Having had a number of websites with a top ten ranking for hard to place keywords, I've had a good deal of people asking me lately just how I do it. The simple truth is kindness and a good deal of elbow grease...
- For ranking high in Google search results, keywords in the “title tag” seem to be very important. The same keywords have to be mentioned in the “body tag” although the “title tag” seems to be much more important.
- I'm sure that you've heard the expression that content is king. IT IS!! Google absolutely loves constantly updated websites with original, fresh content. Try to update your website daily or at least every other day.
- Use wordpress. Now I'm not interested in opening a debate on the merits of wordpress, but let me tell you, as a CMS it is amazingly versatile, user friendly, and makes it much easier to add fresh content. There are a number of plugins that promote user interactivity. For an example, take a look at a new site that I just posted, here (loan modification website, just finished). Versatile, interactive, easy to maintain & post, and most of all, CLEAN!
- There are a number of great wordpress plugins that will "do" your search engine optimization for you, just list your keywords and your title!!
- Keywords in H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on search engine rankings while keywords in a H1 headline tag don’t have an effect on the rankings (this is something I did ot know before).
- Also “bold” or “strong” written keywords seem to have a slight effect on rankings.
- Websites that used their targeted keyword also as the name of images and as Alt-text of an image, ranked higher than websites that gave their images random names and random Alt-text.
- I know this is SEO basics, but websites that have a keyword inside the domain name usually rank higher than websites that don’t include keywords in the domain name.
- The file size of a website seems to influence the rankings. Websites with a smaller file size tend to rank higher than “heavy” websites.
- Web pages that use only a few parameters in their url’s (something like id?=abc) seem to rank higher than websites using a lot of parameters.
- Inbound links and Pagerank of course, have a big influence on search engine rankings. An interesting statistic is that the first page for a given keyword has 4 times as many links as result number 11 (the first result on the second page)
- Encourage your visitors to come back often, by offering content that no-one else has, from on topic to completely wacky and off-beat, and reward loyalty--- have a once a month winner of a gift card, t-shirt, or something interesting...
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- Post articles and press releases - two great sites are www.ezinearticles.com and www.free-press-release.com. I will be posting a full listing of the article sites I submit to at modificationzoom.com, and encourage you guys to visit!
Well, I hope this helps to answer questions and increase your website rankings. I also hope that this help me make a couple of new friends as I am brand new to activerain!
