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Ways to Improve
Your Web Sites' Search Engine Rankings
You can't just
build a web site and expect the search engines to rank it
well with out any effort on your part. Remember for any
given set of search terms there may be millions of competing
sites, but only 20 sites are going to be in the first two
pages or top 20 positions. Not many searchers venture to
the third page of search results. (A lot of searchers don't
get past the first site listed in the search results!).
Here are some general tips to help get your site ranked
well.
1. Get links
from sites the search engines deem important. These
may be different sites depending on the engine. Type your
main keywords, and a few variations, into the search engine
of your choice and see what sites consistently rise to the
top. Try to see if these sites will exchange links with
your site, or better yet, give you a one way link.
2. While many
search engine optimization experts agree that the page rank
indicator that shows on the Google toolbar does not carry
a lot of weight these days, not everyone who trades links
is up to date on this knowledge. Many people still think
the higher the page rank the better the site. So, if possible,
it may be good to start your site off with some high
page rank links to get your links pages to at least
a page rank 4 before approaching other webmasters to exchange
links. Be careful not to overdo the high page rank links,
or you may trip an over-optimization penalty.
To find out the
page rank of a site, you can download the Google
toolbar here. Google doesn't update their page rank
very often these days, only about once every three months,
so if you are doing link development for a site you have
to decide if the trade off of waiting to get links until
you have page rank is worth the delay compared to getting
links for your site right away, albeit with a page rank
0 links page.
3. Try to have
a natural mix of links - one way, reciprocal, some general
directory, some blogs, etc.
4. Try to
have an extensive number of content pages. Google especially
is looking for "signals of quality" these days.
I think all other things being equal, it may be easier to
get ranked if you have a 50 page site instead of a 5 page
site, and a 500 page site is better than a 50 page one.
5. Keep your
site updated frequently, daily if possible. Get fresh
links every now and then. You want your site to look and
feel maintained and current to both the search engine spiders
and your users.
6. Avoid free
hosting accounts if you can afford it. While it is possible
to get sites well ranked using free hosts, I suspect it
may bring on some "demerit points" and make your
site get harder to rank well.
7. Don't over
optimize your site. While you need to have your intended
keywords in the anchor text of the links to your sites as
well as within your site itself, don't go overboard. Hyphenated
domains names with 6 keywords in the domain, title and in
H1 text on the page look cheap and probably trip an over-optimization
filter with the search engines.
8. The cheapest
way in the long run to get great rankings in the search
engines is to start off with good content that attracts
lots of unsolicited, one way links. If you spend your time
or money on content upfront, you may find that you don't
need to spend a lot of money on link development.
9. Be careful
with duplicate content. Sure many sites use syndicated
articles and rank just fine. But I suspect that an excessive
amount of duplicate content may cause a site to be penalized.
10. If you have
a site that mainly sells affiliate products, don't just
have affiliate links if you want to rank well in Google.
They are great at filtering out these kinds of sites. Lots
of unique content site with some affiliate links seem to
be fine.
11. Be careful
about linking to "bad neighborhoods". Avoid
linking to site that have penalties, are only comprised
of affiliate links, or have autogenerated content. In Google's
eyes your site really is judged by the company it keeps.
Before you link to a site, make sure it has real content
and comes up at least for it's own domain name or title
(if the title is unique). Look who else the site links to.
If the site is about growing rose but all of it's links
are to casino and adult sites, then think twice about linking
out.
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