Top 10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking

My top 10 ways to improve search engine rankings are based on 7 years of banging my head against the world wide web's search engines and reading numerous books on top 10 SEO tactics.

Let me say first of all that there are a lot of books, sources and tutorials that make promises of getting your website into the top 10 spots on the major search engines. Most of these are self promoting and the end result is that you have to hire these people to accomplish the things they say you can do on your own.

So I want to preface this by saying that this article on how to improve search engine rankings is not necessarily a do-it-your-self guide. In fact, the art of SEO can be time consuming and irritating to say the least. Some methods require the help of companies like mine so I write this in hopes that you will understand what it really takes to gain exposure, realize what you can do on your own and determine when you need assistance.

One final point I want to make is “Don't use any SEO Company that can't explain what it is doing and that makes claims of using secret software that you can never see or use”. Yes, SEO can be complex but not to the point that you can't understand what is being done. A good SEO company is able to educate you on what is being done and explain that it is best to leave some techniques to the experts.

My 10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking

1. If you are using a shared host, ask your host for a dedicated IP address for your site. This means that no one on the net shares this IP with your site. It is yours and yours alone. Many shared servers have tons of related sites on them. Having your own IP separates you from those sites.
2. Make sure your site validates as a search engine friendly site. The best site to use for this purpose is The World Wide Web Consortium. Their markup validation service will tell you if your site conforms to W3C standards and whether or not the search engines can read your site. If your site has errors, these may stop the bots from properly indexing your site.
3. Make sure you have a contact page with an address and telephone number and a form of some sort so people can contact you. Don't list your email on the site unless you want spammers to send you tons of junk mail. Make sure the form you use on the site uses captcha (challenge-response system). Have a Privacy Policy Page and Terms of Services page and ensure that they have at least 300 words of text each. Most sites have these pages, but I strongly recommend you not copy. Find examples, but use your own words and include keywords related to your site. Make the pages personal to the reader.
4. Every page on your site should have at least 300 words or more. Don't write a 2 paragraph page that has little to no real information. Provide details and give examples.
5. Create a FAQ or Tutorial page on your site. Make each subject link to its own page and focus each page on 1 or 2 keywords. As a start, try to add 10 of these types of pages to your site. You can come up with ideas for FAQ's or Tutorials by reviewing your industry and trying to determine what people might not understand about it and the kinds of questions they might ask. Then post the questions and the answers. This is an easy way to add great content to your site and to help potential clients feel secure about your service.
6. Add a blog to your site. Have your blog designed to match your site so that as it draws traffic your readers know this is your main site of business. This will add value to your site, plus improve your search engine rankings. Create categories and write frequently about your industry to keep your readers interested and your content fresh.
7. Create Link Bait using your blog. There are very few services that offer this on a professional level and it can be very complex. I suggest leaving this service to the professionals because it requires time and knowledge and can be difficult and frustrating to do. The idea is to add unique and detailed content about your industry which creates enough buzz through various channels to motivate others to refer and link back to your blog. This can be a huge asset to your business because many writers love to provide plugs to quality content.
8. Post to Directory sites that have good inner page rank, especially on the page where your site will be listed. Use unique anchor text for each posting. Again, this may be one of those tasks best left to professionals because, if done correctly, your site's search engine ranking can be dramatically improved and, if done incorrectly, can be a waste of time, effort and money.
9. Text Link Brokering is another creative and effective way to build more anchor text back links. Find related and quality ranked sites that will list your site in text format. Generally, this requires a one time, monthly or yearly fee.
10. If you have a product or service to sell, offer affiliate incentives. Post these incentives on affiliate forums and elsewhere to generate interest in getting others to promote your service for you. Be sure you have a solid affiliate back end in place to provide your affiliates with dependable stats and access. Then, have people write reviews on your program's tracking and payout reliability to generate additional buzz.

The 10 points noted above are by no means a complete list of what you could do to improve your site's search engine ranking, but if you focus your efforts on these 10 areas, rest assured you will see both an increase in traffic and higher rankings.