many articles and other quality content, and are continuously adding new content to their sites.

    People that surf the web are usually searching for information, so content is the "fuel" of internet traffïc. If you want to attract many potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests. Updating it frequently with more quality content will keep visitors coming back to your website over and over again.

    Keyword Density

    The third thing you need to observe is the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should you repeat your main keywords? In which part of the web page should your main keywords be mentioned? Again, there is no magic number, it's all about observing and measuring against the top websites in your market. But what should you measure?

    - Meta tags

    - Alt tags

    - Titles

    - Names of the images on the page

    - Heading tags: h1, h2, h3...

    - Frequency and position of the keywords in the body text

    Each one of these items should be measured independently. There are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets of top rankings.

    Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail in overall optimization. This is when you use keywords too often or too little. If you look unnatural, your rankings will suffer as a result.

    So, what should you do now? We have been optimising websites for clients for a number of years and have had some fantastic results. Webpages that weren't even ranked on the top 10 pages of searches are now in the top 5 sites on the front page of google, and getting these clients a LOT more traffic, and business.

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