Tuesday, May 6, 2008

How to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings and Get More Traffic?

Obtaining high search engine rankings for keywords that are closely related to your business is essential if you want to get more traffic to visit your website. The traffic from search engines are people who are searching for the service or product that you are selling, making them highly qualified leads for your business.

There are many things that you can do to improve your search rankings and get more traffic. Below is a catalogue of basic principles that you should keep in mind:

1. Create a website with valuable content. Put yourself in your readers' shoes. Do they want to visit a website with lousy content? The content on your website should solve an immediate problem for them, so that they will be willing to stay on your website and read more. With valuable content, your website will be search-engine friendly, which is essential if you want it to rank well. Keywords that you intend to optimize should also be placed within your content. Avoid repeating the keywords too many times, as search engines will view this as a spam and blacklist your site. Hire a professional SEO copywriter to write good content, with keywords nicely blended within the content.

2. Choose the right keyword phrase to attract your target customers. Strategically choosing of your keywords that target your customer is essential for your online success. The last thing you will ever want is to be able to drive visitors to your website, but the services or products that you provide are not what they are looking for. Research and use keywords that are closely related to what you are offering. Place them in the right fields within your web page, such as: Title tag, Meta tags, Header tags, Alt tags, and within the first 25 words in your page content.

3. Keep your website design and architecture simple. There are many benefits in keeping things simple. Firstly, visitors to your website can navigate easily between pages, finding what they want and buy products and services. Secondly, with simple architecture and design, search engines spider crawlers will be able to index your site more easily and thus be able to consider your site for higher ranking.

4. Get more back links to your website. Getting back links to your website is the most important step in search engine optimization. You can get back links by writing articles with your website link at the bottom of each article, and submit them to article directories for publishing. You can also go to forums and blogs to post useful comments and threads. Social media platforms like social book marking and Squidoo can also get you quality back links.

5. Keep track of the latest search engine algorithm. As search engine algorithm changes every now and then, you need to keep track of them and modify your web pages accordingly. To get latest search engine algorithm updates and happenings, you can go to leading search or online marketing industry publisher websites such as Clickz and subscribe to their RSS feeds.

Obtaining high rankings in search engines organic listings is the foundation of getting more traffic to your site. Once your keywords rank well on search engines, you will need to continue putting in effort so as to make sure that your high rankings remain there.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOM, which specializes in search engine optimization.

Check out more about Search Engine Optimization at http://www.optimalonlinemarketing.com

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