Improve Your Website Search Engine Rank - Part 1

What can I do to improve my website search engine ranking? This is a question all website owners ask from time to time, what is the answer to the riddle of the search engine? I have read over many articles with different information, I have seen software claiming to get your website that #1 ranking in google and yahoo, I have seen the companies claiming to submit your website to thousands of search engines and get your website to the top of the search kings. I have never found these SEO solutions to work, the only way to truly raise your website ranking and placement is lots of hard work and sometimes a bit of a marketing budget.

Where do I start? That is a common question, and I understand how overwhelming it can be at times but do not get discouraged, if you follow a few guidelines and put in a decent amount of work you will get the website raking you want.

1. Keywords

Keywords are very important to your website, select the keywords that best reflect your products, services and location. Limit the keyword choices to the most relevant keywords for your website, do not drowned them out with non relevant keywords. Embed your keywords within your website title, website description meta tag, your website keyword meta tag and throughout your body content. YOu want to keep the most relevant keywords near the top of the page. Linking keywords to pages within your website will help show relevancy for that keyword on the page it is being linked to. This page should have content relating to the linked keywords in order for the relevancy to be recognized by the search engines spiders on your website. Embedding keywords in web page file names will also help with your overall page rank. Anywhere you can use keyword you should, be creative but remember not to make your text confusing to the human user.

2. Linking websites

Link backs are a good way to gain PR for your website, finding websites that will provide a link to your website will help show the search engines that your website is important. The higher ranked the websites that links to you the better. If a website has content related to your website and it has a good ranking then this would be a great site to have a link to your site sitting on. How do you find sites to provide links to your website you may ask, let me tell you how. First think I do is google submit web design site, this is because I am marketing a web design site, you can just as easily search for submit medical website if you sell a medical product, etc.. Once you find some directories that will accept your free submission without a link back you should submit your site, follow the guidelines provided by each site so your link does not get removed. Find community websites and blogs that relate to your content and post articles and blog comments with heavy keywords embedded within the body and titles of your articles. Basically just get creative and search around for good places to submit link backs to your site.

3. Website Site Map

Create a site map page for your website with links to every page of your website. You will also want to make sure you have a .xml site map in your root directory, you can submit this file to the major search engines and provide them a map to crawl your entire website. I would also include a link to your site map file within the robots.txt file for your site. Providing a clear and valid site map is essential in my opinion. A dynamic site map is great for website with dynamic content such as an e-commerce site, this allows all products to be added to the site map dynamically.

4. Your Website Content

The content of your website should be rich with related keywords, don't just focus on single words, go for 2 and 3 word combinations as well. This will help you when people search for certain phrases not just single words. For example if I search for web design, I will find sites that have the term web design embedded within their content. You want to raise your keyword density to about 5% on each page. You can measure this with tools like seoquake, a plugin for ie and firefox, Another important thing, possibly one of the most important things to have is fresh content. That is why it is so good to have a blog or news page o your website, the search engines like to see new content when the revisit your website. This will also give you articles other bloggers can link to, providing you with more link backs. Blogs produce RSS feeds other people can syndicate on related websites and provide you more link backs to your website, this is a valuable tool and it should be utilized whenever possible.

There are many other ways to improve your website search engine rankings but this makes a wonderful start. I will follow up with a second part to this post in the near future. I hope this article proves to be helpful. Good luck with all your web site projects.