How to Improve Your Position
Contents
Below is a summary of the most important factors to consider when trying to improve your position in search engine results. Please see our detailed guide for more advanced tips.
Content
Content is a key factor in achieving high search engine ranking. Search engine spiders love text-rich sites.
Keywords
Keywords are the everyday words people enter in search engines to find products and services. If you are a book seller and decide to use “second hand books” as your keyword, you should first check the search volume of that keyword. You may be surprised to learn that “used books” is searched five times more often in Canada, eleven times more often in the USA and twice as often worldwide compared to “second hand books”.
Make a list of potential keywords by talking with staff, customers, family members and friends. Expand the list with keyword tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner, and then try searching under those terms. Take notes on how many similar web pages are found, and for which competitors, before optimizing your pages for the most relevant keywords.
When it is appropriate for the reader, keywords should appear in the following places:
- URL
- Title Tag
- Headers (H1-H6)
- Body Text
- Text Links (A HREF)
- Alt Image Tags
Spamming
Spamming search engines is a good way to get banned. Even if you are not caught right away, your search engine ranking may suffer because of fraudulent techniques. So what exactly do search engines consider spam? The following list is “old school” spam and definitely tactics to avoid.
- Using text that is the same color, or just a slightly different color than the background to “hide” words. (LOL nice try!)
- Repeating a keyword over and over again in your Keyword Meta Tag, Title Tag, or even on the page itself. Keyword meta tags are so often abused that they have not been an SEO factor for a long time!
- Creating a page which is stuffed with keyword content so far down the page that few people will see it.
- Creating a plain page specifically designed for high search engine ranking, and then once it is indexed, uploading a different page to replace it.
- Submitting a page to the search engines that automatically redirects to a page with different content.
- Getting listed on hundreds of websites, regardless of the value or appropriateness of the link.
If you think of a new way to trick the search engines, you can be sure that one of the 100,000+ employees at Google have thought of it too! So we recommend to avoiding the spammy tricks and to work instead towards optimization for improved results over the long term. A rule of thumb when doing SEO is to make changes that are good for the search engines and good for the end-user.
Authority Building Having links from popular sites that rank well for your keywords is an important factor that will boost your ranking. Search engines use links from other sites (incoming links) as votes to your site and categorize links based on quality and relevance. Authority building strategies involve getting new links to your site and mentions of your website or its content on other websites.
While software can help automate certain tasks, authority building shouldn’t be one of them. You may think manual submissions to business directories, local sites and partners are time-consuming, but just consider that you spent time and money building your website, now building relationships with other websites also merits your attention as it is one of the pillars of SEO.