Drastically Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

If you have ever created your own website or blog, without even knowing who you are or what your site is about (unless it rhymes with "pacebook"), I would be willing to bet that you have wondered how to get more visitors to your site. This is because driving traffic to new websites is without a doubt the hardest part of becoming a successful internet entrepreneur. With so many websites for people to choose from in almost every different topic you could think of, the competition is stiff when it comes to attracting visitors to come to your site rather than any other one. If you are going to have success on the internet, you need to learn how to improve the search engine ranking of your website.

There are four basic ways that determine how well a site is ranked by search engines, and they are as follows:

1. SEO (search engine optimization)

2. Your ability to optimize your content

3. Link Building Strategies

4. Promotional Strategies

In order to improve your search engine ranking for your website, you need to excel in these four areas. So let's go over how to successfully accomplish each of them.

SEO involves catering your content to be "favored" by search engines. There are many different tricks to doing this, with the most important aspect being choosing keywords for each of the pages of your site. Based on the content contained on the page, the keyword(s) you choose should both reflect this content and be strategically contained within the content. Make sure you have your most popular keyword contained in the page title, article title, page description (created for use by search engines), URL of the page, first paragraph of the content, and at least one other time throughout the writing. You also want your most popular keyword contained in the links to the page, both within your site and from other sites (see #3 below for more information on this).

When it comes to deciding which keywords to use for each page, try to go for more descriptive keywords rather than generic ones. Even though it would be ideal to be displayed on the first page of a Google search for the most popular keywords, the reality is that it is much harder to compete for those spots. If you choose a more specific keyword, (for example, for this page I used "improve your search engine ranking" rather than just "search engine optimization") then even though it is not searched for as frequently, it will be easier to compete to be on the first page of the search. Basically, it is better to be on the first page of a keyword phrase that is searched 20 times per hour than on the tenth page of one that is searched 200 times per hour, just simply on the premise that more people are going to see your site.

Having high quality content is also key in improving your search engine ranking. Google's definition of how to produce high quality content is "Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content." The most important thing to make sure you provide with your content is useful information. Make sure that you write about things that people are going to want to read about or are able to learn something from. Generally, if you focus your site around something that you know a great deal about, you will be able to produce excellent content. Choose a website topic and subtopics that you would consider yourself an "expert" on, and it will allow you to write very informational articles.

Making sure that your site is well linked internally as well as having high quality backlinks from external sources leading to your site will greatly improve your search engine ranking. Having a navigation bar constantly displayed across the top of every page of your site will help improve the internal linking of your site. Included in the navigation bar should be 4-6 of the most popular pages of your site. Also, make sure that every page of your website is able to be reached through a link from at least one other page of the site. At the same time you do not want to have too many links on each page, as it does not look appealing.

For your external links, having a solid number of high quality backlinks to the most popular pages of your site will rank your site higher. It is also important if the sites with the backlinks are ranked highly themselves by search engines. To get these backlinks, post links to your site on popular forums and blogs related to the same topic of your website. When doing this, don't just spam the forum or blog with a useless post telling people to go to your site, but actually join into the conversation and contribute something to the discussion before you talk about your own site. Submitting your site to online directories is another good way to create some high quality backlinks.

How you promote your site on the web also plays a major part in determining your search engine ranking. Once you start having some success in gaining viewers, it could be a good idea to purchase some advertising on other popular, content related sites. This is a great way to not only increase traffic to your site, but to improve your search engine ranking. If you do decide to purchase some advertising, make sure that you choose a site that gets a great deal of traffic, so that you can be certain that your ad will be seen. Google AdWords is a good choice, since they not only will place your ad on the top of related Google searches, but will place it on other sites related to yours.

Although it may seem like once you master all four of these areas, your website is going to be ranked #1 on Google for every keyword of your choice. While this would be nice, it is just not realistic. After all, this knowledge is available to everyone out there with a website of their own, and each and every one of them are trying to be first on the search engine result pages. The reality of SEO is that it takes a great deal of time to finally get your site ranked highly for popular keywords. Creating quality content, choosing good keywords to rank for, and steady link building for many months are the ways to improve the search engine ranking for your website. If you want to achieve that number one spot someday, you need to be persistent and keep up with all of these tactics. It will take a great deal of effort, but when you are getting thousands of unique hits per day, it will be worth it.