You probably know by now the importance of being found through search engines. That one little site — whether it’s Google, Bing, or Yahoo, is what people use every day to find answers to questions, products, and information. If your site doesn’t appear until page 10 in search results, you’re not going to see an uptick in sales.
Use these 10 tactics to move up search engine results and start driving more traffic to your website.
1. Keep Your Content Fresh. After you initially write the copy for your website, you might not think about it again. But Google does. And if it sees cobwebs on your website, it’s going to rank you lower. You can keep your content fresh in two ways (try both!):
- Revamp your static web copy once a quarter
- Write lots of blog content
2. Make Sure You’re Found on Search Engines. Search directories are essentially like phone books for websites: they’re how search engines find you. If you have a new site, it might take the spiders crawling the web a while to find you. So speed up the process by submitting them to search engines yourself.
3. Get Others to Link To You. By having reputable, high ranking sites link back to yours, you’ll increase the number of inbound links (links directing traffic in to your site; get it?), which Google uses to determine how popular you are. Just make sure they relate to the content you’ve got on your site. There’s no benefit in getting a dentist to link from his site to your cat grooming site.
4. Target Keywords. In your web copy and on your blog, you should use keywords you want to be found for. If you run a press release distribution site, find keywords like “how to distribute a press release” and use them naturally in your copy. Then when people search these keywords, they’ll find you.
5. Guest Blog. One great way to get inbound links is to guest blog. You provide great content on another blog, and you get a link back to your site in your bio.
6. Write Press Releases. Press releases are great SEO tools, and they include that important inbound link to your site. Write one a month on news your company has. Include those keywords and the site link.
7. Work on Outbound Links. Just like inbound links help you rise the ranks of Google, so do outbound links, or links going to other websites. Providing them, you’re giving extra value to your visitors (“here’s a great link you might link on outbound links.”) You’re not holding them captive on your site. They’ll begin to trust you for it, and Google will like it too.
8. Create Internal Links. Another thing Google likes to see is links from one page to another within your site. So if on one page you talk about products, you could link to your FAQs page as an easy way for visitors to get there without scrolling to the bottom of the page. Link from one blog post to another relevant one too.
9. Pay Attention to Ranking. If there are specific keywords you want to rank highly for, check every month or so to see where you stand. If you’re not as high as you’d like to be, work on adding more of that keyword to blog posts, meta descriptions, etc.
10. Never Pay for the #1 Position. A lot of so-called SEO experts will try to get your money and tell you they can get you to rank #1 for keywords. Problem is, they tend to be crazy specific keywords no one will search for. So tell me: how much value does it hold for you to pay to rank #1 for “the best pizza place this side of the river jordan?” Who’s searching for that? Focus on using these other tactics and rising up search results naturally.
Want more info on all things search engine-related? Join us for our free webinar, “Rev Up Your Search Engine Know-How” on June 25, 2013, at 1 pm Eastern.
Photo Credit: kevinpereira via Compfight cc
