Do SEO experts agree on anything? The more you look into how to optimize your website the more confusing it seems to be. Pay-per-click, articles, keywords, tags, phrases, niches… it never seems to end. Strategies to improve your page rank abound and many of these strategies are being held as confidential. Seems silly since its not really a secret and anyone can learn this stuff. Trouble is, by keeping this stuff mysterious, so-called SEO experts can charge a hefty fee and never guarantee results or reveal exactly what was done. It’s the old “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance… Baffle ‘em with BS” routine. I can quickly get a top place on Google if I want a search term so obscure no one will ever use it except me; just to say I have the #1 spot.
Here are five things that have and will continue to work to help you out a bit.
Leverage. The single most effective way to get Google to notice your site is to be bookmarked at a social bookmarking site. Having links is extremely helpful if the links are to reputable sites. You can leverage the Google friendly sites like these bookmarking monsters and get a great boost. A plethora of links to poor quality sites just looks like someone gaming the system my buying them. Google punishes this behavior. I would say that means don’t waste your money on paid backlinks. There are so many plugins available to make this easy and you should find one that offers links to every popular social bookmarking site.
Downloadable content and video. Google doesn’t care how good your video is or what your downloadable content is but does care that people want it. If you have content on your site that visitors want and are willing to download, Google will take notice and give your site “brownie points”. Don’t forget to make the content relevant to the keywords you choose. There are plenty of ‘gurus’ out there talking about video but frequently they are hawking a particular service. Turning a PowerPoint into a video with Windows Movie Maker can be done by a 12 yr old. The production simply has to be on topic and available. Depending on the purpose of the site you can offer free downloadable eBooks like how-to’s. It’s not hard to find PLR (Private License Rights) articles you can offer on about any subject.
Don’t wait for Googlebots. One mistake people make is they assume Google will do all the work for them. Google likes xml sitemaps (http://www.sitemaps.org/) to easily index your site. What many website managers do is get all the stuff in place then wait for the Googlebots to come along and notice them. If you go through all the work to get your architecture right why wouldn’t you take the final step and just submit that sitemap to Google yourself? It instigates those important bots to come back for another visit. Do this every time there is a change or update to the site.
Use search terms properly. when I started making websites silly things like Meta didn’t mean a lot to me. Tags and key phrases are those things I assumed were too technical for me then. I might change the information just enough to show up in the tab but never really understood what this did. Each page of a website should have a unique tag that identifies the page’s key phrase. A machinist website may have a page on bearings. That page should be optimized to bearings and not the same general term as the home page. It’s simply a matter of labeling everything the right way.
120001454.jpg anyone?? Everyone loves to put pictures on their site. If your pictures have generic default numerical names then Google has no idea what they are. Think of the description of a picture as brail for Google. Google doesn’t have eyes to see a picture but does take notice of the file name and alternate text. If you have a site about fish you want pictures of fish there; not numbers. The alternate text should be the same as the file name.
Update: Nearly a year has passed and changes have been all over the search engine results pages (SERPS). Page Rank (PR) is dying as a measure of strength and content remains king. The path to power on SERPS has always been backlinks once the onpage stuff is done. What are good backlinks and which are bad remains a real question. The subject of backlinks looks like it will heat up in 2012.
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