Search engine optimization can be a daunting prospect for many people, however, like many processes it can be less intimidating if you break down the steps into smaller parts. Enter my 8 main steps to improve search engine rankings.

These steps won’t necessary get you number one results on Google. Getting number one and top ten rankings, particularly on Google, can be an extremely difficult task and some factors – such as the age or longevity of your website – aren’t necessarily in your control while others – such as how many external links you have – can take time to implement. However, the 8 steps listed here will almost certainly enhance your rankings in all search engines and you may find you will be able to achieve top ten rankings in search engines such as Yahoo and Bing.

SEO STEP 1: Keywords

One of the things to remember with SEO is the reason why search engines exist in the first place – that is, to provide suitable results for people who are searching for particular subjects. The search engine’s job is to provide the best results possible from the keywords that people type in.

That’s why you will hear about the importance of keywords – or more correctly keyword phrases – over and over. Keywords are the building blocks of a good SEO plan. Get the keywords wrong and it doesn’t matter how good your search engine optimisation is, your efforts will fail. Get them right and you could be on the road to success.

The key is to determine keywords and keyword phrases that:

• Aren’t so competitive that you won’t get high rankings unless you are willing to put in lots of time and effort (and possibly costs)
• Aren’t so specific that people rarely search for the terms
• Are directly related to your business. That is, if people type in the keywords, see your website in the search results and click through to your website, they will generally want to stay because they’re interested in your site and its contents. There’s no point in getting traffic for a particular keyword phrase that is not directly related to your business because people will leave your site in a matter of seconds.

SEO STEP 2: Title tag

The title tag is the text people will see in the browser tab (for example, ‘Marketing communications for small business – Melbourne’ on En Pointe’s home page). This title is perhaps the most important on-site seo factor and it must be used correctly if you want to improve your seo. In particular, it must include your most important keyword phrases.

SEO STEP 3: Description meta tag

The description meta tag is another important seo factor, although its importance depends on the search engine. In some search engines, this tag is used to describe the pages that are listed in search results. Again, the description meta tag must include your most important keywords.

SEO STEP 4: Alt tags

Images do nothing to improve your seo but if you use an alt tag with each image it can help your search engine rankings.

SEO STEP 5: Permalinks

Permalinks are the addresses you see at the top of your browser (e.g. http://www.enpointeconsulting.com.au/seo-website-analysis). Ideally, these should include keywords.

SEO STEP 6: Sitemap

The inclusion of an XML sitemap will help search engines find all your pages, not just your home page and your top level pages. Many website owners will need help to add a sitemap to their website, but it is worth the effort.

SEO STEP 7: Content

Content is absolutely vital to improve your seo. In particular, your headings, paragraph text, bullet points and links should all include keywords where possible.

SEO STEP 8: External links

Getting links from other websites is perhaps the most important aspect of any SEO campaign. In fact, if you have no links pointing to your website from other websites, your site may never be found in search engine results.

Let’s start with a simple one: External links are simply the links from other websites that are pointing to your website. So, let’s imagine your website’s domain name is www.mywidgetbusiness.com and a friend of yours has a site called www.myfriendswidgetbusiness.com. If the friend places a link for www.mywidgetbusiness.com on www.myfriendswidgetbusiness.com, this is an external link. If you place a link on your website pointing to your friend’s website, this is called reciprocal linking.

This sounds simple and is, but unfortunately there’s a lot more to it than this. One of the main reasons is that not all external links are created equal.

Link quality and search engine optimisation

Link quality is important when looking at external links and there are several factors to examine.

First and foremost, if the website which links to your website is considered important the link is much more valuable to you. There are several ways to determine whether a website is considered important and perhaps the most popular is Google’s PageRank, which uses a rating of 0 to 10 to measure a web page’s value, with 10 being the highest. This value is determined by a number of factors but one of the most important is the number of external links going to the page.

If you’re interested in finding out the page PageRank of a particular web page, Google ‘page rank tool’. A simple service I often use is http://www.pageranktool.net/. Bear in mind that ranks of 1 and 2 are incredibly regular and ranks of 7 or above rare.

Another aspect of link quality is relevance. Search engines are able to determine if the links pointing to your site are relevant; the ones that aren’t won’t help your website much if at all; the ones that are relevant will be more valuable to you.

Lastly, if you do have control over the external link try to include your most important keywords in the link text. For example, if one of your most important keyword phrases is ‘widgets for Melbourne businesses’, use this phrase in the text link (i.e. My Widget Business – Specialists in supplying widgets for Melbourne businesses – where ‘My Widget Business – Specialists in supplying widgets for Melbourne businesses’ is the text and this links to www.mywidgetbusiness.com).

Increasing your links

There are a number of ways that you can increase the number of links pointing to your website. Some of the main ones are:

• Reciprocal linking – as mentioned earlier, this is when you exchange website links with another website owner.
• Links from blogs, social media, forums, etc. – include constructive comments along with a link to your website.
• Free content websites – pay particular attention to the bio and including your most important keywords in the link text.
• Website directories – there are heaps of these out there – some free; some not and some more useful than others.

Keep it up!

Another point to highlight about SEO and external link gathering is that it’s not an activity that has a start and end point. To be successful, you should set aside time each month or quarter to add to your external links.