Do you believe this? If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen a million pages and emails like these claiming they can work wonders for you in all search engines. They claim everything from having inside information or special relationships with Google and all the search engines.
The simple truth is: no one can guarantee the best listings on any search engine, in fact, no one can guarantee that you will ever be listed. So beware of big claims and unethical SEO companies as there are a lot of them.
So how do you get the best listings in the major search engines. Let me try to answer that as simply as I can without confusing you completely. Content – Yes that’s right… Content is still king… And the more you try to deceive search engines, the more damage you will do to your ranking. Search engines are getting smarter and smarter and they have seen every trick in the book that every unethical SEO / search engine marketing company and spammers do. So do not pray to the hype and false claims.
Here is the secret of the great search engine
Well-written, relevant content, relevant page titles, and meta tag descriptions. So there you have it, the secret has been revealed… If anyone tries to tell you differently or convince you otherwise – put the checkbook away and run. Yes, there are other things you can do to help your ranking with the three items above and a few others.
How to improve your chances of search engine rankings:
*** Know your most important keywords.. Use the Yahoo Keyword Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?mkt=us&lang=en_US or Goggle’s Sandbox https://adwords.google.com/ select/ main? cmd = KeywordSandbox to find what users are already typing into search engines to find sites like yours. Once you have the best keywords – don’t lose them… you will use them again and again.
*** Use your most important keywords in your pages content, your page titles, and in your mating tag descriptions. I don’t mean to use pages filled with anything but keywords, use them in real sentences. Pages that are just keywords will hurt you in search engines, this is called keyword stuffing and it will hurt your ranking or worse, your site gets deleted or banned from search engines. Just take your current site content and use your most important keywords in the right places where they make sense in real sentences.
*** Don’t overuse keywords or try to use too many on one page. Put your keyword in the title and description and a few times on the page content is usually enough. Do this for each page of your site, and optimize it for the topic of that particular page using relevant keywords from your search. I see many sites with the same title and meta descriptions on every page. Make sure yours is different.
*** Get as many high value links as possible. The best way to identify high value links is to install Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com/ and use Google PageRank to determine link value. You can also use the PR tool at http://www.i4market.com/tools/rankcheck.html. The higher the rank the better. You may have to pay for links on PR7 or higher sites – but don’t pay too much. You can also use Alexa Traffic Rank or their toolbar – http://www.alexa.com/. The more high-value links you have, the better your search engine popularity.
*** Install Link Exchange … but be selective about which link exchange you agree to.
*** Add value to relevant content to your site, such as articles, news, blogs, or tools related to your business or industry. This will increase the saturation of your search engine. A site with 100 pages of good content has a much better chance of finding it than a site with only 10 pages.
*** Use Google XML sitemaps or find a company that will create one for you. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html
*** Show a sitemap to your users with links pointing to important parts of your site. If the sitemap is larger than 100 links or so, split the sitemap into separate pages.
*** Try to use text instead of images to display important names, contents or links. Search engines do not recognize text in images or Flash content. If you must use images, always use the Alt to describe the link.
*** Check broken links and correct HTML.
*** If you decide to use dynamic pages (for example, the URL contains a “?”), then know that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and few. Don’t use ‘&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as Google doesn’t include these pages.
*** Keep links on a given page to a reasonable number (less than 100).
*** Use the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure your site is up to date so you don’t accidentally block spiders from the content you want to include.
*** Understand the difference between search engine and directory. The search engine uses spider technology and will search the web for new sites. Directories will not look for you and you will have to tell them about your new location manually.
*** Revisit your keywords regularly. There are 1000 ways to search for the same thing, search patterns change from time to time. You’ll want to keep up with these changes.
*** Submit your site to search engines if it has not been submitted before or if you are not listed in that specific engine. Most search engines still offer “natural lists” for free, however they may not be easy to find. You can find the Google add-on URL here http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
*** Submit your location to directories including Yahoo! and DMOZ. DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org/ is the Open Directory Project and is used to power thousands of other sites and directories – inclusion in this directory gives you links to thousands of other sites. DMOZ is also the directory that Google uses. http://directory.google.com/
What you should not do.
– Don’t use hidden text or links
– Do not use portal or portal pages.
Do not use pages that redirect users to other places.
She doesn’t use any kind of masking technique – no matter how amazing she sounds. It may work for a short time – but you will get caught.
– Do not use Flash content for important information. Flash is an application that is completely invisible to most search engines. Flash is good for animations and other page elements – not for an entire site unless you also have the html version.
Do not use misleading or excessively repetitive words
– Don’t use bait and switch methods… they don’t work.
Do not use duplicate websites or pages
– Stay away from Free For All or Link Farms schemes, as these will only harm you.
There are many things that affect your rankings and then only the content on your pages, so don’t bother being #1 – you may never get there no matter what you do. It is better to spend your time running your business in areas that you have more control over.
Following the above guidelines will get you the best results that your site will achieve. This doesn’t mean there isn’t more you can do – but these are the main elements that will affect your rankings in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). The internet is a huge place and technology is changing all the time – and so are search engines – the site that ranks #1 today may be #1001 tomorrow.
You can try to do all this on your own or you can hire a company that specializes in SEO/SEM (search engine optimization and search engine marketing), but beware, there are many things that will take you out of your money quickly and leave you with little to no results. We suggest that you take some advice from Google regarding choosing an SEO company for your business. http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html
Above all – remember this – there are no guarantees in any kind of marketing campaign, be it on the web, in newspapers, on TV or radio. So spend wisely and choose your marketing company wisely!
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