subject: Mprove Your Website Rankings - Further Search Engine Optimization [print this page] Mprove Your Website Rankings - Further Search Engine Optimization
Hopefully you began your journey towards an optimized web site by developing and implementing good, descriptive, keyword-rich copy. This practice will help search engine spiders accurately index your content so that your listings show up along with the most important keywords for describing your business. Now it is time to explore some of the other things you can do to improve your web site's search rankings.
Once you have all this great copy written on each page of your site, your next goal should be to make sure search engines can access every page of it. There's no guarantee that each time your site gets crawled every page will get read and indexed. So in order to increase the odds of that happening, it is a good idea to practice interlinking strategies. Interlinking is the practice of having a link on one page of your site that takes the user to another page of your site. This way, search engines will read and index one page and then follow the link to the next, then find a link to another page and follow that, and so on, hopefully leading to them indexing every page on the site. There are a couple of easy tricks that can help beef up your interlinking. One is to develop a site map page with a link to every single page on the site. A second is to have a universal footer that has a link to each page on the site. This way, a search engine has the opportunity to hit every one of those links each time it reads any page of the site. Basically you want to create a web of links within your site that keeps search engines moving from one place to another so that you get credit for all of your content.
Staying on the topic of providing an easy path around your web site, you will want to make sure the overall architecture of your web site does not contain anything which may impede a spider on its path through the site. This could include having your site navigation executed in a coding format that spiders cannot work their way through, or having too many videos or images on your site, or building your site within frames, to name a few. You want to make sure everything is as easily accessible as possible.
Once you have developed an easy-to-navigate site that has great keyword-rich descriptive content, you are ready to start looking at inbound linking strategies. As search engine optimization techniques became more widely known, people looking to exploit search engine traffic to reap advertising profits began to use these tactics to build sites that didn't really add value to the consumer but attained lofty status in search engine rankings. Search engines want to provide high quality results to their users, so they tweaked their formulas to include some outside influences that webmasters could not manipulate as easily.
One element is inbound links. To a search engine, if a site is willing to link to your site from theirs, that is an endorsement of the quality of your site. They then give you credit from that for search engine optimization purposes. And to make sure people are not buying links from other sites or trading links with unrelated sites, higher value is given to links that come from sites that have lots of traffic, have a related interest to the industry your site serves, and sites that carry some level of public authority. So while attempting to convince others to link to your site, your time will be best spent pursuing links from sites that are in a related niche and sites that have high traffic counts.
Finally, when you have the other elements of your site finely tuned, you will want to turn an eye towards refreshing your content often. Within the last year, Google has really emphasized the importance of having new content frequently added to your site as part of the factors determining your ranking. The more new content being added to your site on a daily or weekly basis, the better it is for your rankings. So you may want to look into adding a blog to your site, as this will make it easy to post new content on a regular basis.
These elements are all equally important in the quest to attain a top ranking on the results pages. You must learn to balance them all together and perform each one exceptionally well in order to achieve the great rewards of improved traffic, sales, and leads that come with a strong search engine presence.
