How to boost search engine ranking

 

1. Use a Keyword Report to make sure that the pages on your website have there own keyword rich title, meta description and H1 tag. As every page on your website is potentially a landing page.

Don’t just optimise your home page, optimise your all you product pages too. At the least give each of your pages a unique optimised title and description.

2. Use keywords that attract buyers, not browsers. Most people start off by searching for non-specific keywords like mp3 player. However, after a while, when they know what they want to buy, they will search for something more specific like “apple ipod video” mp3 player.

It’s those more specific keywords that catch customers in the later stages of buying process, just when they are ready to make that purchase. Make sure that you have pages optimised for those that want to buy now.

3. Update your internal links. Use alternative wording for your “Home” link. Whenever possible include keywords in the links to the page that are relevant to that page.

4. Get a listing in DMOZ, Microsoft bCentral and the Yahoo! Directory. These are the search engines favourite directories and will improve your website ranking. Some of these directories do charge for a listing, but the increase in ranking in Microsoft Live, Google and Yahoo! will outweigh the costs involved.

Get a listing in other directories including niche directories, but try not to skew the balance of the links you create.

5. Research you competitors’ backlinks. Utilise Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool to see who is linking to the top 20 website for the keywords that you are interested in. Make sure that Yahoo Site Explorer is set to check “inlinks from all pages except this domain”. The search results are roughly in order of importance, so checking the first two pages will give an idea of which links are helping a  sites rankings.

6. Pay particular attention to the quality (page rank, relevancy etc) of the pages linking to your competition. It is better for your website to be in a good neighbourhood.

Find the best site linking to your competition and try and get them to link to you.

7. Once you have found a number of potential link partners, check out their incoming links too. This will help you assess the quality of the link partner, give you some further potential link partners, plus give you an idea of the neighbourhood the link partner is in.

8. Don’t just use the Google search engine when doing competitive link analysis. Use the other search engines, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live, You could triple your original findings. Then investigate the top ranking sites to find even more sites to get links from.

9. Once you have exhausted the links to your competitors, take a look in the Google Directory. The Google Directory list pages in order of PageRank so you can see which pages Google considers the most relevant for your keywords.

Bare in mind the PageRanks listed in Google’s Directory can be a little out of date, so use it as a guide. But, it is still a great resource.

10. Before requesting a link from a website, use the Windows Live command LinkFromDomain (e.g. linkfromdomain:domain.com) to see who they are linking to. Make sure that they are not linking to too many off-topic or spammy websites.

11. For links to be found by the search engines, make sure the link is not a redirect link, noindex, JavaScript link, nofollow link or nofollow meta tag at the top of the page.

12. It’s up to you to find out if you can get a link from a page. If you found the link through researching your competitor’s inbound links, you should determine the kind of link your competitor has on that page.

• Is the link an advert? You may be able to purchase a link on that page. Contact the website by sending an email to find out about placing an ad on that page.
  
  
• Is the link part of a list? Email the website and ask for a link to your website. The fewer links on the page the better. If the link forms part of a resources page. It may be part of a reciprocal link program, so don’t expect too much boost from a link of this kind.
  
  
• Does the link form part of a signature? You may be able to write an article for the site or contribute positively in discussion. Links embedded in articles are one of the best types of link you can get.

Look for websites that don’t compete with your own but complement it. Remember that some links are on a page due to some sort of business or personal relationship, so getting a link on that page may be tricky.

13. Create a list of your best links and calculate how much work and/or expense it will take to get the link. Arrange the links in order of best to worst and contact the websites in that order. It is possible that you may need to provide content, pay or (worst case scenario) swap links.

Contact the website and let them know that you are interested in advertising, providing content or that their visitors would find your website useful.

14. Create great content. What visitors require is something worth going to your website for. Let the social media websites know about this content as this can generate many natural incoming links for your website.

15. Try getting a link on an authoritative website like Wikipedia. Be tactful and provide good content or link to good content and a link from one of these websites should be attainable.

16. Add your website to a Niche Director. Try searching the Speciality Directories at the Internet Search Engine Data Base. Also if you carry out a search for “your keywords” + directory you may find directories that you could add your website to.

17. Make use of press release and article directory links, but don’t add these too quickly. There should be a good balance of the sources to your incoming link structure. The best links come from analysing your competitors. However, you may be able to provide regular content (with an embedded link) to the websites using your content.

18. If you are not having much luck building links, then there are always the links pages. Links pages are not as effective, but can help boost your rankings especially if there are already some quality links like .edu or .gov on the page.

19. If your website already has good incoming links then you could rank for other searches. Use the Keyword Report to discover which keywords have enough searches to make it worth your while creating new content for them. Having more pages on your website could help increase the traffic through your website. If you can’t write the content yourself, have a good copywriter write it for you.

20. Add keyword modifiers to the links that point to your most trafficked pages. This can increase you search engine ranking significantly. For instance, you may rank well for the keyword “pizza delivery” but what about “local pizza delivery”.

It’s not usually a good idea to modify traffic to your top pages since they are already performing well. But you can get your most trafficked page to rank for more queries by optimising your incoming link anchor text.

By varying the anchor text in your incoming links, they appear more natural, plus helps you page rank for more keywords.