Many online sellers get frustrated with search engines regularly changing algorithms. But there are basic principles that haven’t changed through the years. Apply these tips to increase your rankings:
1. Get listed in more search engines. There are tons of them out there. There are also many free services that will help you get listed. Or just set aside some time to get it done yourself. Here is a free search engine submission site that will let you cycle through the top 100 search engines and get your site submitted.
2. Get listed in more directories. Again, there are a lot of them out there. Look for higher pagerank directories. Improvingrank.com has some listed by pagerank. Look on the left side of the homepage.
3. Program your site to be “crawler” friendly. Search engines send out “crawlers” to gather information from your site so they understand how to rank it.
- Create your links using HTML, not javascript. Crawlers can’t follow javascript and won’t be able to read your information.
- Don’t design your site in Flash—there’s nothing for the crawlers to read. If they can’t interpret the information, they can’t classify your site.
- Make sure your copy is HTML, not a graphic of a text. It may look like copy. But if you have a text graphic, all the crawlers will see is a blank page.
4. Make sure your site is link-worthy. Search engines judge a site’s popularity by the number of links pointing to it. To make sure people will want to link to your site, you have to offer something worth linking to. Beyond your product or service, you need something that puts you over the top: an information service, a superior presentation, or great variety.
5. Make your page filenames descriptive and keyword rich. Naming your page new_page_1.html is wasting an opportunity to do some SEO. Use names that describe the content and keep the keywords flowing.
6. Check your Title tags. You can use 90 – 100 characters in the title, so add some keywords. We know Google looks at them, and so do many more search engines.
7. Do keyword research extensively. Everything else revolves around the keyword phrases you choose, so it’s critical you choose the best ones. http://WordTracker.com and http://KeywordDiscovery.com are two information databases that show you what words people are searching for and suggest words you can use.
8. Don’t be married to any one keyword or phrase. Optimize for all the relevant phrases. Says Whalen, “If you can rank highly for a good portion of them, they’re going to add up to a lot more than just that one keyword phrase that you think is the good big money one.”
9. Go post in a few forums and put your website in your signature. Forums are a great place to put one way links. And you can help somebody out at the same time.
10. Put together a text based sitemap and put it on your site. There’s a lot of navigation that spiders can’t understand, such as flash, forms, java and javascript. Putting together a text-based sitemap gives the bots a way to navigate around the site.
Fifteen minutes every couple of days will make a huge difference in getting your rank higher.
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