Posts Tagged ‘search engine rankings’

How To Increase Your Keyword Rankings

Friday, May 13th, 2011

When you consider that roughly 90% of searchers click on results on the first page, and that more than 80% click on results in the top three positions on the first page, it makes sense to try and improve your rankings for important keywords. Moving a keyword ranking from the bottom of the first page to one of the first three positions can boost your website’s traffic by thousands – of course, the hard numbers depend on your niche and the number of people searching for information on a particular keyword phrase.

Considering these facts, it makes sense to boost those rankings. So how do you do it? Here are the steps to boost your keyword rankings for any keyword you want to improve upon:

  1. Check your organic search traffic under Traffic Sources in Google Analytics
  2. Export the data in CSV
  3. Using a website ranking tool, check the rankings for each keyword on your list
  4. Find the keywords that are sending you traffic despite their lower rankings (you’ll get better results if you focus on those keywords where your rankings are at the bottom of the first page or on the second or third page; these are easier to push up to higher visible rankings quickly.)
  5. Once you’ve got your list, start a link building campaign for those keywords (write articles, guest blog posts, and use social media to promote them)

Your link building campaign should focus on achieving high value anchor text links for the specific keywords that you are targeting. If you do this right, you’ll push your rankings up a few notches within a month or two. That will increase your traffic, and if your web pages are converting that traffic, then you’ll see an increase in ROI.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | 5 Comments »

3 Ways A Blog Helps You SEO-Wise

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

If you add a blog to your company website, there are 3 very distinct SEO benefits that you gain from doing this. Of course, you only get these benefits if your blog and if you blog in the right manner.

Here are those 3 benefits:

  1. Fresh Content – Every time you write a blog post, you add fresh content to your website. This invites the search engine spiders back to your site to crawl it. Each time your website is crawled is another chance to rise in the rankings for your keywords.
  2. Increased Search Engine Rankings – Not only do you have more opportunities to rank with each blog post, but each blog post can rank according to its own merits. Every blog post is considered a separate web page by the search engines. As such, each blog post can rank for a separate keyword phrase.
  3. Linkbuilding – Because you can link to your website pages from your blog, you can drive up those pages in search engine rankings using powerful link anchor text.

There are other benefits to blogging, but these are three of the biggest SEO benefits. Needless to say, the more often you blog, the more likely you are to realize these benefits. And if you create blog posts around your important keywords, you’re also more likely to realize these benefits.

Do you have a company blog? If not, why not?

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Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 3 Comments »

How Twitter Can Assist Your SEO With A Single Tweet

Friday, July 16th, 2010

If you are members of multiple social media networks you can sync your networks with your Twitter feed and improve your chances of SEO. All the major search engines now include Twitter in their real-time search results. That means every tweet you send has the potential to rank in the search engines – at least for a little while – for specific keyword phrases that you target. But that’s not all.

You can also have your tweets rank at other social media networks.

Let’s say you have your Twitter account synced with Facebook, LinkedIn, Mixx, BlogCatalog, Plaxo and a half dozen other social networks. When you update your Twitter feed it will notify the other social networks that your Twitter feed was updated and they will pull your tweets in to share with your audience on those social networks.

For example, Mixx will bookmark your tweet automatically as a result of you updating your Twitter feed. As will BlogCatalog.

The search engines will crawl those sites and see your tweets. If they match the algorithmic preferences of a particular search query then those bookmarks or updates could rank, giving you search rank position on secondary sources. How cool is that?

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Posted in Social Media | 3 Comments »

Are PageRank And Rankings Related?

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

It’s easy to get confused about such concepts as PageRank and search engine rankings if you don’t spend a great deal of time studying how search engines work. One common misconception about search rankings is that they are tied to one’s PageRank number. This is not the case.

PageRank is a way Google has devised to assign an authority number to websites within the same niche based on how many other sites link to it and the authority ratings of those sites. It is an algorithm based largely on quantity and quality of backlinks.

While search engine rankings also rely, to some extent, on backlink analysis, the factors influencing are much broader in scope. There are literally hundreds of factors that influence how a web page ranks for the keywords it targets. One important ranking factor is domain age. A website that has been around for 10 years or longer has a much higher chance of ranking for a particular keyword than a page that is just 1 year old. The age difference, however, is not a guarantee of higher rankings as that ranking factor is used in conjunction with hundreds of other ranking factors. But it is one factor that can give a particular website an edge in the ranking wars.

Webmasters should not confuse PageRank and search engine rankings. They are not related and one does not influence the other.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | 1 Comment »