Increase Your Ranking

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Sometimes we should look back in time and think how the internet started, there was a lot of information that needed to be catalogued and some people decided to give a service providing a way where people could find information quickly. Like this site:

Date: Oct 17, 1996

As we can see most directories were very successful and their search engines evolve in ways that allow us to find information faster and accurately.

In my last article we learnt how to find quality directories and how to submit our websites to them. But as you noticed that activity is time consuming, there is a better way to achieve better results in a shorter time.

I’m using this site called Promotion System and I must say that it’s very useful and you can see result in a short period of time.

Next, I’m listing the details that you should have on hand:

Category
URL
Summary/Description
Keywords
Reciprocal Link (this is only for 1% of the directories, I never use it)
Contact Name
Submission E-Mail (create a special email account to avoid spam from some directories…could happen)
Password
Country
City
Street Address

In less than 10 minutes you can submit your site to several directories for Free!

Remember DO NOT send too many submissions a day, set a daily limit and make it look a little bit natural.

James G. Evans
 

It is not enought to have a web site hosted in some server, you need to let the search engines know about your web site and your web site’s pages. In order to do that you don’t need to submit your website to the search engine, there is another way around to make it faster.

If you can have access to a website that it’s already indexed and you can add your website on that indexed site,  your site will get indexed very quick. Why? because that site is like a recommendation from that site to the search engines. Is like a friend of yours inviting you to a party, they will trust you because they trust their friend (sort of). There are good friend and “good Page Rank friends” that will give you VIP access, that means you will get indexed faster and it will help you with your ranking.

Now you might be wondering how are you going to have access to someone’s website, easy, there are a lot of websites that allow you to write or leave a message on them, like:

- Forums (add your site on your post or your signature), find a forum about your niche.

- Blogs (create an account in Blogger write something and add a link to your website).

- Sites where you can post Ads (like Gumtree, write an Ad about your new site and your new services offered to the commuity, be creative).

- Directory submission, send it to some free directories with high PR, you can find some of them on Top Directories

- Article Submission, write an article giving some tip and add your url in the “about the author” field. You can send your article to Ezine Articles is quite good…

You only need to add your url on any of those sites and you will be indexed very quick, do a search on google you will find a lot of that kind of sites.

But if you really, really want to get indexed very fast you should use this online tool:

QUIT - Quick Indexing Tool

You will get indexed in 24 hours, don’t ask how, use it, you will see the benefits very soon.

James G. Evans

An outbound link is a link from your web site to another web site. Outbound links add value to your site by providing useful information to your users. At the same time outbound links provide PageRank for the target page. Some search engines algorithms place value on sites with relevant outbound links.

If you are going to place links on your site follow the same guidelines that you were following when you were building your site, make the outbound links relevant to your site.

Something that I do and it really works is find high page rank (PR) sites with related content, I use an average of 50 sites and believe me it help me a lot to increase the ranking of my web sites and my client’s web sites. But consider this as a small variable in the equation.

Most people don’t consider  these little factors but at the end they can affect your ranking “big time”. There was an article about (-)* SEO (28/6/07) in some well known magazine, a lot of sites that were linking or were making a reference to that article or to the web site named in that article lost their top positions, so conclusion, yes!, outbound links count!!!.  *(-) = Negative

The same happens in real life if you hang with the wrong people, others will point of you as being as equal as them, so be careful when you choose your outbound links because there are only 2 options, it will help you to increase your ranking or it will “damage” your reputation with the search engines, what would you choose?.  

There is a very interesting tool that allow me to select my outbound link based in a) The content of my website b) Page Rank. This tool is called PageRank Search, I did a search for the term “SEO “and as you can see below I got some sites that are relevant to the content of my site and with high PR.

Create a link page called “links” or “resources” or any name, and add those sites on it. The most important bit here is the content and if you deliver quality content (relevant sites with high PR) you will see that your ranking on the search engines will get only better.

James G. Evans 

Internal Linking, Most people underestimate the power of a well designed web site, and I’m not talking about design on terms of graphics or animation, I’m talking about the internal linking structure of a web site.

I think of that as the skeleton of a website, every part have to be linked, connected, and have a purpose; base all that on the Internet concept, every computer is connected, same on your web site, everything have to be connected.

Search Engines don’t like to visit a web site and follow a link to an empty page or to a page that it is not related to your web site.

Something that will help you to increase your ranking is the use of anchor text including your related keywords.

If your main site gets a decent Page Rank every page on your site will gain Page Rank too and it increases your ranking for that keyword.

If you have a side menu or footer menu, use your main keywords there, it will help you to be found on the search engines for those keywords.

All your main inner web pages should always be just one click away that will boost the number of inward links that each page has. This is very powerful because with higher pagerank and more links you will get higher search engine rankings

Focus your efforts in delivering a site easy to navigate as simple as that.

Anchor Text is is the visible hyperlinked text on a page.  It’s usually used to indicate the subject of the page that it links to. For example, the text “Increase Your Ranking” indicates to your users that they can expect to see content about increasing your ranking on the search engines if they visit that link. The search engine algorithms take in consideration this factor as one of the most weighted for them.

This is valid for External and Internal Linking, in the case of internal linking, it enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content.

Do:  my interesting content using my main keywords

Do Not: my interesting content using my main keywords is here

This is how the anchor text code look like:

<A href=www.IncreaseYourRanking.com>Increase Your Ranking</A>.

Always design your pages to be useful and informative, keep in mind that what the search engines are looking for are not only average websites, they are looking for good websites, well designed websites to add them on their indexes and deliver the right content for their users.

James G. Evans

What is Keyword density? Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web site that match a specified set of keywords.

We must add that Keyword density is one of the factors in determining if a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keywords.

Right now search engines implement certain measures of relevancy to prevent the abuse of keyword density from some bad webmasters (keyword stuffing).

As an example, imagine that we have a page with 100 keywords and we have our main keyword 5 times repeated over that text, that means that the keyword density for that keyword would be 5%.

If you are wondering what is the right keyword density on a web site, my answer would be anything between 3% to 5% if you go over those parameters you could get into trouble such as being banned from the Search Engines!

This is the link for a great tool that will help you to find out what the keyword density of your web site is.

The interesting thing is that you can use the keyword density analyzer to see the density of top matched pages of your competitors versus your own. This is good because it tells you exactly what to do to improve one of the factors that will allow you to rank better on the search engines.

Keep in mind that your main goal is to deliver good content, with a liitle bit of practice you can find the right way to satisfy the bots and the human visitors :).

When a Search Engine visit your page, it recognize a heading because you are using the <H> tags. One of the most important headings is the H1 tag because is the title of the body of that particular page.

In this case is very important to use your main keyword(S) as part of the H1 tag to let the search engines know that your content is related to your website.

Limit the use of the H1 tag to only one time in the body of your page.

It will add a little bit of weight if you use H2 tags too (with related keywords), it’ll shows to the search engines that your content is tidy and that you put some efford to deliver good content for your readers/visitors.

I most say that the H1 tag is one of the most important aspect of you onsite optimization, after your “title” of course.

Let’s take a look at the next website H1 and H2 tags:

 http://www.whatcar.com/

<h1>Britain’s Biggest and Best Car Buyer’s Guide</h1>*

<h2>Reviews, specs and prices for every car</h2>**

*You should only have one H1 tag on each page 

**You can have as many H2 tags as you want… or H3, H4,H5,H6 but they have less weight.

Tip: Imagine your website as a book, the tags would be the chapter headings.

That’s it, that will help the search engines to find your site more attractive

Some people forget those details when they are trying to optimize their sites, but remember that every little counts, if you add all those little details to the equation you will have more chances to increase your ranking.

Hi,

This question have a quick answer,  because the title is the description of your website, as simple as that. If you choose the right title you will help the search engines  to index your content faster and it will help people who is looking for some kind of solution to find it faster.

Remember, you are delivering solution for problems or answers for questions, if you have the right title you will get better rankings and more traffic.

It’s so important to choose the right title; we have seen a lot of movies or books not having the expected success because their title wasn’t explicit enough. It’s the same on the online world, if your website doesn’t have the right title you will suffer a lot trying to increase your ranking.

Remember use your main keywords in your title, the first keywords (keyphrases) have more weight, use your 3 primary keywords, separating each of them with commas ’,’ pipes ‘|’  or *hyphens ‘-’ then follow them with your 3 secondary keywords (only if is necessary - use related keywords or locations for your 3 secondary keywords - if you think that it’s not, then only use your 3 primary keywords).

You can add, as well, “only” your Primary Keyword and a brief description of your site or offer, I got some pages ranking well using that technique too.

As an example do a search for “teddy bear”, as you can see most of the sites have the keyword: “teddy bear” and a brief description of their offer or site.

What a lovely teddy bear!…

As an example, if you are selling “teddy bears” maybe it would be a good idea to include “teddy bear” or “teddy bears” + “something” before or after your primary keyword(s), like:

“vermont teddy bear”
“teddy bear clothes”
“build your own teddy bear”

It will look like

Vermont teddy bear | teddy bear clothes | build your own teddy bear… UK maybe? (anything)

or

*Vermont Teddy Bear - buy the best teddy bears online (…or whatever you want to offer or sale)

Note: I used Wordze to find those keywords.

Easy! you only need to remember that your “title” will make a big difference in order to increase you ranking on the search engines.

James G. Evans

In the past a lot of people abused the meta tags adding 1000’s of keywords or doing the wrong things.

One of the factors to consider when you are building your website or if you have one something that you shouldn’t miss are the Meta Tags.

When the spiders visit your site they look at the meta tags and the content on your website but that doesn’t mean that if your site doesn’t have Meta Tags you wont be considered by the Search Engines, of course you will but adding Meta Tags will give you an extra point to help you to increase your ranking.

Let’s do a search for “transformers movie”, we get http://www.transformersthemovie.com/ as one of the results on the first page, let’s take a look at their metatags:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Transformers, Transformers The Movie, Michael Bay, Paramount Pictures, Dreamworks, Don Murphy”>

<meta name=”description” content=”Transformers The Movie - this Transformers website has been created as a resource for the upcoming Michel Bay movie Transformers from Dreamworks and Paramount Pictures, due July 4th 2007. “>

That’s enought to satisfy the Search Engines, he is including his main keywords in the “meta keywords tag” and is adding a real description about his website.

Folow that example when you are building your site, it will help you to increase your ranking on the search engines.

This is a link to a meta tag builder site very helpful if you are starting… let me add somethinng else about the follow and nofollow tag, that tag tells to the search engine spiders (web robots) to follow or not follow the links on your site as simple as that.

In general terms, your primary keywords should focus on your industry and not be too specific. At the same time, they should be open ended enough so that you can derive secondary keyword phrases and still include the primary keywords in them.

For example, let’s say that we have a site that sells “golf breaks”, if you type it on google.com (not co.uk) you will find this page on the first page:

http://www.yourgolftravel.com/

Look at their title on the search results:

TITLE: “Golf Breaks, Golf Holidays, Golf Hotels, Golf Weekends, Golf Tours and Golf Trips in the UK (England, Scotland Wales), Ireland and Europe - YourGolfTravel.com”

That’s too long, they only need:

“Golf Breaks, Golf Holidays, Golf Hotels, Golf Weekends, Golf Tours and Golf Trips in the UK”

Primary: Golf Breaks, Golf Holidays, Golf Hotels

Secondary: Golf Weekends, Golf Tours and Golf Trips

LOCATION: in the UK

So it is important to choose the right keywords, don’t over crowd the title tag or description tag with a lot of words, that will get you in problems, deliver what you offer, focus in your target market and you will increase your ranking on the search engines.

James G. Evans

The long tail is the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key phrases that a site is found for, and in most cases those keywords are not noticed or exploited.

Most people want to focus all their energy and efforts in getting a better ranking for 1 or 2 keywords when the truth is that you can get more traffic from long tail keywords.

In statistics we have a term called long tail, as we can see in these distributions a highfrequency or highamplitude population is followed by a lowfrequency or lowamplitude population which gradually ‘tails off’.

Product = Keywords

Most webmasters are amazed to see that they are getting most of their traffic from long tail keywords allowing them to change their website’s strategies.

So, don’t try to get the most competitive terms, do a proper keyword research, in the long term you will get more benefits in a shorter time.

Example:

‘Loans‘ is the general keyword topic and long tail keywords within this niche includes terms such:

Loans for people with bad credit
List of low interest loans
Benefits of small business loans
Good UK loans for students

A good tool (Free) that will help you to find good long tail keywords to increase your ranking on the search engines is HitTail. This tool is going to help you to get a better knowledge of how people find your website and based on that you can optimize your front page, create new pages, write articles based on those long tail keywords.

VIDEO (coming soon)

Hi,

A lot of people are wondering is there is a way to spot the right keywords that will help you to rank well and that will give you a lot of traffic; we know that a lot of people would like to know how to get hold of those keywords to monetize their website.

The answer is simple, you don’t need to break your head in order to get those amazing keywords.

There are some amazing tools in the market that will allow you to find those ‘magic’ keywords that will make wonders for your website.

Let me point you to some of them:

Wortracker

Keyword Intelligence

Keyword Discovery

and Wordze

I am using Wordze for a while and I must say that my results are incredible!, it is very easy to use.

What I like about Wordze is that the data comes directly from (Internet Service Providers) ISP’s and other sources which allows for more accurate results and reporting.

Remember it is not about trying to rank as “one of the first ones for a generic term” it’s about knowing what your “target market” wants and how they search for it to achive the first results based on those keywords/keyphrases.

This tool is going to allow you to find those keywords/keyphrases that will help you to increase your ranking on the search engines very fast!

VIDEO (coming soon)

Hi!

I would like to start talking about the basics of SEO, as you know we must set our goals in trying to achieve the first page on any search result based in our main keyword(s) to do that we will base our first lesson in all the possible ways that we have to find those main keywords.

Let me point that on the next days we are going to cover every single subject that you need to know in order to increase your ranking on the search engines 

Let’s start!

Hi!

Welcome to my new site ‘Increase Your Ranking‘ here we are going to talk about all the possible ways to increase your ranking on the search engines.

Please feel free to contact me or to leave a comment.

James G. Evans
Increase Your Ranking