SEO TIPS: Improve your Search Engine Rank

To learn how to improve your search engine rank and drive website traffic you need to understand the concepts that govern the way the search engines work.

Without an understanding of these principles and a system to incorporate them into everything you do online, you will not get the success you are seeking. On the other hand, learn how to effectively utilize them and you will start dominating niches all over the Internet driving 1000’s visitors to your site on a daily basis – Hopefully!

So what are the principles that rule search engine rankings and how do I improve mine? Here they are:

1. Relevancy
2. Popularity
3. Originality

Relevancy

Relevancy is something defined as having a relationship. For example, if your website was about fishing, related content would include information about fishing rods, fishing tackle, places to fish and fishing lessons. Content about anything other than the topic of the website or related topics would not score for relevancy, thereby having any chance of ranking in the search engines. Search engines check your site for relevancy.

You need to be right on topic for whatever it is you are targeting with the content you create. A final word of caution about relevancy: Relevancy alone will not rank your site! You could have the most highly relevant, best original content ever written posted at your site, however, if there are no sites pointing to it, it will not rank in the search engines. Relevancy does not work without the concepts of popularity and original content. The first step is to choose the keyword or keyword phrase you want your content to target. Let’s say you’re trying to get a higher ranking for this keyword phrase, “Business Branding Packages”. First, you would want to find what people are searching for and specifically target that keyword if you want your content to rank for that phrase.

Make sure you include the keyword phrase in the title of the article. For example, your title could be “Affordable Business Branding Packages for Start-Up Companies”. Always try to put the keyword or keyword phrase as the first few words of the article title. Always remember to use the keyword phrase, several times throughout the article. Finally, make sure your content remains 100% relevant to the keyword phrase.

Popularity

Popularity works together with relevancy to improve search engine rankings. Popularity is based on two key measures:

1. How Many Sites Link to Your Site – A site’s popularity is measured first by the number of sites that directly link to your site. 

To demonstrate popularity let’s take a quick look at YouTube. YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, Why? All links and embed codes taken from YouTube and embedded on other sites, whether on Facebook, Myspace, a blog, a sales page or a website, create automatic links back to YouTube where the video is hosted. Every time someone shares a YouTube video a link is created.

With the number of videos shared, Youtube gets 1000’s new incoming links daily. This is one of the reasons why YouTube videos rank very highly on search engines. Their site is super popular!

2. The Popularity of the Sites Linking to You – The more popular the site linking to you is, the better the score given by the search engines. 

The more incoming links to your site the more popular it is. It is therefore always important to syndicate the content of your site (with a direct link to the content on your site), to as many sites as possible.

The Internet presents a host of sites where you can post your content for free to improve your search engine rankings, including popular high ranking sites like article directories, blogs, social bookmarking sites, video sites, press releases and social network pages.

Originality

Originality basically refers to unique content. In simple terms the search engines ask the question, is this same piece of content all over the Internet? As an example, if I took a highly relevant and popular article from my site and posted it to hundreds of sites it would not rank high in the search engines as it would no longer be deemed unique. 

There is no doubt that spreading your unique content across the Internet is important for driving traffic to your site.

The secret is to make several unique versions of the same information all with a backlink to your original article posted on your site. Spinning is a popular term used to describe the process of changing the titles, keywords and phrases throughout your article to make several unique versions. Placing these all over the Internet with a backlink to your site will improve rankings. Follow these steps to watch the number of visitors to your site improve.

If you would like assistance in building and maintaining a consistent, stronger and more powerful brand for your company with a new website then contact BlueFlameDesign today.