Let’s start with the hard facts. Not even the most experienced SEO-specializing firms can guarantee specific search engine rankings in any search engine. Further, every search engine uses different proprietary (and mostly secret) algorithms for indexing and ranking sites according to various keywords. As such, SEO efforts can miss the mark and hurt your website rankings. Of course, the efforts may also boost your ranking in one or more search engines. A sketchy business, SEO.

Major Search Engines

Remember that every other website owner also wants to be on the first page of search results, and many of them are doing their best to insure that happens, just like you. With competition so stiff, especially if your website’s topic is “common,” it is impossible to guarantee positive results.

However, there are things you can do to improve your chances and make your site more “attractive” to search engines such as Google. In this week’s article I share some of the most common techniques.

These recommendations are generally for all sites, but not every recommendation is necessary for every website. Your site’s size and complexity will dictate how far you need to go. Use your best judgement.

• Have other relevant websites link to yours. Ask related sites to place a link to your site, offer to link back in return. Also, wherever possible, get on higher-ranked websites related to yours and post information; include a link back to your website. I can’t stress enough the importance of having other websites link to yours; this is one of the main ways to get your site ranked highly in search engines!
• Get a domain name that features your primary keyword as part of it. This point is practical if you don’t have a domain name yet or are willing to buy a second domain name. Regardless, this suggestion reflects a perfect world scenario. It’s very helpful to your rankings to have your primary keyword as part of your domain name, but this may be very hard to do.
• Insure that your site has a clear hierarchy and is easily navigable through static links. Search engines love text links instead of image links, and love any “static” link over a dynamic link. Dynamic links are the kind that usually contain a ? in the URL. If you do use images as links, be sure that those images (and every other image on your site) contains an alt-text entry (this is the text that appears next to your mouse pointer when you point at an image in your web browser).
• Avoid putting important content in Flash, frames, or Javascript. These technologies are not always search engine friendly, although search engines are catching on. Still, I’d recommend staying away.
• Insure that page titles within the HTML are unique and descriptive. Further, page titles should include your primary keywords to stress their importance.
• Choose your keywords precisely, and then list them in a descending order of priority in your keyword meta tag. Don’t go crazy here, just come up with a short list of keywords. Imagine which terms people trying to find your site would be typing into their favorite search engine and use those. Don’t repeat keywords over and over as this will specifically hurt your site ranking.
• Write well. Content is king! Clear and accurate descriptive page content is extremely important. It is this text that the search engines are indexing to rank your site, afterall. And for the sake of your readers, take the time to read your content out loud to insure it sounds smooth and natural.
• Prepare a marketing budget that includes an expenditure for search engine advertising. Placing targeted ads in keyword-relevant search results can have a positive effect on traffic flow to your website. While technically not an SEO “trick,” this is the quickest fix that gives positive results for any site. Watch your advertising account closely to insure that it’s effective!
• Submit a sitemap to search engine crawlers. A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of all the pages in your site that you wish to be indexed.
• Keep your site free of broken hyperlinks and badly formed HTML. Not only do search engines dislike broken hyperlinks, but so do your site visitors. A broken link doesn’t exactly build confidence.
• Update your site often; keep your pages fresh with news, new products, new services, etc. Rewrite some of your content now and then to reflect updated keywords and fresh ideas. A dusty old site won’t rank highly.
• Don’t use too many links on any one page. Google recommends less than 100.
• Ideally, keep the typical size of any page to less than 50KB. In fact, 15KB is recommended. This trick helps your search engine ranking, and speeds up navigating your site overall.
• Submit your website only once to search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Nagging them certainly won’t help; I know that didn’t work with my mother either.

There are some dirty old tricks that search engines have caught onto over the years. If you’re guilty of using these tricks, your site may be lower in ranking or not listed at all. Avoid all of these:

• Don’t use irrelevant keywords and descriptions. This just doesn’t make sense to a search engine.
• Avoid hidden text or hyperlinks. This especially includes white text on a white background, or any other same or similar color combinations used to hide text.
• Don’t repeat keywords over and over in sequence. A certain degree of natural repetition can occur among your title, keywords, description, and content—and this is helpful. Ceaseless repetition of a keyword, however, will kill the keyword in your ranking.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with mostly duplicate content. This issue causes the same problem as the previous bullet.

If you’re retrofitting an existing site, carefully review it and create a checklist of items to improve. It may be necessary to rewrite copy, reorganize the site hierarchy, or even rebuild it from scratch. If you’re building a new website, incorporate healthy SEO practices in every decision from the start. Keep in mind, though, that no matter what you do, nobody can guarantee results. These suggestions are simply best practice and will give your site a fighting chance to achieve excellent rankings.

Finally, if anyone promises a quick fix to your site that will dramatically improve your rankings, then run! SEO is a continuous process of quality improvement to your site, not an overnight cure.

Craig W. Samson