5 Tips To Raise Your Rankings

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ranking-tipsSearch engine rankings are an significant factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic.

If your website doesn’t possess a very good placement in the rankings then it may be hard, if not impossible, to find.

Considering that the majority of searchers simply click on the first couple of results, you want to make certain that your web site is ranked highly enough so that people can easily discover it on the very first page of search engine results.

Although no search engine optimization firm can guarantee a high rankings for your site forever, often times hiring a web marketing business will pay off many times over. For those of you performing your SEO yourself or those of you that would like to help ensure your marketing firm is doing the things that really matter, here are some tips for raising the search engine rankings of your website.

Optimize your web site for your target audience, not the search engines. Think of exactly what impression your web site gives your users—you’ll create a significantly better site the search engines will love.

Produce compelling content for pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases. Pick out a couple keyword phrases that apply towards the certain page you’re writing and work those phrases into the copy.

Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique title tag. Title tags are given significant weight with search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. The title tag is the text shown in the engines search results, so it’s crucial that it be alluring, not just crammed with keywords and phrases.

Make certain your website is link-worthy. Search engines like Google and Yahoo judge a site’s popularity by the number of links pointing to it. Generate great content people will wish to hyperlink to. It’s a must for your link building efforts to offer things worth linking to.

Don’t be hitched to any one keyword or phrase. Optimize for all of the relevant key phrases. If you can rank high for a good percentage of them, they’re going to add up to a lot more than just that one particular keyword phrase that you think is the big money one.

Keeping these five tips in mind when optimizing your website and you’ll be on your way to getting much better rankings and a lot of organic (free) traffic.

Google’s Speed Ranking Factor

BMW 520d speedometer
Image by storem via Flickr

There has been a lot of speculation going on over Google’s announcement late in 2009 that load times of a page will become a relevant factor in ranking web pages.

If you haven’t heard all the scuttle-butt the articles below should get you up to speed.

Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010
I would say that based on Matt’s comments it is probably fair to assume that Google will indeed begin taking page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, although he doesn’t come right out and say that they definitely will. …

Will Google Make Page Speed a Ranking Factor
Google is obsessed with speed. A tremendous amount of corporate energy is being put into initiatives to speed up the web. Googles Lets make the web…

What do you think? Is speed really a factor when it comes to rankings?

I personally don’t think so. With unique content and link building factors being the bread and butter of “true’ results I find it hard to believe that the load time of a page will have any real effect on the serp’s.

Worried about your load time?

GTmetrix – A New Tool For Google’s Speed Factor
GTmetrix is a free tool that provides in depth information on the speed of pages on your site and what you can do to improve load time.

Sure, page speed plays a role and is important when it comes to the user’s experience but when it comes to displaying relevant search results speed is not a factor.

Why You Need Backlinks

Current example of Google's (and web search en...
Image by lambo via Flickr

Search engines take numerous variables into consideration when displaying websites inside their natural search results depending on the search terms you use.

Backlinks are just one of these many factors.

Unfortunately only a small number of people,who are sworn to secrecy, know the complete algorithm that is used. This makes it real tough to know what links are worth perusing that would benefit your domain the most.

And alas not all search engines are created equal. Even though there might be some aspects of the algorithm that are comparable to say Google, Yahoo and Bing have their own ’secret sauce’ whenever figuring out rankings.

Things such as the domain age, quality of content, the actual domain name, and on and on establish where your website falls whenever people do a search.

Backlinks play a huge, but not fully known, roll in driving a ton of visitors to your website and in many cases it helps with SEO. Plus it gets you traffic from the sites you are receiving backlinks from.

If you would like to drive top quality traffic to your web site – you need backlinks. Lots of them. And if you want to be found in the search engines for short and long-tail keywords, you need backlinks from several other websites using those words as anchor text that link back to the web page you’re trying to rank for.

Don’t make the error that many people do – and that’s just focusing on building backlinks to their home page. They are missing out on a great deal extra traffic!

Don’t just build links to your home page for the main keyword(s) you’re targeting, but dig deeper and get backlinks for longer-tail keywords you’re targeting within a blog post or an individual page on your website.