Improve Search Engine Position

Description

The following article provides insight and valuable information on how to improve your search engine position on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Step 1. Define web site goals

I think the problem with a lot of web sites is people never actually understand their current web site situation and where they can scale out to. Most sites are built in a linear fashion with a step by step process. THIS IS A HUGE MISTAKE. Why spend any time or money on a web site before knowing what goal you are trying to achieve with it? I’ve seen it over and over again:

A company will go out and hire some fairly low-cost web designer that charges them roughly $500 - $1000 on a web site. It sounds like a pretty sweet deal to the less Internet savvy individual. The designer puts together some half way functioning site that does some things the client wants, but overall it lacks direction and focus. To no surprise the designer has no clue about Internet marketing, the business the site is being built for or a general scope of how the site will work and grow.

It is very important to first understand why you need a web site in the first place - to decide on what goals you are trying to complete. Maybe you want to sell products online and make money this way. Maybe you want people to contact you when they find your site – great. As long as you have some direction with your site it makes the whole SEO process fall into place. Figuring out the main goals of a site is pretty much the core of improving your sites search engine position. Once you actually know what desired action you want your site to produce you can start building marketing ideas around it.

Step 2. Figure out ways to get traffic

Once you know what the goal of your site is you should figure out how you are going to market it and generate traffic. As funny as it sounds, this is another step that is completely overlooked on most websites. People don’t just find your site out of nowhere. And people who find you by your company name are not new customers. If you’re reading this article you probably want to focus on SEO. I just want to mention that SEO isn’t always the best route. Some sites may do better if marketed other ways such as PPC or affiliate marketing. But for the brevity of this article, and because I love it, I will only focus on SEO.

Step 3. Heavy Keyword Research

I say “heavy” keyword research because this important step is overlooked A LOT, even by some SEOs. Researching and analyzing keywords is one of the most important elements to improving a web sites search engine position.
Don’t guess what people are searching for

I would not advise guessing if somebody may or not search for something. There are a number of free keyword tools that provide great REAL data that shoes what people are actually searching for, not what you think they may be searching for. It also does little good to see what your competitors are going after. Some people will go through a competitor’s site and grab their keywords and try to target these. Sure that’s fine, but these should be analyzed just like any other keywords. Who’s to say your competitor is doing it right?

Don’t be greedy

There is no point in going after keywords that are either too hard or deliver no traffic. You may be asking, well why can’t I target hard keywords? Aren’t I supposed to go for the big keywords? Well maybe, but in most cases no. Let me explain:

Yeah, winning free traffic is cool, however, most web sites are not set up to ever win the big one word or even two word searches. To win a search your site must answer the question of what somebody is searching for. If somebody is searching for something as general as “baseball” is somebody who has a 5 page brochure site that offers a few pages on baseball bats really going to answer the question of “baseball”? No, far from it! Somebody searching for just “baseball” is probably looking for information on baseball players, cards, betting, equipment, tickets, etc. Because of this it really makes no sense at all to even target the term baseball by itself. A better term to go after for a smaller 5 page brochure site would probably be “Denver Colorado Baseball Bats” granted they are located in Denver Colorado. Sure, this term doesn’t deliver as much traffic as just baseball, but it is relevant and winnable in most cases. It is much better to go after a smaller search term and win it, then to go after a larger search term and fail to win. I am not against going after competitive terms by any means; I just don’t think it is smart to go after these without first being able to win the smaller terms.

Start off with low competition and build up to higher competition keywords

I would advise starting off targeting lower competition keywords so you can get an understanding of what you can achieve. Once you actually have some rankings on the search engines for these keywords you can then start going after harder and harder ones. It is usually best to have your site’s lifecycle put into stages. Maybe the first 6 months or so you will target fairly easy keywords and try to first win these. The next year or 2 you will go after mid-range terms that provide better traffic. After 2 years you may be ready to start tackling the large keywords for your industry.

Step 4. Web site architecture

Once you know what keywords you want to target you should start to construct or re-construct your site.

Internal link struction

You want your link structure to work where your most important pages (keywords) are set up as main categories and sections. You then want your less competitive keywords to be a 2nd tier of sections and on and on. This way you will be building internal strength for your main keywords by having the majority of links pointing to them.

Title tags

Once you actually know what keywords you are targeting, setting up your title tags becomes much easier. You pretty much want your title tag to exactly match the keyword you are going for with that page. Perhaps I should back up a bit and mention that it is generally smart to go after one keyword per page. This is not always the case but 99% of the time it is.

Step 5. High quality content

You’ve probably heard this over and over, but it’s true. Good content is good for users and for search engines. And I’m not talking about the kind of content you steal from other top ranked sites. Taking content from other sites seriously has no value at all for your site, from a search engines perspective. When Google comes to your site and find content from another site it says, “Oh look, this page has the exact same content as bluewidgets.com/ripped-page, this site bluewidgets.com must be really good if their content was published on another site. The site that stole the content on the other hand, is probably lacking and isn’t serious enough to actually write a page on it themselves.” Copied content really does not help rankings at all. Changing it around may do a little bit of good, but by that point you might as well re-write it from the start.

Step 6. High quality links

One of the most important parts to improve search engine position is the acquisition of high quality backlinks. High quality is a pretty subjective term and can mean a lot of different things. To dodge going into a super in-depth analysis of backlinks, let’s just say you want links from sites that users would actually go to and want to click and visit your site from. Getting listed in directories has some value, but not as much as a link that is on an article about your exact topic and links with the anchor text for your desired keyword.

Step 7. Rinse and repeat

SEO is an ongoing effort that is constantly changing. You should always be trying to add new content and links to your web site. You should also look for new avenues to follow and places that may be smart to open it up to. Hopefully this article serves you well in your quest for improving your search engine position!

Comments (2)

by Malak UR6 1 year 18 weeks ago

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Thanks, thats very helpful specialy step 7.. i like it

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by shaykai UR9 1 year 19 weeks ago

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This is an awesome factor, great job quinton it has helped me boat loads!!!

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