Improving Your Search Engine Rankings

For starters it’s important that your domain name has relevance to what you do if you want to improve your search engine rankings.  Having a keyword-rich URL is like living on the beach with a panoramic view of the ocean.  It’s very valuable real estate-at least in the eyes of the search engines.  Sure there are lots of bigger than life companies out there with esoteric domain names that have absolutely no relevance to what they do (Google, for instance), but for most of us working class internet marketers we’ll be doing a lot better out of the gate if we choose a domain name that has at least our main keyword in it.

The next most important feature of your site to improve your search engine rankings are your category links or names.  When you create a category page, it becomes its own mini website-especially on dynamically generated page names.  For instance, websites based on WordPress have dynamic, hierarchical category pages whose names can be used as keyword rich URLs to help improve your search engine rankings.  Many times pages will be assigned a number in their URL, so be sure to update this in the back office of your site with a more relevant title.

Keyword content was, is, and probably always will be very important as well to higher search engine rankings.  There are tools like, SEO Pressor, available that will rate your keyword content and even tell you where else you should include keywords.  Many people do a very good job when writing content to include their keywords and phrases in the body of their articles.  They forget to include them in header tags and in the alt tags for their graphics.  If you are using the right keyword tool, then you will be reminded of where else to include your keywords to improve your search engines rankings and therefore your organic traffic.

Don’t forget about volume of content.  We’re not talking about stuffing your website with irrelevant trash just to add some bulk to it.  It’s important to have lots of relevant, well written content.  This is not only for improving your search engine rankings as a result of mindless spider searches, but also to keep people that visit your site on your site longer.  The lower the bounce rate is the better your search engine rankings will be.  Quality content takes time.  So patience is a must in this regard.

And finally, content management is very important.  Search engines like to see something new every time they visit your site.  So keeping your content fresh is critical to high search engine rankings and being found when somebody is looking for your products or services.  When constructing your website be sure to incorporate content management capabilities by using a platform that makes this easy.  Unless you want to learn HTML coding or Javascript, it’s probably better to stick with a platform like WordPress for your website.  If you can use MS Word, then you can use the content management capabilities of WordPress.  Plus it has plenty of other features and plugins that will improve how your website is viewed by the search engines and how well your website ranks for keyword searches.