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If you are an internet marketing novice, you are
probably facing the seemingly impossible and somewhat
daunting task of trying to get your site listed on the
first page of the search engines. You probably have no
idea how to improve your ranking. For the purposes of
this discussion, we will outline the procedures you
should follow to climb steadily to the top of the search
engines, while still making sure that you attract
qualified traffic that will actually be receptive to the
products or services that your website offers. The
first thing you need to understand is that your search
engine ranking will not improve overnight. There are
quite a few charlatans in cyberspace who work as Search
Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants. They will charge
you an arm and a leg for their services, sometimes as
much as $2,000 per month or more. They often make
dubious claims that they can get you ranked on the first
page of the search engines within a few months, and if
not, they will kindly refund your money.
However, there is a catch. Once you pay the initial
deposit and the SEO company begins working on your
website, they will often optimize your website in such a
manner so that you will be able to quickly rise to the
top of the rankings for a keyword that is either not
significant or will not attract any real traffic to your
website.
| About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of
www.forms4free.com, a service that helps
programmers make free HTML forms. |
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For example, if your website provides auto insurance
quotes, any SEO consultant knows that it will be
impossible to expediently get your website ranked on the
first page of Google for a highly competitive phrase
such as AUTO INSURANCE QUOTES. So, instead, they will
pick a variation of that phrase, such as AUTO INSURANCE
QUOTES FAST, for which there is no competition, and you
will quickly rise to the top. The only problem is no one
will ever actually use that precise phrase when
searching for auto insurance quotes, so even though the
SEO company delivered on its promise to improve your
ranking, you will still not get any visitors to your
website because you will be ranked high for a keyword
that no one will ever use when searching for auto
insurance quotes. So, you need to use a different
approach if you want to not only improve your ranking,
but also attract qualified traffic to your website. The
first thing you need to do is optimize your website for
the keywords or phrases that people actually use when
searching for products or services related to what you
offer. For example, if you sell vitamins, you would want
to improve your ranking for the phrases BUY VITAMINS or
BUY VITAMINS ONLINE. To optimize your website for your
chosen keywords, you should either hire a web designer
that has experience optimizing websites, or you should
purchase search engine optimization software that will
show you how to tweak your website and how to change
your HTML code so that your site is properly optimized.
You should also try to have a decent amount of free
content on your website that relates to the keywords or
phrases for which you want to be ranked higher. |
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The next step is to submit your site to the search
engines, if you have not already done so. It seems silly
to mention this considering that we are talking about
search engines anyway, but some people actually forget
to submit their website to the engines, or only submit
their site to a couple of search engines and then quit.
There are hundreds of legitimate search engines and
directories in cyberspace, and you should submit to all
them. I recommend that you look for search engine
submission companies on Google and pick one that charges
a small monthly fee to submit your site to the search
engines once per month.
The last step, and probably the most important
component of getting ranked higher on the search
engines, is increasing your link popularity. The more
websites that are linking to your site, the higher your
ranking will be. To increase your link popularity, you
will need to submit your website to link exchange
directories so that you can swap links with other
websites (they will link to you if you agree to link to
them). Also, you can write articles and submit them to
article submission directories. At the bottom of each
article you write, you are allowed to include a link to
your website. As the articles you write are put into
circulation and are published on other websites, your
link popularity will increase.
If you employ each of the strategies outlined in this
article, you should be able to improve your search
engine ranking while at the same time garnering the kind
of traffic that you want. No website can improve its
ranking overnight, but if you are persistent, your
efforts will be rewarded in the long run.
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