Search Engine Optimization Made Simple PDF Print E-mail

Strategy to boost your ranking in search engine results.

A few simple items to increase your search engine rank:
  1. Keywords
    Use keywords that are relevant to your website topics and are likely to be entered into search engines. There are several free keyword tools online you can use to discover what phrases are searched most frequently. Type in your keyword phrase and it will return the number of monthly searches for your phrase and numerous synonyms. Try the DigitalPoint Keyword Selection Tool. You can also check your website's internal search report to see what people are looking for on your site. If there are relevant phrases that are repeatedly searched, make sure those phrase appear throughout your website.
  2. Navigation
    Once you've narrowed down your list of keywords, create a page for each keyword and fill that page with content relevant to that keyword. Start the page's title tag and H1 tag with the keyword. Use it as the text in the navigation link to that page.
  3. Put your top keyword in your domain name
    If a lot of your site traffic comes from search engines, try to put your top keyword in your domain name, particularly if your company name is not well known. Otherwise, use your company name if possible.
  4. Write quality, UNIQUE content sprinkled with keywords
    Don't overdo it. Having text that is nothing but keywords doesn't read well to your visitors or search engine spiders and will work against you. Your ideal goal is to have high-quality, unique content that relates specifically to the keywords and topic your are targeting. Write your content like a sales brochure, then just make sure your keywords are in the title and first paragraph. Avoid copying text from other sources like manufacturer-provided product descriptions. If you are using the same content as your competitors, you have little chance of ranking well! Ideally, write your own product descriptions and include how-to articles on your website.
  5. Links within your website
    When linking to another page in your website, make sure the link text includes the keyword being targeted by that page.
  6. Links from other sites
    Link exchanges, getting listed in directories, and buying links isn't as useful as they used to be. The BEST way to get links from other sites is to create content that people actually like and will link to on their own!
  7. Patience
    If you're in a competitive market, it could take six to 12 months before you start to see any ranking benefits from your SEO efforts. But the sooner your start, the sooner you'll reach your goal!