Everyone wants to make it to the top of Google and in the world of online marketing making it to the top of the search engine can be difference between generating loads of business or no enquires. Google and other search engines work to keep online marketers guessing at how to hit the first page of the results, and they change the rules so often it doesn’t seem worthwhile trying to crack their code.
Here are five simple and easy ways to boost your organic rankings within the search engines.
Check and Recheck your Keywords
Don’t make assumptions and don’t just pick them and leave them unchanged without monitoring how they are working. Take advantage of the analytics tools available to see exactly how your keywords are performing. Are people actually searching for your keywords and is your website ranking on the first page for these terms? Since Google search has become encrypted a lot of the seach data is now unavailable, another good alternative is to try Bing Webmaster Tools to get a more detailed breakdown of queries.
Redirect Duplicates
One of the most common errors we see, when we do SEO audits is redirect errors. When another website links to you, you cannot control whether or not they list you as ‘http://websitename.com’ or ‘www.websitename.com’, and the search engines cannot tell these are one and the same. So you can look like two moderately popular sites instead of one wildly popular site, which is no good to you. This can be fixed by putting in place a permanent redirect from one address to the other. There are several ways to do this, if you would like any help please feel free to contact one of our developers.
Do Good Deeds
Why not boast your search engine ranking while also boosting your contribution to a better world. Donate funds or time to a cause you support and see about getting a link from the charity’s site to yours. Not only will you boost your ranking by building links, you’ll get a great introduction to a group of potential customers. We recently helped raised some money for Cancer Research and were luckily enough to get retweeted by them.
Create Events & Local Meet Ups
Never miss a chance to promote your business through any kind of event that can get mentioned elsewhere with a link to your site. Hold competitions, make special offers, promote new products and services and above all, announce them widely where they will link back to your site. One caveat here – never, ever spam anyone’s comment section with announcements. Use press releases and ask other sites to mention your event. Here at Fifteen Design we will be shortly be celebrating our 10 year anniversary, not only are we having our very own beer commissioned but also throwing a party for all of our clients.
Finding Missing Links
Are you getting mentioned elsewhere without being linked back to your site? It is not as daunting as it sounds to find those mentions with missing links. Make it a habit to search your own name and your business name regularly. Google is not the enemy here; they actually provide a tool to look for mentions. With Google Alerts, you can set the parameters to search for mentions, and you’ll get an automated alert when it happens. You can then get in touch with the site where you are mentioned and request to be linked. None of these tactics mean you are off the hook for creating great content and an excellent product or service. But once you are doing those two key things, you can make sure you are getting the full benefit of your efforts with these five easy steps.
If you would like one of our online marketers to carry out an SEO audit of your websites, why not get in touch.
We would love to hear from you. e. [email protected] t. 0115 932 5151