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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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