Everyone wants to rank #1 on Google, but how do you get your site to rank higher? MarketingExperiments held a web clinic: Live Optimization: Improve your SEO Clicks and Conversions, to explain how to better optimize your site for search. These are their tips.
There are two trends in search:
1) It’s getting more and more competitive to get to the top of search rankings.
2) If you’re not on the first page, you’re invisible – as of a 2008 study, 68% of web users never get past the first page.
5 SEO Factors You Must Get Right
1) Keywords
* They should be short and concise.
* Scour competitive sites for keywords that would bring in a lot of potential traffic.
2) Content
* Place keywords strategically within the content on your site
* You need 100 – 500 pages of content on your site to rank at the top (this is why blogs rank high).
3) Meta Content
* This is what Google sees; it is the code behind each of your pages.
* Titles and meta-descriptions (what searchers see on Google) are what matter.
* Page Titles: Don’t put the company name first, your site is already ranking high on your company name so you’re wasting ‘juice’.
* Use two key phrases in the first two positions in the page title. Use a word separator between keywords like a bar, dash or comma. Don’t use ‘&’, use ‘and’.
* Descriptions: It’s important to have unique meta descriptions on every page. It’s what searchers see on Google so it needs to be compelling
4) URLs
* You need your keywords in the urls of your pages.
* Keywords should be separated with a dash.
5) Inbound Links
* Often called ‘link juice’.
* These are one-way links from other highly regarded, relevant sites linking to you.
* It’s good to have inbound links coming from highly regarded blogs, articles, press releases, forms and directories.
* You need a certain number of links linking to all of your pages – not just your homepage.
* The clickable link and the descriptive text surrounding the link (anchor text) should contain your keywords.
For more information watch the full web clinic video.
Looking for related information? Check out Stickyeyes.com’s SEO Tips for 2007. This is a great article with excellent, easy to follow tips that still apply in 2009.
