Getting high search
engine rankings for your site is possible
There is no secret to getting top rankings for your
site. The difficulty depends upon a number of factors such as how much
competition you have for the topic you are aiming at, and the quality of
your competitors’ sites.
Good content and proper presentation
to the engines is key
The job of the search engine is to find the best
sites to present to the person doing a search. What you need to do then
is make sure you site is as good or better at providing the searcher
with what they are looking for, and making sure the search engine can
determine the quality of your site.
I can’t tell you what to provide the searcher other
than make sure it’s what they are looking for. I can tell you how to
present the information to the search engines in a way that they can
determine the value and quality of your site.
High quality content and high quality inbound links
The search engines have basically two ways of
determining your sites ranking. The first is the content of your site,
and the second is the number and quality of the links to your site from
other sites.
Step one would be to produce a high quality website
with a lot of high quality useful content that people are searching
for. However, it won’t do you any good if the search engines can’t
figure out how good your site is. You have to present your content in a
way that the search engines can use it to determine the quality of the
site.
Let’s take a look at how the search engines figure
out what your site is about and how to assign a ranking to it. Having
the best web site on the web won’t do you any good if the search engines
can’t figure that out.
Head section of the web page
The head section of your web page is the first
thing the engines see. In the head section of your site are some very
important elements. The head section contains the meta tags including
the title tag and the description tag.
Importance of the meta title tag
The title tag tells the search engine what your
page is about. If your title is “John Lund Photography”, the engines
will know the page is about John Lund and photography. If you want to
get a high listing when people search for “John Lund” then that is a
good title. But John’s site is a stock photo site and John wants to be
ranked high for the keywords “stock photo”.
John wants to use his site for two purposes; the
first being to provide great high-quality stock photos to ad agency’s
and people searching for stock photos to use in advertising, and the
second to sell advertising on his site.
Using wordtracker, a keyword research tool, we
determined that “funny pictures” and “stock photos” would be his primary
target keyword phrases.
Importance of the description tag.
The second meta tag in importance is the
description tag. When the search engines display the results it often
displays the contents of the description tags under the title. So people
decide whether to visit your site by the title and the description. If
you description doesn’t inspire searchers to click through to your site,
then getting the high ranking was a waste of time.
Make sure your description tag accurately reflects
what the searcher will find when he gets to your page. Google and the
other engines also use the description tag to help determine what your
site is about.
Keyword tag... not so important
There is also a meta tag for keywords. Although
the engines for the most part don’t use it because of all the keyword
stuffing abuse that has occurred, they may still check to see if it is
being abused. Don’t stuff a bunch of un-related keywords or repeat
keywords. It won’t help and could hurt. I generally use 5-8 keyword
phrases in the keyword tag.
Body text
Body text is the next element the engines look at.
If there is little or no body text, the engines won’t be impressed.
When the engine compares your site to your competitors sites, if you
have a couple of paragraphs of information, and your competitor has a
800 word page, who do you think will look more important.
Put 500 to 800 words on a page so that the engines
know there is content. Make sure you have proper grammar and perfect
spelling. The engines are watching. A page with a bunch of
miss-spelled words will not be viewed as a high-quality page. Also use
headings with your keyword phrases worked in. Keywords in headings are
generally given more weight than keywords in body text.
Don’t stuff extra keywords into your text. Write
for humans. The engines will give a lower weight to body text with too
many keywords.
Photographs and alt image tags
Search engines can’t determine what a photograph is
about from looking at the photo. The only information available to the
engines are the text near the image, the file name of the image, and the
alt tag text for the image. So use a keyword or two in the photo file
name, in the alt tag text, and nearby the image. Again, write for
humans.
Make a sitemap
Make a sitemap. Sign up for Google webmaster
tools. Google tells you exactly how to do it. That way if your
navigation proves difficult for the spiders, the sitemap will make sure
they can index all of your pages.
Incoming links to your site
Get links from other sites. The engines use the
number and quality of links that point to your site as another way to
gauge the importance of your site. Links from spammy and low quality
sites will not do you much good. Links from related sites of high
quality will do you a lot of good. If you have a high-quality site with
information that people want, then other sites will link to you.
Article marketing to obtain one way inbound quality links
One good way to get links is to do some article
marketing. Write some 500-800 word articles and submit them to the
online article directories. You will get long-term quality links, and
you get to choose the anchor text in the links.
Anchor and link text
The search engines look at the anchor text in the
link, the text around the link, the link text, the page the link is on,
and the site the link is on to determine the quality and topic of the
link.
Quantity of content
Your site needs a lot of content. If the engines
are comparing your site with others, and your site has 20 pages of great
content, while the others have 50 or 100 pages of equally good content,
which site do you think will be given a higher ranking? Yep, the bigger
site will win.
You should probably shoot for at least 100 pages of
related content. Use the various elements as they were designed for
i.e. title tags, alt tags, description tag, and keyword tags. Make sure
your grammar is proper and there are no miss-spelled words. Provide
plenty of body text and use headings.
Keyword tools for keyword phrases
Use a keyword tool when composing keyword phrases
because if you use keyword phrases that are not searched for then they
won’t help you get traffic.
Time and patience
It takes time for the engines to trust you. Brand
new sites usually need a year or so before the engines really begin to
trust your site, so patience is necessary. Early on you may get some
traffic from long-tailed keyword phrases, but it will take time to rise
to the top for the really popular search terms where you have lots of
competition.
There you have it. Follow these instructions and
in time your site will rise to the top of the search engine result
pages.