Improve Search Engine Placement

To improve search engine placement, you must please your human visitors as well as the search engines. The more humans that click to your site, the more the search engines take notice of that activity.

Remember that when you use the search engines to find information about a particular topic, you don’t want to wade through countless spammy sites to get to valuable content.

If you were getting spammy results every time you used your favorite search engine, it wouldn’t be long before you’d go somewhere else to do your search.

And Google, as the search engine that everyone uses, knows that. So they make sure that their search engine results pages get the very best results possible. Otherwise, they would go out of business pretty quick.

There are always times when people will do a search on Google and get spammy results. There are lots of reasons for why that might happen including Google's regular updates and a lack of quality supply of websites when a search is done for a particular keyword. This is a temporary situation and as Google takes notice of your behavior when you receive the results, you can bet that their algorithm will change to make the search engine return better results for you.

There's a caveat in all of this as well. No one really knows what Google is going to do next. But based on the past, one can make certain assumptions.

Right now, Google is concerned with Facebook's increasing popularity. Social media is definitely a game-changer and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Role of Social Media in Search Engine Placement

In December 2010, Google's Matt Cutts announced that Google and Bing are using people's engagement with your website on social media channels as a part of their "authority" algorithm.

They are still working out the details, of course but the takeaway for your website's ranking is to make sure you are sharing links to your website a lot on Facebook and Twitter pages.

As you share, and your friends share, Google will take notice and increase your "authority" score. The more authority you have, the higher your ranking. The higher the ranking, the more clicks to your website. The more clicks, the more opportunity you have to convert your visitors to customers.

Simple Ways to Improve Search Engine Rankings

Obviously, you want to stay away from “black hat” tactics to get your site to the top.

But there are some simple things people can do as they optimize their site for the search engines that will make it easier for "spiders" to read and index their pages.

Simple urls: Choose a simple domain name. Also, there may be times when you’ll use a 3 or 4 word keyword in your file name to let the spiders know what your page is about but make sure demand is higher than supply for this keyword.

Organize Your Content First, by sections, then by topics. For example, a site about cooking could be divided into “Asian”, “French”, etc. Then within those sections, divide it into “entrees’, ‘desserts”, etc. It helps search engines categorize information relevant to the keywords.

Easy Navigation Make sure each page is only one to three clicks away from the home page. Also, make sure each page links back to the home page.

As I mentioned before, avoid "black hat SEO" (unethical techniques) to get your site indexed and ranked by the search engines.

Black Hat SEO is including things on your site that are designed to manipulate or "fool" the search engines. One example would be "keyword stuffing" where web designers will use one keyword multiple times in a meta-description.

Black Hat methods are already being accounted for in Google's algorithms. People who engage in search engine manipulation can see that it doesn't work anymore and in some cases, their sites are penalized for doing it.

But people are always coming up with the new ways to game the system. Play it right by creating good content that please visitors and the search engines and your site will naturally rise to the top.

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