10 SEO Tips for Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesn’t have a good position in the search results (ranking) then no one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. By good position, I mean the top 5 placement for your choice of keywords in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

We know that Search Engine Optimization and Promotion is challenging, and we know how important it is for you to beat out the competition to remain competitive.

Although no SEO company can guarantee a high ranking for your website, here are some tips to improve your search engine ranking. Using these tips will not get you to the top unless your site is the best out there, but they will at least put you into the positioning that you truly deserve. After all, the internet is basically a free market. You will naturally flow into the place that you deserve and many search engines try to insure that you do not rise above or fall below this position. This is why they are so strict, and this is why you must keep yourself on good terms with them.

1) Content is the most important factor in achieving high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of useful and well written content throughout your site with your target keywords in the content. It’s also worth doing a search for websites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. The more content you have the better. It is generally a good idea to have between three hundred and five hundred words per page, but more important than a quantity of content is the quality of the content that you are providing. You cannot just put out three hundred words of jargon and expect your visitors to find it interesting and stick around for the long haul.

2) Your website’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings - you need to do more than just that.

3) Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you do use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. The alt tags in your pictures are almost as important as text. It’s also a good idea to put some of your key words in links to other pages. In the eyes of a search engine it is almost as good to have a link to a page full of the content that the visitor is looking for as it is to have the content that the visitor is looking for on your page. If a visitor is looking for something that you are linking to and he or she finds your page, they may look around your site on the way through.

4) The title of your page is very important, and making sure that you choose it wisely will make a big difference. Terms such as "free article on safe children’s toys" or "contact the children’s toy expert today" (for example) are good to use as titles, they would get you a high ranking. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you put them all in.

5) The navigation menu that appears on each page of your website should include your page’s title.

6) Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases - the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too.

7) Make sure that you don’t have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely related to your site your links are, the better your chances of being ranked in a higher position.

8) You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if it’s only a slight change, as websites like sites that are kept updated.

9) You need to consider the fact most search engines don’t like automatic submissions or multiple submissions. Submit once, manually.

10) Always be on the look out for SEO news - staying up to date and using the latest techniques will help you stay one step ahead of your competition.

The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of incoming one-way direct links from related industry websites. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine ranking.