SEO Tips to Up Your Page Ranking - Part 2
By Carl Chambers, Chambers Copy & Content
5. Links
As search engines rank pages according to their relevance to a given search term, one way to appear more ‘relevant’ is by getting lots of other websites to link to your site (so-called link building). Though it is possible to automate these backlinks, your efforts will be better spent in generating fresh, original and useful content to naturally encourage quality inbound links. Sure, it will take longer for your wonderful content to be discovered, but always remember that search engines love unique and compelling content – and they probably always will.
However, if you are in a hurry, be wary of link buying. If a web crawler spots inbound links coming from random sites that have no legitimate business linking to you, the search engine could impose a page rank penalty on your site. This happened to Go Compare a couple of years back when Google imposed a penalty of minus 50, i.e. it went from No. 1 in natural listings for the search term ‘car insurance’, to No. 51 – D’oh!
A legitimate way to point links back to your site is to promote it via its own network of social media (e.g. Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter). Regularly updating these social network accounts will afford you plenty of opportunities to link back to your website, plus tweets and updates can be seen by other users of the networks.
But it’s not just external links that can improve page ranking. Wherever possible, link between pages within your site (link text should be the title or heading of the page being linked to). Doing so will help web crawlers to ‘discover’ your site, and it also aids navigation and scannability for human users.
As mentioned in the previous section, don’t overlook the power of trusted social networking sites such as Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. These are hugely popular, easy to set up, are great for promoting your website to a huge potential audience, and they also offer legitimate ways for you to create inbound links to your website.
Set up a Twitter account and post updates whenever you get the opportunity. Stay informed about your contacts and industry and alert others to your business with LinkedIn. If you’ve written a great article, make sure you Digg it to give millions the chance to read your words and add their comments. And let’s not forget Facebook, the social networking phenomenon with over 400 million users.
So tap into a variety of social networking resources, interlink between them, update regularly, and before long, your website’s online footprint will start to grow. And don’t forget to link to these services from your website.
7. Tags and Page Titles
Search engines don’t place as much emphasis on tags as they once did, but who’s to say that won’t change in the future, so it’s a good idea to continue adding them. What are tags? They are keywords or key phrases – unseen by readers but visible to robots – that are entered into the code at the top of your web page to give web crawlers a snapshot of what the page is about.
Search engines place far more emphasis on the page title (that descriptive line of text at the very top left of your web browser), so make sure it accurately describes the page content. As a general guide, write out the page title text in this order: keyword or key phrase/category/website title or brand – and don’t exceed the character limits set by the search engines (65 characters for Google and Bing, 120 characters for Yahoo! including spaces). Importantly, each web page should have a unique title.
8. Sitemaps
The main purpose of a sitemap is to get search engines to accurately index every page of your website. This is important because if a page is somehow overlooked by a search engine’s web crawler, there is no way for it to appear in search results.
There are actually two types of sitemap: the clickable sitemap page that helps visitors find their way around a website; and the sitemap file that’s used solely to alert search engines to each page on a website.
A sitemap page is doubly useful because it’s both a site navigation aid for users and it’s an opportunity to add links to all the pages on your site. Because search engine robots index sites by following links from one page to another, a sitemap page is particularly recommended for new sites that are unlikely to have many external links pointing to them.
A sitemap file, on the other hand, is designed to be read by search engines alone, and it contains an encoded list of every page that you want to be indexed. If this all sounds a bit ‘techie’, you needn’t worry because it’s actually quite easy to set up. Check out this simple Site Wizard guide.
Neither type of sitemap is essential – your site will work just fine without one – but if you do find that specific pages are not appearing on search engines, try adding one (or both) types.
Well those are my SEO tips. If you were to remember just one, make sure it’s ‘Content is King’. Search engines may change their search criteria, but content will always be the best indicator of a site’s relevance. And don’t forget to write for people as well as web crawlers – anyone can write a keyword-rich web page, but there’s real skill in writing a page that attracts search engines and humans alike.
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