5 Simple Steps to Higher Search Engine
Rankings
Are you one of those people who launched a
site yesterday and expect to make big profits today ? Unfortunately, it
doesn’t work that way, however, there are many people who start an online
business everyday and expect that to happen. Realistically, there are 5 steps
to greatly increase your chances of being ranked well and making large
profits. The article is written using Star
Computer Parts as an example and how you can dramatically increase
your web site’s rankings.
Step 1: Design
The first step towards optimizing your web
site for search engines is to give your website careful thought in its
design. The design starts with a domain name that contains keywords
describing your website. For example, www.starcomputerparts.com
is a website selling computer parts and computer hardware, which
contains the keywords “computer parts” in the domain name. If
possible, register your domain name for 5-10 years out, the search engines
will value your site on a higher level than a site that is only registered for
a year.
Second,
choose a title for your site that accurately describes the content of your web
page. For instance, the title for Star Computer Parts is “Star
Computer Parts.com | Buy Computer Parts | Computer Hardware | Components”.
The title says the site sells computer parts along with associated keywords
that are relevant to computer parts.
Third,
the description should give a more in-depth overview of the website and a bit
more in depth of what content is contained on the web page. The description, “Star
Computer Parts has thousands of computer parts and hardware in-stock and ready
to ship. We offer the latest computer hardware news, reviews, and articles on
computer hardware-related issues.”, describes more about the website and
some of the product categories that are offered. It is important to mention
not to use promotional language in the title, description, and keywords as the
search engine may construe your site as ‘spam’. Also, avoid the use of ‘FREE’
in the site’s headers as this is a red flag to search engines of ‘spam’.
Fourth, keywords are the most important
aspect of the web site and will have a huge impact on how well search engine
ranks your website. Keywords are words or phrases that describe the content
found on your web page. The keywords I use are: “Computer
Parts,Computer
Hardware,Software,Laptops,Networking,Servers,Memory,components,motherboards”
These words should appear throughout the web page – title, description,
keywords, and body of the page. Be careful not to overuse keywords or the
search engine may penalize your site for “keyword stuffing”, which means
overtly using the keywords in an attempt to tip the scale on the search
engine’s results. A web page that has keywords evenly dispersed throughout
the page will stand an excellent change of being ranked well in the search
results. Visit the home page Star
Computer Parts and look at how the words appear in the title, description,
keywords, and how the keywords appear in the text copy of the web page. The
site is now complete and carefully written, but it won’t make profits yet
unless the search engines can find it. The subject of marketing your site
will be described in the next few steps.
Step 2: Site Submissions
Once your website is complete, be sure
there are no broken links. There is no quicker way to lose a potential
customer if you have broken images or broken links on your site. When you are
sure everything is looking top notch, start submitting your site to Yahoo,
MSN, AOL, Google, and other major search engines. By submitting your site, it
will put the site in the queue of sites to crawl. Crawling is when a search
engine goes to your site and follows all the links down through the site,
indexes into its database what it finds. There is no guarantee the search
engine will index the website, but a well written site has a very strong
chance of being found. Read carefully the guidelines for each search engine
and be sure your web site meets those standards.
Step 3: Directories
There are thousands of directories on the
web that you can submit your site to and be listed. Here is a list of
directories to get you started: http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html
. Be sure to read the submission guidelines carefully for each directory,
failure to do so will most likely cause your submission to be rejected. It is
important to understand that directories are different than search engines.
Directories are human-edited and search engines are maintained by massive
servers that electronically index websites they find.
Step 4: Articles
One of the fastest way to build up links to
your site is through articles and press releases, which I’ll discuss next.
Write an article on some expertise you have that is relevant to your website,
then post it to an article site and every time your article gets used on a
site, a link is generated to your web page. For example, this article is
being written based on my experience with Search Engine Optimization and is
relevant to my website. The links used in this article are a link to my
website to illustrate the points I am making throughout the article.
Step 5: Press releases
Press Releases are used to announce to the
world that you are open for business and where potential customers can find
you. It is important for both articles and press releases that you carefully
proofread it before submission for a better chance of the media picking them
up and publishing your article.
There are many other ways to promote your
website, you just have to be creative and many of them do not cost anything to
promote. Some other pay services to consider are Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s
Overture, both are pay-per-click marketing programs that can almost instantly
generate traffic.