How to Improve Your Web Site’s Ranking

Last time, I talked about 3 things that hurt your web site’s ranking with search engines.  Today, we are going to discuss 3 techniques that will help improve your web site’s ranking. 

1. Content, content, content.  If the golden rule for buying real estate is “location, location, location”, the golden rule for achieving high rankings on Google and other search engines is “content, content, content”.  It is not enough to just have a lot of text content on your web site.  All the contents need to be original.  If you simply copy a number of articles from other web sites, search engines have ways to detect it.  This is an area that the business owner can actively participate in.  If you don’t have the time or expertise to come up with a number of original articles to put on your web site, it pays to hire someone to interview you and write articles on your behalf in your area of expertise.  Not only does having great content help your rankings, it also makes you a lot more credible in the minds of potential customers.  That is why I often recommend business owners create a Free Resources section on their web site.  This section can be filled with articles, tips, forms, and any other content that can be beneficial to your potential customers.  The more original content you have, the higher your web site will be ranked by search engines. 

2. Build a web site for your customers, not for the search engines.  This is a mistake I see people make sometimes.  The business owners are so worried about achieving high rankings that they build a web site for the search engines instead of building it for their customers.  Remember, getting people to your site is only half the battle.  You also need to encourage potential customers to stay on your web site, and give them some incentive to contact you.  If you excessively optimize your web site to the point of overkill (where the site is friendlier to machines than it is to humans), chances are you have missed the point of having a web site.  If you are interested in achieving high rankings through search engine optimization, chances are your web site is not just a collection of personal photographs but a lead generation tool for your business.  By building your web site for your clients instead of the search engine, you would have done your job right.  Another way to say this is to make your web site as useful to potential clients as possible.

3. Earn high quality inbound links to your web site.  This is one of the most important ways to enhance your web site’s ranking, but it is not easily done.  Generally, it requires the expertise of a credible SEO company.  The reason I say some special expertise is needed is that you can’t just get any links, and you can’t just get the link in any way.  If you get low quality links, it can potentially hurt your web site’s ranking.  If you get a high quality link in the wrong way, it can also hurt your web site’s ranking.  Search engines such as Google tend to frown on the practice of buying and selling links, so the manner in which you acquire links need to be done in an editorially earned manner.  For many business owners, this is the reason why they hire a SEO company.  A web designer can build a beautiful web site and the business owner can come up with lots of great content, but it takes the expertise of a trustworthy SEO company to earn the proper links for your web site to be ranked high on Google.