How To Boost Your Search Engine Rankings
Managing your website so that you get better search engine rankings doesn’t have to be hard. But it does have to be planned. If you want to be a successful online entrepreneur, you need to do certain things that will keep the search engines happy.
When you take action in your online business according to particular methods and systems, you effectively tell the internet what your business is about. The search engines will then send visitors to your website that they think will benefit from what you offer. This is what makes optimizing your website for the search engines so important.
This process is called search engine optimization (SEO) and can have a serious impact on your business.
Here are 7 ways to boost your search engine rankings.
FREE Checklist: SEO For Beginners
Your Search Engine Ranking Position
To improve search engine results takes a goal and a plan. There are strategies that you can implement on and off the pages of your website.
On-page SEO is all about optimizing your website pages and social media profiles with the right terms, navigation, keywords, headlines and so forth. Off-page SEO, concerns itself with these same things off your website pages that you control. For example, guest blogging, forum commenting, and anything above board that you can do to get authoritative links back to your website.
1. Target An Easy Search PhraseÂ
First, choose the keywords or keyword phrases you want to focus on.  Ideally you want one that has lots of demand and little supply. These phrases are often the phrases that are three or four keywords long. They may begin with “How to” or “Tips for”. Use keyword tools to help you find those unique keyword phrases to focus on. Without doing keyword research, you may chase particular words and phrases that are very competitive. For example, you’ll have a tough job trying to out-SEO the huge websites and companies that rank high for terms like “weight loss”.
The reason for targeting these easy search phrases is that you can quickly achieve a top page rank. You can then use these content pages to link to other pages within your website – the pages where you ideally want your traffic to go.
2. Social Bookmark Your Key Pages
Social bookmarking sites create both traffic and incoming links. It’s basically bookmarking a web page so that you can read it later so long as you are connected to the internet. Website pages that are bookmarked on social bookmarking sites are considered as a quality backlink by search engines.The more quality links you have coming into your website, the better search engine rankings you will achieve. Choose a few of your key website pages and list them with social bookmarking sites. Start with sites like Reddit,  Digg and StumbleUpon.
3. Comment on Blogs And Forums
Commenting on blogs and forums and participating on social networking sites drives traffic to your website. It can also give your SEO a boost. People may link to your website and specific pages on your website once they learn about your valuable content and information. If the search engines see people linking to your website, they’ll see it as a signal that it contains useful and relevant information for their users, so will point traffic to it.
4. Internal LinkingÂ
Targeting the same key pages, create an internal linking structure within your website to draw attention to these pages. You can identify a keyword or keyword phrase you’re trying to optimize and link to pages that use those keywords. Link building helps search engines, but it also helps your audience find your information in a more organized fashion. Consider your link-building strategy and create a plan of action going forward that will provide links from outside your website to your content, plus links within your website to more of your content.
5. Write More Keyword-Rich Content
Content is ultimately what the search engines index. The more relevant content you have, the more value the search engines place on your site. Creating keyword-focused content can give you the search engine rankings you’re looking for. Keep in mind that writing a bunch of 500 word blog posts that have no purpose other than SEO isn’t going to help if they’re not focused and purposeful. You need to find a voice for your business and stick to it with a strict focus.
6. Optimize Your Existing Content
Search engines like Google keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, because they want to provide the best search-results for their users and stop spam pages from clogging those results. But there are some golden rules you can follow:
- Placing keywords in your headline
- Using keywords in your subheadings
- Including keywords in your first and last paragraph
- Place relevant and supporting keywords throughout the body of the copy
One way to ensure that people find you, especially if you have a locally focused business, is to ensure that you use keywords that help local people find and discover you. For example, if you’re a local dentist you want to use the name of your location as well as the name of your business within meta descriptions, headers, titles and tags.
7. User-Generated Content
You can use interactive features to motivate user-generated content. This content can give you a great SEO boost. Look for opportunities to ask for contributions. For example, ask advice and then let people post their responses to your site. Of course you have full rights and control over the content.
Free Checklist: SEO For Your Website
Without SEO, you’re just hoping that Google will somehow stumble across your website, figure out what you’re writing about, and then hopefully send relevant and targeted traffic to your website. You’ve put a lot of work into your website so it makes no sense to just pray for luck where traffic and success is concerned. To learn more about how to get on first page of Google without paying for advertising, download my free checklist, SEO For Beginners.