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Search Engine Positioning: How do you improve the positioning of your site on major search engines?
What are the basics behind this methodology? What resources do you recommend to a business owner who is trying to improve their positioning?
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8 Answers
Something that is never mentioned by so-called SEO experts is standards compliant coding and a user friendly layout.
Nowadays, it is important that your website meets the standards set by the W3C (http://www.w3.org/) for web development. If your website is developed according to current web development standards, search engines will give your site priority over sites that are still using deprecated standards.
Make sure your website is designed by a professional who understands web design and development. A good user friendly web layout is critical for achieving better SEO results as well. The web is evolving, your website should too.
Other advice: Don't design your site for search engines, design it for your users. Don't copy content from other websites (you will get penalized by the SE's for doing so), avoid blackhat SEO (keyword stuffing, etc.).
Top 10 SEO steps that my SEO consultant gave me to optimize my company website (www.calszone.com)
1. Keyword Selection
2. Title Tag Writing
3. Description Tag Writing
4. Homepage content and structure.
5. Back linking and directory listings.
6. Interior Page Lead Gen Optimization
a. Call To Action with forms and prominent phone number placemtn
b. Social Proof - Testimonials, Logos, Case Studies.
c. Ad copy writing.
7. Analyzing the data and measuring results with Google Analytics
We have started blogging activtely since June 2009 at www.erpsoftwareblog.com. Since then, our website traffic has increased 56% so I feel that blogging is an excellent way to establish thought leadership and direct people to your website.
Can we just return to Anne C's point for a moment? I've been in internet marketing for 15 years now - more than the vast majority of people.
Personally, and with no hesitation whatsoever, I would say that my biggest bugbear has to be website designers who sign off a site as being 'finished' and ready for promotion when it clearly isn't because *their* side of the task hasn't been done satisfactorily.
Any company which fails to build a W3C standards compliant website should not be in business in this day and age IMHO. And any website design company who doesn't understand how usability works....well!
An SEO company should not be sorting out HTML compliance, nor should they need to rebuild the entire site so that a visitor can make it through the shopping basket in under 50 clicks.
I strongly believe that the whole SEO/SEM/Internet marketing/website design process must be holistic - i.e. joined up thinking - to work properly, but how many of us get that luxury?! Far more frequently, we are presented with a supposedly finished website and told to "make it number 1 in the search engines".
A minor tweak on the navigation here and there, the addition of META tags, page titles that don't read "homepage" etc are not a problem, but having a site that only works in IE5 for instance is a huge issue and it should not fall on our doorstep as SEO/SEM/IM practioners.
It's almost like being given a car to enter in the Grand Prix and finding someone only designed it to have one wheel on the front axle!!!
I would always highly recommend that you use Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics to track the impact of any changes you make to your site.
There are a few fundamentals to improving your search engine visibility, although none are certain to increase your ranking.
- Do your research- There are various tools available, either from Google or third parties such as Market Samurai, which allow you to analyse the search terms you should target on your website.
- Fresh content - Fresh, relevant, keyword rich content on your site will ensure that your site is 'crawled' more regularly, and will also help with the next point...
- Inbound links - Build up the number of links from quality, relevant, website to your website. If you have interesting content this may happen naturally, or perhaps ask to Guest Blog on a relevant site.
- Use meta-data wisely - Research the bets keywords to use within the meta data of your site.
These are just a few tips but will hopefully start you on your journey to improving your ranking.
Let me know if you have any more questions,
All the best,
Stefan
There are 101 easy tips to follow for improving your SEO results in our newly published e-book here at http://101guideseries.com/?li as well as on our blog at http://www.clickthrough-marketing.com/resources/blog/
One of the most important things to remember is probably that if you move your focus elsewhere from the search engines and promote your site in multiple places eg with article marketing, posting to forums and blogs, links, social bookmarks, social networks e.g.facebook, linkedin and twitter etc, your organic results on the search engines will also improve as a result. So, less SEO and more holistic internet marketing is the best way forward.
Ranking Factors
Trust/Authority of Host Domain 25%
Link Popularity of the Specific page 22%
Anchor text of External Links 20%
Registration, Hosting, Social + CTR Data 18%
On-Page Keyword usage 15%
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/90minute-pro-webinar-link-building-strategies-on-t...
Keywords in the domain name.
Clickthrough Marketing - thanks for validating my comment. I agree with you wholeheartedly. If you ever require the services of an experienced designer/developer who also understands SEO, please give me a shout.
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