Improve your search engine rankings

Here are three key factors that you should constantly keep in mind for improved search engine rankings.

1. Content Is King As Far As Search Engines Are Concerned

Much has been said about content. The fact is that content is the currency used by search engines. Without good, useful content, you are basically going nowhere. It doesn’t matter how good your site is or how effective your search engine optimization efforts are.

It is advisable to have lots of content throughout your site and not just any well-written content, but keyword rich content.

Another useful tip here is to do a regular search of sites that are similar to yours and to take a close look at their articles for ideas that you can implement at your own web site.

There are a number of reasons why content is so important to the success of a web site and continued high search engine rankings. When all is said and done, web sites are in an open market where the customer is king. High page rankings are capable of getting you lots of traffic, but to sustain that high traffic and keep a healthy volume of repeat visitors, there has to be good well-written and extremely useful content at your site. This healthy volume of targeted traffic is what will also keep your reciprocal links growing.

Effective content for web sites must also go with catchy headlines that will encourage click throughs to other pages on your sites and basically keep visitors around at your site for as long as possible. Many webmasters and site owners often forget the importance of good engrossing headlines.

Yet another useful tip is to post some of your content at other high-traffic web sites all over the net. This will do two main things that are useful to your search engine page rankings and traffic volumes (which is the whole objective in the first place). Firstly it will create lots of links back to your site through the article resource box at the bottom of each article which should point people back to your site for more information. Secondly it will drive targeted traffic to your site which is critical in helping you maintain high page rankings by helping to steadily increase links pointing to your site.
2. Your web site URL

Not everybody is in a position to change this, but if you are, always remember that your web site URL can make a great difference to your ranking with search engines. That is if you are able to name your site after your keywords.

Admittedly, this is not a very easy thing to achieve. To start with it depends on a lot of factors. Including how competitive your main web site keyword is. The less competitive the keyword, the bigger an impact it will tend to have on your search engine rankings.

You will of course also need to bare in mind the usual factors that impact the naming of any business. For example getting a name that is easy to remember. In the online world, easy to spell is also a major factor because quite often visitors will have to write out your URL name on a search engine or as a URL to get to your site.

If by any chance you are registering a new domain name or are in a position to change, then think long and hard about your name while bearing in mind the fact that it will make a huge difference in your search engine page rankings.
3. Your Page Title Matters A Lot

Most webmasters make their page titles too casually and rather carelessly when you consider how important they can be in page rankings. The title of your page is actually very important. Try and keep your page titles very specific to each page while making use of keywords. The magic about being specific is that the competition becomes very minimal and chances of your particular page being found through search engines becomes very high because it will usually rank high.

The more pages in your web site that rank high in search engines, the better for you because you will receive much more traffic. It is no accident that sites that have many pages tend to receive much more traffic than sites with fewer pages.

Google ranking tips

Google Pagerank™ and web directories

The best thing you can do for your PR seems at the moment seems to be getting listed in Dmoz.org. Dmoz.org is home to the Open Directory Project which is a human compiled directory of websites.

Pagerank™ is widely known to be biased towards big name directories such as Dmoz.org, Yahoo and Looksmart.

This is true, especially in the case of Dmoz.org. These ODP links are treated like gold by the Pagerank™ system. It doesn't even matter what the individual PR of the category page is. I have seen sites gain a large PR boost on the toolbar as soon as Google updates its directory with the latest one from Dmoz.org. This is because Google uses its own version of the ODP for the Google web directory.

Don't believe ODP links are very important to Pagerank™?
Don't believe a listing in the ODP will boost your ranking?

Well they are and it will. Perform a search for almost anything on Google and you'll discover that 75-80% of the top 10 results are also indexed in the Google directory and therefore also listed on Dmoz.org. The fact of the matter seems to me to be if your not listed with the ODP, you shouldn't expect much traffic from Google.

Getting a listing is not difficult, it does sometimes take time but it's not difficult. Just make sure your site has good content and follow the guidelines for adding a URL. Try to get your index page listed at least. I say at least because although ODP claims only to list your index page, there are plenty of sites with 5 - 10 pages listed.

Therefore if your site has very distinctive sections you can submit each section, beware though that this must be done slowly, otherwise you may be banned from the directory altogether for spamming. Once Google updates its directory these listings could do wonders for your sites Pagerank™. My article entitled Open Directory Project guide is a complete guide to getting into the ODP, I highly recommend you read it.

Regarding Yahoo and Looksmart, Pagerank™ will usually allocate a more than normal amount of PR boost for any sites listed. Tips on getting listed in Yahoo can be read in Yahoo submitting tips.

If you're a non-commercial site or have a site that's almost completely non-commercial you can get into the Looksmart directory through http://www.zeal.com. I really love this site, just like Google obtains its directory results from ODP, Looksmart obtains its non-commercial listings from the Zeal web directory. Without Zeal I would have to fork out hard earned cash and all my site does is provide free information in the form of articles and tutorials.

To continue, I submitted AKA Marketing.com on a Tuesday and was listed in Zeal by Thursday morning. On Monday I checked my logs and found lots of referrals from Looksmart, I was in Looksmart already. I looked at my logs later only to find MSN had updated its database from the Looksmart database and was sending me loads of visitors because of the good listing I got. My site was listed in Zeal, Looksmart and MSN within six days. Needless to say I highly recommend you get over to Zeal.com and submit your site.

Before you can submit a site however you must pass a member quiz, the quiz is a fairly simple straightforward one, you might however learn a thing or two while doing it.

If you happen to be a webmaster that has a listing in all three of Dmoz.org, Yahoo and Looksmart then I'm guessing your site has good to very good PR and rankings.

Google ranking tips - Conclusion
In closing I would like to recap on some of the main points you have just read. Be sure to have your main keywords and keyphrases in your title tag and well spread throughout your page, use header tags wherever possible. Get as many links from as many high PR low number of outbound links pages as you can. Get listed with Dmoz.org, Yahoo and Looksmart.

Well that's it. I hope you have enjoyed reading this Google Ranking tips article as much as I have enjoyed researching and writing it. I also hope that you can put this advice into use and help get yourself some real traffic.