Unless you’ve been living under a technological rock for the past few years, you probably know that Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO, is key to driving traffic to your website. In a nutshell, good SEO makes your site popular, valuable, easy-to-find, and well connected. Your rankings on search engines will improve and soar with good SEO practices. Beyond the basics, here are some advanced methods to help you increase these often elusive rankings for your business or personal website.
1. Social networking is a must.
Having great social network profiles for your business is positive on many levels. First, engaging with social media drives customers organically to your site and gives you a stronger web presence. Bringing more customers or readers to your website is key to growing these rankings. But having a social media presence also helps you with link building, through connecting with users who will share your links. Make sure your website has social media buttons so that users can easily share content and links. This will improve search engine rankings over time.
2. Be diverse with your links.
As you build links, do not focus all your energy into one avenue. A diverse range of links to your site is key to strengthening those rankings and bringing in large amounts of traffic. A variety of links, such as links from blogs, homepage links, directory links, and footer links, will help drive traffic from different sources. Google likes this. But too many links from one type of source often drops your rankings.
Search engine rankings will also tend to soar when you’ve earned valuable links from highly trusted domains such as major news sources, universities or non-profit organisations. These websites have a great worth and are well-trusted and used by the Internet and web searches. Links from these to your website can be a wonderful boon to success.
3. Add only quality content.
Many people mistakenly believe that creating massive amounts of content for your site will automatically improve your search engine ratings. Unfortunately, adding large amounts of content to your website too quickly can produce the opposite effect. It’s very important to strike a balance between adding content and building links.
Not only do you need a balance with how quickly you produce new content, you must make sure the content is of high quality, as well as relevant to your page, valuable, and informative. No matter what methods you employ to grow your website, the website itself must be a good one–readers and users will only come and keep on coming if the content they’re accessing is truly good and useful. So focus on making sure your web content is strong and unique—not duplicate content or fluff.
4. Old fashioned email outreach.
You can use Google to your advantage by searching for sites similar to yours, or sites belonging to the same industry. These sites often have pages comprised completely of links. For a blog, blogrolls exist which link extensively to a multitude of blogs, generally on the same topic. Getting a link to your website on these sites can be a great help to increasing search engine rankings, but you may have to do the old fashioned work of contacting the site/company/blogger and asking for a link. This will take time, effort, and the additional finesse of “selling” your website and tailoring each email. But the payoff could be worth it, as this is a great way to create natural links.
5. Don’t build too fast, and build organically.
So, buying links? Do or don’t? The ethical issues raised with buying links seems to make it a no-no, as well as the fact that purchased links may not always come from the best sources, and often Google does not seem to take kindly to them. The best method is to take your time, and build links naturally and organically. These types of “real” links seem to possess a much greater value, leading to higher rankings with longer-lasting results. Patience and time seem to be key.
On that note, do not build your links too fast. You want to make sure there’s a suitable balance between content creation and link building. If either of these elements grows too quickly, the ratings can actually begin to suffer and drop. For companies, a business blog is a great way to build links, as fresh new content appears weekly or biweekly, and this creates great new links for other businesses or networking groups to share.
