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How To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

how to improve your search engine ranking

Let’s look at how to improve your search engine rankings. The rules over the years have generally stayed the same in this regard, and with a little work and effort, you can get your website ranking up there with the best of the best.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about more than just improving your search rankings. You should think of it as a way of increasing the volume and improving the quality of the traffic that those search rankings drive to your website. You don’t only want increased traffic, but you also want qualified traffic.

So more than adapting to all the algorithms the various search engines use, you also need to know what people are searching for. Having a site about cars when people are searching for transportation is not going to cut it. You need to get inside the heads of your potential customers and fine-tune your site’s content and keywords to match what they’re looking for.

How To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

how to improve your search engine rankingHere are some helpful tips on how to improve your search engine ranking, as well as get better quality traffic visiting your website.

Know your Customer

This is so obvious that most website owners overlook it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t really about HTML coding and keyword placement, it’s about knowing more about the people who visit your website or know who you want to visit your website.

The more that you know about your potential customers and visitors, the better you can optimize your site to be of value to them and rank high on the list when they search for topics relating to your site.

The more valuable your site is, the higher it will rank – well in most cases.

You as the marketer have to get inside your customer’s heads and learn how to think like them. If you know how your customer thinks, you will know what interests him and what he is going to search for.

If you don’t know your customer, or if you think you know your customer, but really don’t, now is the time to get connected.

Don’t assume you know how your customers think, get out there and ask them. Do some market research. Try a survey or distribute some questionnaires or whatever you have to do including talking face to face with actual customers to find out what your customers are looking for and how they are looking for it. Then using this information, you can proceed to the technical business of search engine optimization.

Improve Your Content

Once you know what your customers are looking for, you can construct your site to meet their needs. Sounds easier than it is right? It does involve some hard work, but you need to do it if you want to have a successful online business.

Improving your content can make a huge difference. The better your site is content-wise, the higher it will rank, simple as that.

When it comes to ranking, content is king and the easier the search engines can find out what your site is all about, the higher quality and the more relevant your site’s content will become to a particular search, and the more likely it is that a search engine will rank your site higher in its results for a particular search query.

So even though you need to do your due diligence with your keyword research, you must focus on what your site does and says. If your site is about dog training, for instance, make it all about dog training and don’t skimp on your content. The more helpful your content, the better.

Make your site useful to your customers, and the search engines will reward you well.

Make Sure Your Website is Organized

how to improve your search engine ranking

The search engine crawlers can find more content on a web page or website if the content has a clear hierarchical organization. The most important information on your site must be in the pages in major headings with the lesser information under the blogs. Your site should have the important information as key with subsidiary information branching out from your main page and then even more subpages branching out from those.

In other words, the most important information is on the home page and additional information should be no more than a click or two away.

Fine Tune Your Keywords

Just as important as a page’s layout is the page’s content in terms of keywords. Keywords are how searchers find your site, so they are the key factor in how your site is ranked.

For this reason, you want to make sure that each and every page on your site contains relevant keywords pertaining to that article. Work your keywords into your content in a natural way.

Place your more important keywords higher up on your page as you don’t want the web crawler to miss out on what your page is about, and they only crawl so far down the page in a lot of cases.

Inbound Links

Getting other sites to link to your site (naturally) will make a big impact and the higher the page ranking of those sites linking to yours, the higher your site’s ranking will be.

Actively asking other sites for links will speed up the process, or you could wait for sites to link to you naturally, but that will take a long time.

You must also make sure that you link from one page to another on your site via text links. A search bot will use these text links to visit other pages on your site. Make sure you use relevant text, for example, if you are linking to a leash article, then you should link the word leash or dog leashes to that article.

Sitemaps

Make sure that you have a sitemap you can submit to increase your site’s rankings. A sitemap is a map of all the URLs in your entire website, listed in hierarchical order and it lets search engines know what your site is all about and speeds up the indexing process.

Submitting sitemap supplements, rather than replaces the usual methods of adding pages to a search engine’s index. If you don’t submit a sitemap, you will still get indexed, but depending on the age of your site, it could take longer.

Use Alt Tags On All Images

Search Engines can only decipher text, not images, so whenever putting a picture on your site, make sure you label it by using an alt tag so that the search engines know what the picture is of. It is a good idea to assign your keywords to the images so that the images correspond with your pages.

Last but not least, make sure to update your content often, as your rankings can be affected if your content hasn’t changed in a while, and in this way the search engines perceive your site as providing fresh content.

If you have any other ideas when it comes to how to improve your search engine ranking, please comment below.

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Michel Maling

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