10 tips to improve your search engine ranking – Part 2 Oct 5th '09

I hope many of you have already enjoyed reading the first part of this series on how to improve your websites search engines ranking. If not, why not? Okay, I’ll wait, go and read the first part… All done?

The 10 golden rules

1. Have unique title and descriptions on all your pages
2. Generate a sitemap and submit it to the search engines
3. Make sure that your keywords are in your body text
4. Add your keywords to headers or place emphasis on them in your text
5. Ensure images are properly optimised
6. Code is clean and readable by search engines
7. Submission of website to directories
8. Obtain links from other websites to yours
9. Ensure you have a method to track your progress
10. Create unique new content regularly

Let’s continue where we left off and crack on with point 6:

6. Code is clean and readable by search engines

This isn’t a visual thing but it’s still vitally important to the search engines. If your website takes a while to load or is full of Frontpage, or heaven forbid Microsoft Word HTML tags, your website may be affecting your ranking. Your site should be designed and constructed using clean code and CSS to ensure the search engines view the most important aspect of your website: your content.

7. Submission of website to directories

There are many free directories which are worth adding your website to, three of these directories I would advise are the following:

• Google Local
• Free Index
• Yahoo Local

I have chosen these as they are the most visible to your potential visitors as well as being reputable and free. A word of warning though, don’t just add yourself to lots of directories, in this case more directories does not mean more traffic. Some can even give you the opposite of what you are after.

8. Obtain links from other websites to yours

So far we have mainly focused to what we call ‘on page’ optimisation. This is only half the battle. It is very important that other sites link to your website. There is a myth circulating that if you have a links page and link to lots of other sites that will help, it’s not true! Only links from others to yours will help and only if they link correctly. For example if you want to rank highly for the keyword ‘blue widgets’ get other people to link to your site using the keyword ‘blue widgets’ as the text, so the link looks like ‘blue widgets‘. Search engines love this!

9. Ensure you have a method to track your progress

Over time your website will move up and down the search engines rankings. You will need a method to track this. Ideally before you start optimising you should have a statistics package available such as Google Analytics. As well as this you will need a way to see where your site is in the rankings and how that changes over time. For this we recommend Monitor My SEO. They will monitor your sites SEO progress over the weeks and months without you having to do a thing, comparing your websites position with that of your competitors for your chosen keywords. They even send you a weekly progress email with a hugely helpful PDF document.

10. Create unique new content regularly

As well as all the points mentioned so far, search engines love unique content. The easiest way to achieve this unique content regularly is with a blog. Blogs are a brilliant way to connect with your audience and to improve your ranking. One of the best blog platforms is Wordpress, they have a hosted version or one you can have on your own website.

So there we have it, all 10 tips. If you follow these tips your websites search engine ranking will improve. If you have any other tips or comments that might benefit other people then please leave them below—thanks for reading!

Written by Oliver Culverhouse

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