Ten Ways to Improve Your Website Rankings

In this lesson I will briefly outline 10 ways to help assist your website to better rankings in the search engines. These techniques are intended to grow your ranking naturally over time.

1) Keyword Research

This is one of the most important aspects of promoting your website. In fact before you build your website, you should do your keyword research. If you already have a website, that is fine, still do your keyword research and rewrite some of your website text around those words you have found with relatively high demand and low competition. (see lesson 1). If necessary, change the text a little of existing pages but not too much unless necessary, it is often best to just add new pages.

2) One Page per Keyword

Ensure each page of your website is dedicated and focused upon only one keyword or keyword phrase. Ensure your page has at least 400 words or so of text. Within that, you should have your keyword phrase appear about 3-4 times. It should be present at first paragraph, middle of the page, and also in the last paragraph. Ensure that the text reads naturally.

3) Title

Each webpage of your website should have a page title. If you look at the top of this browser, you should see the text, "Ten Ways to Improve Website Ranking for Beginners". This is the page title. It is often used by search engines to help with ranking, in the sense that it can help the spider get an idea of what your website is about. It is wise to place your targeted-keyword for the page here.

4) Basic SEO

You should certainly have a go at doing some basic on-page search engine optimization (SEO). There are some basic things you can change or include such as meta-tags that can help to a certain degree with your rankings. (See Lesson 5)

5) Write Articles

Write articles based around certain keywords that you discovered from your keyword research. The articles should be different from your website copy, so do not just take the text from your website and submit it to an article directory. Write a new article specifically around a keyword and submit it to the directories. In the 'Author Biography', ensure you place a link back to your website (See Lesson 7), and also use the correct anchor text back to your site (see point 9 below).

6) Blogs

If you have a separate website, it is not a bad idea to start a blog separately. The blog can be where you regularly update and post your thoughts. From here, you can link it to your website.

If your blog is regularly updated with your thoughts, ideas and whatever you want to write about, then the search engines will love it and when it visits your blog, it will also follow the links to your website. In your blog, you can also write or 'talk' perhaps a little less formally about things and promote or pre-sell your website or products more easily. (See Lesson 6)

7) Give away a free product

By giving away some sort of free gift from your website, it may be a money-off voucher, it may be free information, it may be a short report, anything at all.

If you do this, then there are a few ways you can benefit. Whatever it is that you give away, if it is an e-product such as an ebook or a report of some sort, then you can place a link back to your website from it.

Alternatively, you may encourage other website owners or blog writers to try your free gift. If they like it, they may recommend it to their readers and put a link on their site to yours, and so you get more links!

This is a great 'viral marketing' activity.

8) Linking

This is an important aspect of improving your website ranking. When you browse online, you can type in your websites subject matter or theme and see what other sites come up. When you find a good site that you think compliments yours and that your readers would be interested in, then contact/email the website owner and see if they are willing to link to you. They may agree if you link back to their website. This is an important aspect of improving your website ranking over time.

There are programs and sites out there that you can join on a membership basis that help sites link to each other. It is generally better to do this work manually and contact the websites individually. It does take longer but the results will be higher quality links.

9) Anchor Text

This is another SEO technique used in linking. The 'anchor text' is the highlighted text that a user can click to visit the link. The wording of the highlighted text is the anchor text. The highlighted text that follows is an example of an anchor text: law of attraction. The highlighted text is 'law of attraction' and if you click on it, it takes you to the linked page.

OK, so you know what an anchor text is, why use it? Well, whenever you get a link from an external source back to your website, if you can tell them what you want your anchor text to be, then it can help with your ranking for a keyword. You anchor text should be the keyword or phrase that you are targeting.

Say you were targeting the keyword, 'milk chocolate' for your website about all things chocolate. If you for example, wrote an article about milk chocolate, then in the Author Biography box, you could say something like;

"Joe Bloggs runs the milk chocolate International Fan Club. Visit his site now to find out more."

So, when this article gets accepted, it gets posted into an article directory and perhaps some website owners will use the article on their site as content. They will have to keep the Author Biography box unmodified as part of the agreement. You then have an external page about milk chocolate that points to your website and provides a one-way link, the anchor text of which contains the keyword that you are targeting.

10) Content

This is probably the most important factor of all 10. Create great quality content for your users! Ensure your website content is unique, good quality and interesting. If you write something that you yourself would be interested in reading, then you are on the right track and cannot go far wrong. If you do nothing else but one thing, then content is it! Search engines love quality and regularly updated content, so remember that!

TASK

1) Pick 2-3 strategies above and work with them to help your rankings over the next week. This needs to be an ongoing campaign in order to get the results you want and it can take time, but it will be worth it.

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