Improving Search Engine Rankings Naturally

Why start here? One of the first goals of advertising and marketing is the pursuit of “eyeballs.” On the Web, that means driving traffic to your site is a good thing. And for traffic, a key differentiator between online and offline marketing is the presence of online search engines like Google and Yahoo! In order to optimize your site to get the biggest bang from online search engines, you must craft your page coding to support and reinforce your content.

Each search engine has its own set of “operating rules.” Each rank Web pages differently, and because search engines are known to change their rules frequently, there is no single way to optimize a Web site for search engines. We make it our business to keep up with as many of the engines as we can to change and shift as they demand. The following is a partial list of best practices that will increase your rankings in a variety of engines, using what’s called “natural” search engine optimization. The key is to use all of these elements to optimize your site’s chances of a high ranking.

The overriding goal in configuring pages for search engine ranking is to create as much relevant keyword redundancy as possible, without overstepping a given engine’s limits. While no one specifically knows these limits, a good rule of thumb is to aim for 5% of a page’s content to be devoted to keyword redundancy. Keyword redundancy simply means establishing keywords for the search engines to pick up, and repeating them in key places within your pages.

Depending on the search engine, different sections of Web site code are given varying weights of importance. From those weights and a combination of other factors, including a page’s inbound links, cross-linking, keyword term use, etc., the page rank is determined. The following guidelines will identify the ways that code can be used to help create keyword redundancy, and thus improve natural rankings on as many search engines as possible.

The vehicles for coding search terms into your site include HTML “meta” tags, title tag, header and anchor tags, and assorted other HTML tags and attributes. The best vehicle for your keywords remains the content of the page itself.

So, where to begin?

Keyword Research
Do some homework. Educate yourself on how people find you. Review search engine phrases people actually use to find your site. Use the information gathered in your Web usage logs to measure traffic, report patterns, and most importantly, reveal what keywords were used in which search engines to get visitors to your site.

Compile any findings from your keyword research, and then collaborate with us to produce a list of the most relevant, effective keywords and phrases for your site’s focus. If you are unsure at this point which keywords and phrases are effective, we can work with you and do research into what keywords are most relevant in your industry today, and provide you with information on keyword terms that have been searched within the major engines of late.

Links
Links inside your site should use key phrases whenever possible particularly in the “title” attribute. You should make an effort to cross-link within your site as much as possible, using key phrases that match the page they will land on. In our practice, every site that we create is accompanied by a site map. In the linking phase, a good site map helps, but best practice dictates that links should be plentiful throughout the site.

Your best investment for linking is to either get someone to link to you without linking back to them or create a scenario like that yourself. These types of non-reciprocal links are very highly valued by a search engine, especially if they come from a page of similar keywords that is already ranked highly by the engine.

Content
Here’s the best tip we can offer:

The best way to get to #1 in Google is to provide lots of content that people want.

Content is king. If you say your site is about Content Management and all your keyword usage revolves around that, do more than just describe your Content Management product – make the page, or better yet the site, all about content management. People will begin linking to it if you provide useful content, and that is the best way to raise the rankings. Valuable unique information is the secret ingredient to a naturally high ranking Web site.