Here's a six-step guide to help your website rise up search engine rankings

Relevance is key. The old adage: "Content is king", is at the heart of getting good search engine rankings. The more relevant your content is to a search term (the "keyword"), the higher your site ranks in search result. Here are six steps to climb the rankings chart.

1. Focus
Ensure that your content is relevant to the keywords you want to target and vice-versa. Which keywords do you want to get high rankings for? Focus first on those that will bring quality traffic. Say, a market research company wants high rankings for "market research", "quantitative research" and "qualitative research" so that it can capture the audience that is looking to hire its expertise. The strategy would be to focus on narrower keywords such as "market research firms" or "market research companies". Gun for more generic keywords later.

2. Optimize your content
Focus first on keywords that will bring in quality traffic. This step is critical to the success of your project. Go through your content and include the keywords naturally into the text. Make page titles, headings and sub-heading keyword-rich - search engines give more weight to these when determining relevance. However, do not stuff your pages with the keywords hoping to trick search engines. Google's team will sniff these out and blacklist you.

3. Tweak your tags
Search engines give more weight to text enclosed in certain HTML tags such as the <title> tag and the heading tags (for example: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and so on). So, after optimizing content, have keyword-rich page titles, headings and sub-headings. Do the following:

» Put page titles into the <title> tag

» Format headings or sub-headings using the heading tag

The <title> tag is especially important. The text in these tags is displayed in search results. Try and keep the text under 64 characters. Anything longer might get chopped off by search engines.

4. Increase your credibility
Google places emphasis on the number of sites which link to yours and the credibility of these sites. Ask your suppliers, customers and business partners to link to your website. Get as many credible incoming links as you can. A good incoming link should contain both your company name and keywords. Exmaple:


Happy Hampers - Affordable, Christmas, food, wine, gift hampers.


5. Be patient
You can use the search engine ranking tools (both free and commercial ones) to track your site's rankings for the keywords you have chosen to focus on. However, it may take some time to happen.

6. Refine and repeat
Measure your results using search engine ranking tools and update your website at least once a week as search engines give priority to updated sites. If you do not get listed in the top 10, do not fret. It is a hotly contested page with scores of companies vying for a spot. Look instead at your site's rankings for the keywords. If you have moved up, then you are on the right track. Refine your keywords, include new keywords, optimize your content and get more credible incoming links.

Keyword Suggestion
Not sure what keywords to choose? Try these free keyword suggestion tools.

» Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

» Wordtracker http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Search Engine Ranking
Track your site's ranking for keywords using these tools. Most free tools do not allow you to track your ranking on local search engines (for example, google.com.sg or yahoo.com.sg

Rank Checker for Firefox (free)
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Check Rankings (free)
http://www.checkrankings.com/

WebCEO (free and commercial editions)
http://www.webceo.com/




Remember to vote for me!!