You have a web site and you would like to improve your search engine ranking. Let’s assume you have done nothing so far. And you are a small business that services a small geographic area.
First make sure that you are capturing and reviewing your web site analytics. These would include number of visits, unique visitors, where your visitors are located, how they are being referred to your site, etc. One excellent source is Google Analytics. It is a free powerful tool. And it is easy to set up. You sign up for the service, copy and paste a small block of code on each page of your site, submit some basic information about your site, and the next day you can begin tracking your site’s analytics.
Keep that in place for a period of time to get a baseline on how your site is currently performing without making any changes to your site to improve traffic. Because that is what your are trying to achieve. Higher rankings are great, but you want people to actually click on the link and visit your site.
Second, consider using pay-per-click advertising with Google Adwords. This is a quick fix to improve traffic while you are working on the other aspects of improving search rankings. You can place a cap on how much you are willing to pay-per-click, and how much you are willing to pay-per-day. So you can choose 10 cents per click for a maximum of $5 per day. And if you service a small geographic area, you can limit this search to the geographic area you service, thus targeting your marketing.
Third, create inbound and outbound links. Most likely you are listed on some professional directories. In addition to the usual information, such as name, address and phone number, make sure you have your web site listed also. This will help search engines find and understand what your site is about. Be picky though. Search engines also take into consideration the quality of the inbound link.
Also, add outbound links to your site. This will help search engines get a better understanding for what your site is about.
Fourth, add your business as a local business center on google maps. It is a free service. And the whole process will take about four weeks. When you sign up for this service, you will enter the name of your business, address, email and web site information. To verify your listing, you can either have them send you a postcard or have google call you by telephone. The telephone process is very easy. If you decide to do a phone verification, you will receive a phone call immediately and asked to verify that the listing is correct by typing in a pin number. Within four weeks your listing will start appearing on the google maps for searches on your business type in your area. That’s it.
The final step is a bit more painful. Consider a web site face lift. You got that blinking new button, that airplane flying around gif thing, your site uses frames, etc. The web is relatively new. Times are a changing. And how search engines spider the web have changed also. So you need to keep your image and coding practices up-to-date.
Your site needs to use Semantic HTML and Web Standards. Semantic html means that the html tags describe the content between those tags. This is a title, this is a main header, this is a sub-header, this is a paragraph, and this is a bullet point. This helps search engines understand the content and importance of each piece of content. Also, Web Standards means that you separate the content from the appearance of the site. Basically it strips out all of the unnecessary information about how to present the site to the web browsers, and just leaves the content in the html. Search engines can spider that content more efficiently as a result.
Keep in mind that this is an iterative process. By reviewing your web analytics you can gauge how your changes and improvements are affecting your site’s traffic. You can tweak your pay-per-click advertising, such as keywords used and geographic area. You can add inbound links and outbound links. And you can add new content to your site.
Content is key for search engines. They are spidering your site for key words. Don’t just put them in the meta-tags, key words need to be in the text of your site. Keep your content up-to-date and relevant. This will ultimately help your rankings.
