Blog Title : Improving your Ranking in Google

The number of articles and companies who offer to increase your web site visibility in Google is quite frankly astonishing. The industry is littered with people who offer to improve a variety of issues concerned with your ranking at a cost.

Before considering spending anything, this article offers some ideas that you can apply yourself.

Google continues to provide simple clear guidelines regarding this subject and emphasises that improving the ranking of you web site really should be thought of as being a performance inprovement process.

The basic information required to perform your own Search Engine Optimisation free of charge is very straightforward and while new algorithms continue to refine where you appear in Google, the basic principles have not changed.

This article attempts to take some of the mystery out of SEO such that all you need to do is perform some very simple tasks each month which are unlikely to take more than 20 minutes.

Google uses thre prime factors to rank your web site in its index -

 [1 ] HITS  the number of unique visits to your site each month. This makes sense because it is only right that a web site that is regularly viewed eg BBC and Amazon should rank highter. You can increase the number of hits to your web site by telling people about what you do and explain that you regularly add useful educational material.

[2] CONTENT  Many pages of your web site simply describe what your company offers. This is fine but you know your own specialism and should be able to write pages in your web site of general information. Remember that students in Schools and Higher Education are regularly surfing for quality content to help their work and will continue to revisit your site if its content is regularly changing. This means more visits to your site.

[a] If you are an accountant then perhaps you could write some words on basic principles of accountancy.

[b]  A graphic designer must know some history of their profession as well as lots of things to avoid.

[c] A double glazing company may have numerous of technical specifications that would be useful.

[d] Be careful not to flood your home page with different colors of text, font sizes and underlines. This is not a visually appealing .

[e] We want people to be interested to read more about what you have to say and not be deterred by appearance

[e] Add your Facebook and Twitter Links if you have then

[f] Be prepared to share useful links. Perhaps there are govening bodies for your specialism

[g] Research the history of your specialism and include it in your site

[h] Write good Blogs

[3] LINKS

A link is a word, group of words or image that you can move your mouse over and click to move to a different document or web site. If there are many web sites which contain links to your web site, then Google will rank your web site higher.

 Take the trouble to see if there are companies who you work with who would be willing to place a link from their web site to your web site in exchange for your offering the same reciprocal service. this really does help your ranking.

 There are companies who will obtain the inbound links for you - this can be quite expensive but I add this point for completeness.

META TAGS

 Meta Tags are used by search engines and browsers to provide further information about the site. Amongst other items,  Meta Tags, set out

 [1] The title of the Page

[2] Keywords for that page

[3] A brief description of the content for that page.

Some search engines only use the Title Meta Tag whilst other search engines use keywords and descriptions.

Your Content Management Software will  normally provided the capability to define the content of the Meta Tags for each page. Search engines do like the meta tags to have a close relationship to the web page in question. For example, use each of your chosen keywords at least twice in the page content. Also make sure that the Title Meta tag is relevant to the web page being viewed.

If you find that you can only devote 10 minutes each month to optimising your web site for Google, then spend that time improving the copy of your Home Page. After all, this is the first page people see and if the content rarely changes then visitors to your site may conclude you have nothing new to say which is unlikely to be the case. There is some evidence to suggest that if your Home Page does not change, then over time, your ranking in Google may be reduced.

SOME GENERAL THOUGHTS

Be patient when performing SEO as changes can take many, many months to have an impact on the position of your site in search engines. You should also remember that your competitors make also be doing the same performance improvements as you and so the benefits you obtain may not be as quick as you might wish.

If you take the trouble to provide occasional free seminars at local schools and colleges, then tell your audience that they will find further useful information on your web site - make sure this is the case. Doing so will encourage students to continue to revisit your site for more detail and most definately this will improve your search engine ranking because you will be enjoying more visits ( eg Hits ).

You can of course pay companies to do much of this for you but before doing so, try to spend just 20 minutes each month helping yourself. Before doing so, it would be sensible to speak to whoever develops your web site and ask them to perform some of these tasks for you - the cost may be be less than you think.

Google has recently released its latest algorithm called Hummingbird which appears to help inprove searches from mobile and portable devices. More emphasis is placed on quality content and not simply repeating the keywords many time on each page. This encourages more of us to ensure that our web sites evolve from just being a portfolio of our services to that of containing quality content useful to a must wider audience.