free ways to better your sites page rank and traffic

april 27 2009










Search engines can drive a great deal of traffic to your website. This is something worth paying attention to! You might think the situation is hopeless--there may be a million websites that come up when you type in your keywords in Google or other search engines--but with a few simple steps you can make a HUGE difference in your website’s standings.

First let me say that I strongly recommend against hiring one of those services that claim they can increase your search engine status to the top page right away. Many of these companies try to “trick” the search engines with various illegal tricks, and if the search engines catch them it could get your website banned. And these companies normally charge a lot of money, which would be better spent elsewhere.

So it’s best to do the work yourself, the old-fashioned way. If you do not know how to work on your own website you are at a disadvantage; you’ll need to hire someone to do the work for you. But it’s not that complicated, so try finding a college kid or someone to barter with, so it doesn’t ending up costing you too much money. (Better yet, take a basic web development class and take charge of your own site. It’s way worth it!)

The main investment you need to make to improve your standing in the search engines is time. With a few simple changes (and no cash outlay) you can be within the top one to two pages of results.

Here’s the steps to accomplish this:
1) Pick your keyword phrase carefully - this step is crucial. You need to pick a search term that relates to your website. (It’s best to focus on just one phrase at first, and then once you’ve perfected that go on to others.) Target this for your home page, if at all possible, not some obscure page on your site. The more specific you can be, the better--in other words, it’s much easier to get results for “holistic health magazine” than it is for “holistic health” or simply “holistic.” The more specific your search term is, the easier it will be for you to achieve results. You also want to choose a phrase that people actually use in search engines--if you make it too obscure your website might be listed first for that search term, but if no one types in this term then it doesn’t matter! Not sure what people are looking for? The free tool at the link below will show you how many people looked up your proposed search term: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Sometimes a small change can make a big difference: you might discover that 10,000 people looked up the phrase “natural diet program” but only 500 people looked up “holistic diet program.” You want to choose a search term that’s popular and that relates directly to your website, while being as specific as possible.

2) Make sure you have good content on your home page (or the page you’re choosing to optimize for the search engines). The keyword phrase you decided on in step one should appear several times. (Not a ridiculous amount of times, or it will be considered spamming by the search engines.) If you have a “splash page” on your website--in other words, if your home or “index” page is just a pretty graphic that says “welcome” or enter”--get rid of it! Splash pages will really hinder your search engine results.

Here is another tip relating to content: don’t use graphics instead of text! It’s not worth it, because the search engines can’t read it. Function wins over style in this case. Make sure all of your key content appears on your web pages as text. (It can be colored or bold or italic, large or small, just not converted to an image.) As a matter of fact, if your search term is in bold or larger text, the search engines like that, because it shows emphasis.

3) Give your web pages good titles that include your search term. You must know how to access the html code for your web pages to do this, but it’s not hard. There are actually three key items of html code that you need to pay attention to for each page: the Title name (most important), the Description, and the Key Words. Different search engines give these things different importance, so best to do them all correctly. The title line should be short (no more than 5 words) and don’t include any uneccesary words like “the.” Make sure what you say is what they get: in other words, don’t try to cheat with a catchy title that does not relate to the content of the web page. For the key words, list 10 to 12 words, and include variations (e.g. health, healthy, healing).

4) Get your website linked with other sites that relate to your search term-- preferably those sites that already have a good search engine ranking. The number of websites that link to you is called your “popularity” and this can affect your website’s standing with the search engines quite a bit. Want to know how popular your website is? Go to http://www.linkpopularity.com/ for a free tool to see how many websites link to you.


Here’s what you do to accomplish step 4: do a search for your search term. (I recommend using Google.com as it’s the most popular search engine by far.) Then check out all the websites that come up in the first two or three pages of results. Put a link to them from your website, and then send them an email telling them you did this and requesting a reciprocal link back to your website. They won’t all answer you, but if you keep at it you will eventually build up a good list of websites that link to you. This is the time consuming part, by it’s worth it. Keep a running list so you know who you’ve contacted and who has responded.