Showing up at the top of the major search engines can be easy or difficult depending on the competitiveness of the search term. This said, there are some basic steps that you can follow to make sure your web site shows up well for semi-competitive search terms.
Terms like ?credit cards? or ?weight loss? are examples of super-competitive terms that can take even an experienced search marketer over a year and hundreds of hours to rank well for. At the other end of the spectrum, ranking well for your company name or a geographically-clarified term like ?Hillsborough Law Firm? can take nothing more than putting your target keyword on your web page a few times and building a couple incoming links to your web site.
Regardless of the competitiveness of the terms you are targeting, there are three basic steps to follow first. These steps are:
- Determine What Keywords You?re Targeting
- Put those keywords on your home page
- Build links to your web site from related web sites
Let?s discuss each of these steps.
Step 1: Determine What Keywords You?re Targeting
The first step is to determine which keywords you want your web site to show up for. You can use the Keyword Suggestion Tool from at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/ to get an idea of the number of times a specific keyword (or keyphrase) is searched each month. Try to come up with a main keyword(s) that you will optimize your home page for and less competitive keywords (?Secondary Keywords), that you can optimize other pages on your web site.
Step 2: Put Those Keywords on Your Home Page
Now that you have determined your main keyword(s) and your secondary keywords you want your web site to show up for, take your main keyword(s) and put them naturally within the text on your home page. Repeat the main keyword(s) 4-5 within the content. The ratio of the number of times your main keyword shows up in your content to the total words on the page is called keyword frequency. Increasing keyword frequency in the text content of the homepage is one of the most helpful and easy things a web site owner can do to improve their ranking.
In addition to adding the keywords to the text content of the homepage, it is also critically important to add the main keyword(s) in the Title tag of the page, which is between the
and tags in the code. Other less important, yet still helpful tips include putting your main keyword(s) in a few of the ALT tags on the images and adding the main keyword(s) to the meta description and meta keywords tags on your home page.
Step 3: Build Links to Your Web Site from Related Sites
The third step is building incoming links to your web site from other related web sites. Search engines rank web sites based on authority, and authority within a topic can only be gained by getting web sites that are about the same topic as yours to link to your web site. The two most common methods for building links are offering to exchange links with similar web sites or writing articles and asking similar web sites to syndicate them on their web site. Ideally, you want your main keyword(s) in the link itself, the words that are underlined, clickable, and usually in blue. Building quality links from related web sites can take time, but it critically important to establishing top rankings, especially if you are attempting to get a good ranking on a competitive term.
The number of incoming links needed is generally dependent on how many incoming links the top web sites for the targeted terms have in the major search engines. You can see how many links the top ranked sites have for your target keyword by typing that keyword into Google, then copying the domain name of the top ranked web site, then pasting in ?link:domainname.com? in the Google Search box, where domainname.com is the actual domain of the web site of which you are checking the incoming links.
While there are many more tips for improving the rankings of your keywords, these three steps (determining the keywords to target, increasing keyword frequency, and building incoming links from relevant websites) are the most important initial steps to take to ensure that your web site shows up for your targeted search terms.
Search Engine Optimization Questions & Answers
I have a new web site. What is realistic to expect in terms of how long will it take to show up?
It is important to keep in mind that for a brand new website, it can take up to 9-12 months to start showing up in the top rankings for competitive search terms. If you?ve completed the optimization steps mentioned above on a new web site and it isn?t yet showing up for top rankings
What else can I do to improve my ranking?
While improving keyword frequency, adding your targeted keywords to your title, meta, and alt tags, and building incoming links from relevant web sites are the most important steps, there are a few other things that are important. These include building lots of quality related content pages on your web site, updating the content on your home page every couple weeks to ensure content freshness (which is a factor in the rankings), and cleaning up your code.
Why is my site not showing up?
If your site is not at all showing up in Google or Yahoo, it can be because you don?t have any other web sites linking to yours. Type in ?link:yourwebsite.com? into Google and make sure it is showing up that you have other web sites linking to your web site. If you have built incoming links to your site but Google isn?t showing them, it is possible Google?s spider hasn?t yet found the page with the link to your site.
You can submit the page where your link exists at http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl. If you do have incoming links showing up in Google, it is possible your site may be penalized. You can use the Google Webmaster Tools at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus to diagnose issues with why your web site may not be showing up in Google. Do note that if you have a new web site, it can take at least two months for the site to show up at all once you have at least one incoming link to your website and as much as 12 months for the site to start performing well on searches for competitive keywords.
Is it better to hire a professional Upper Ranks or do it myself?
Hiring a Upper Ranks can save a good deal of time and cost less than doing it yourself and often get better results?depending of course on the firm you hire. In order to find a good firm, ask for references from clients they?ve worked with in the past and for actual search results for competitive keywords that they?ve obtained high rankings.
While I?m certainly biased, I would recommend checking out Virante, Inc. for any search engine optimization or web marketing needs you may have. Virante is an SEO and marketing consulting firm I started in 1998 and now is run by search marketing experts Bob Misita, Malcolm Young, Russ Jones, and Jeff Staub as I?ve focused on being CEO of Broadwick, the company behind the IntelliContact email marketing software. You can learn more about Virante at http://www.virante.com.
Ryan Allis is the Chief Executive Officer of Virante, Inc., a web marketing consulting and search engine optimization firm in Durham, North Carolina as well as the CEO of Broadwick Corp., providers of the leading email marketing software service IntelliContact. He is the author of the book, Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to One Million in Sales. You can read more of Ryan?s articles at http://www.ryanallis.com | |
