There are lots of myths out there on how to get your site ranked – but the days of doorway pages, cloaking, automatic site submissions are all over.
Nowadays to secure a high ranking on your chosen keywords, it takes hard work and a professional to get the results you want. There are however, some steps you can take towards improving your ranking by yourself:
1. Content
Search engine spiders love content. They want to read text and preferably text that has your keywords in it. Without getting into the great debate as to whether you should be writing for your user or the search engine spider, doesn’t it make sense that if you are a site about “Car Fleet Management” that your site is going to have the words “Fleet Management” liberally scattered throughout?
Keyword selection is often one of the most arduous parts of the search engine process because we have to explain to clients that just because we are working on getting a ranking for them, we can’t just magic it out of the air and achieve rankings on words that have no real connection to their business!
Next, when you’ve got your page content worked up, look at the meta data such as page titles (by far the most important), descriptions, keywords, internal linking keywords, and alt tags.
I cover all of this in detail in our Internet Marketing training - if you’re interested, the next session is on Thursday 9 October.
2. Construction
If your site is already built, there’s not much you can do about this, but tidy code will assist search engine spiders in their task of indexing your pages. This is why it’s always a good idea to use a reputable web design company when embarking on your new site project. Your 19 year old nephew straight out of web design school might create a site that looks good on the front end, but the code behind it could be all over the place. Similarly, graphic designers are used to designing for print. This doesn’t mean they are good at xhtml/css coding.
Don’t build all Flash sites if you want to get a good search engine ranking.
Because it’s just not possible to get good rankings on all-Flash sites, so we don’t take them on. And if you’re thinking of redesigning your site, make sure you write into the brief for your designer that it is not to be an all Flash number. Pockets of Flash are good. But no Flash intro and no all Flash sites.
There’s a lot of debate about hosting and specifically whether you can aid your search engine ranking by hosting in the country in which you are targeting. If your site is a .com and is hosted in the USA , it won’t be included in results from Ireland on Google. So you might consider moving hosting to a reputable Irish company. These days, their prices have come down, while service has gone up. So there’s no real reason to host abroad.
3. Links-arama
The gold dust of the search engine world, it is inward links that will really power your position up the search engine rankings. Unfortunately it takes time and connections to secure quality backlinks to your site. This is why I always say it’s best to leave search engine optimisation to the professionals. We take care to build links only on quality PR sites and to add links in an incremental process over time. Google isn’t stupid and if it suddenly sees your site jump in the number of backlinks, it will take note - and probably dump you!
These are just some tips that spring to mind when I think about how people can look at their SEO. Unfortunately I believe that without spending money engaging a professional, it’s unlikely that you can secure a good high ranking for a highly trafficked keyword on your own. In these times of cutting back, SEO is most certainly not one of the areas to be shaved.
Source: Maryrose Lyons Brightspark Consulting
http://www.brightspark-consulting.com