Search Engine Ranking - How To Improve Your Site's Placement
If you have a business website you will know that there is
no such thing as too much traffic (assuming, of course,
that your intention is to make a profit). The majority of
targeted traffic comes via search engines either as a
sponsored result through pay per click (PPC) advertising or
through placement in the search engines' organic or natural
results.
To get a decent amount of free search engine traffic to
your website, you need to get your site listed as high as
possible in the organic search results. This means
preferably on page one and definitely within the first
three pages. Statistics have continually shown that web
surfers rarely scan through or click links below the third page of the organic search results.
Here are four tips to keep in mind when you are trying to
get your website listed in a high position in the search
engines.
Content Is King
You will undoubtedly have heard that before: it's one of
the things the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts
agree upon. However, it is not just any old content:
the search engines love good original, relevant content. If you
build a website by filling it with articles that appear on
hundreds of other websites, your site might eventually get
listed by the search engines but it won't appear high up in
the listings. It will probably be ranked so far down, no
human visitor will ever see it. You need to write
your own articles or, if you are unable to do this, pay a
ghost writer to write articles for you. It is also quite possible to get good content by using articles from pros in your field and providing linked by-lines without paying them for the content and with exclusive rights.
Quality Links Improve Status
Remember that you need "quality" links to improve your
website's standing with the search engines. It is a waste
of time to buy links or create an obvious "link farm"
swapping links with any and all who will do so. Writing articles helps here also by providing linked by-lines back to your web site. An excellent way of obtaining one way links
back to your website is by writing your own articles (or
having them ghost-written) and submitting them to article
directories. Publishing articles is arguably the best way
of obtaining links. Exchanging links with other websites
is still useful but reciprocal links do not impress Google
and, all too often, where Google goes the other search
engines follow. The one possible exception to this is reciprical links where both sites are about the same thing and both have high quality content but not identical content.
Keywords Count
If you target the wrong keywords, you will be making life
harder for yourself and setting yourself up to fail from
the start. Before you rush in to try to stake a claim to
number 1 position with a hugely popular keyword, take a
look at the competition. If a great big established
website has been sitting at number 1 for eons, do you
think your little newbie site has what it takes to topple
the champ? Unlikely! You probably won't even stand a
chance of getting in the first ten pages within the
foreseeable future if the keyword is really popular. Far
better to do some careful research and find keywords that
are not only relevant to your website content but also have
fewer sites competing for the traffic. For listings to
really count, your website needs to be ranked within the
first three pages of a search result and the fewer sites
there are in competition, the greater your chance is of
getting your website into a good position.
Change Is Good
Keep adding fresh content to your website and also check
that your links all work. Nothing upsets the search engine
bots more that stale content and broken links. If your
website becomes stagnant it will sink into oblivion and
this will probably be a sudden massive plunge rather than a
slow slide down into obscurity. Don't be afraid to remove
content that becomes outdated or is no longer strictly
relevant to your website. A website can change direction
quite dramatically as it grows, so be on the lookout for
redundant content and get rid of it. The bots will like
this tidying up as much as they like fresh content.
Getting your website high ranking in the search engines
takes time and more than a little effort but it is worth
it: it is deeply satisfying to know that your website is
getting visitors through your own SEO efforts. The fact
that this traffic is free is also heart-warming.
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Generating traffic from the internet is only possible through great search engine rankings. Shannan Hearne has been helping online marketers do just that for over
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