Tips for Getting Higher Search Engine Rankings

Posted on January 29, 2013 in Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

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It’s a process known as search engine optimization (SEO) and it can be a long-drawn out process that involves working with your site in various ways. You’ll have to employ many SEO techniques in order to help you boost your rankings on search engines. Here are five tips to help you get started:

1. Work on Page Titles: One of the best things to help out your website’s rankings is to rewrite any page title that hasn’t been written with SEO in mind. This will help attract those search engine bots as they search through your page’s source code. The titles are specific HTML elements that are located in the HTML Header.

Page titles need to be short, 60 characters or shorter, as search engines generally only show those first 60 characters in results. They need to be descriptive of what’s on the page and have to contain the target keyword for the page. Your pages need nice attractive, descriptive titles to gain traffic.

2. Work on META-Tags: What are META-tags? They are HTML elements also located in the HTML header of a page’s source code. They contain info about the page and are usually heavily laden with keywords. The three main metatags are:

  • Meta Description – This appears as a brief part of the description of your page in search engine results. They need to be less than 150 characters as that’s all the search engine will display on a page. These, like titles, need to be descriptive, contain the important keywords, and be attractive to your customers.
  • Meta Keywords – This used to be an important element of SEO, but that doesn’t hold true anymore. They don’t affect search rankings at all and don’t need to be focused on.
  • Meta Robots – Less about keywords and more about how search engines read your page. The search engine “bots” inspect every element in your HTML code, and this tells them whether the page should be indexed and if the outgoing links should be followed. Leave it at the value stated which is “index,follow.”

3. Build up Your Internal Linking: Internal linking refers to the way pages are linked together on a website. This is another important thing to consider when it comes to SEO. The best policy is to make sure all your most important pages are as close to the homepage as possible. This provides those pages with an increase in pageviews and this allows them to gain PageRank. High PageRank values mean that your pages are landing higher on search engine results.

4. Use Keywords Properly: As always, keywords play an important part in any SEO campaign. Creating a list of your target keywords and all the terms your users could use to find your website or any page within your website is a step not to be ignored. Identify the main terms using a tool such as Google’s AdWords keyword tool and use those in your titles, meta-tags and everywhere else on the appropriate pages.

5. Explore Tools to Use: This is an easy often looked over step in an SEO campaign. There are tools online that can help you improve your site’s indexing and ranking on search engines. An XML sitemap can make it easier for search engines to find your pages and index them. Every major search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) have Webmaster Tools that allow you to submit your site to that search engine for ranking and indexing. Consistently use a web analytics tool as well to monitor how your SEO campaign is doing.

These techniques plus creating engaging and interesting content for your customers will help increase your website’s SEO which will help get you ranked higher on results.