6 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Rankings
After you have been in the whole SEO game for many years you end up learning what works and what doesn’t work. Whether you have money to spend on marketing or you have no money there are many things you can do to increase your rankings. Here are a few things you can do to increase your rankings:
- Title Tag – it seems dumb that title tags can help increase your rankings, but it is true. By keeping titles short and descriptive they can help increase your rankings. One thing to keep in mind when writing title tags for each page is that they need to be unique and represent the content on the page.
- Meta Descriptions – just like title tags, meta description tags can help drastically increase a website’s traffic. I usually like keeping my meta descriptions short, descriptive and relevant to the content on that page. The last thing you want to do is use the same meta description tag throughout your whole site because sometimes it causes search engines to see your website content as duplicate even if it is not. If you are running a WordPress blog you can use plugins such as the Head Meta Description plugin to automatically do this for you.
- Headings – I usually like to use headings on all of my pages. Think of headings like a book chapter title, each section/page on your website should have a heading so people know what it is all about. The other great thing about headings is that they give you another opportunity to place keywords within your content.
- Social Media – There are a lot of powerful social media sites out there that can drive thousands of visitors and links. If you study the Digg homepage or the Del.icio.us popular page, you will start noticing trends and if you can replicate them by writing content relevant for those audiences, then you too can gain thousands of links, which will help you with search engine rankings. Here are some things that I have learned from studying these sites:
- Before you leverage these sites it is best to become a user and participate in them so that you can learn about the site as well as their rules.
- By doing some quick searches on topics that are related to your website you will find out what will make the front page and what won’t.
Catchy titles and descriptions heavily determine if a story succeeds or not.
- Sitemaps – I personally have not seen a drastic increase in search traffic by adding a sitemap, but with large sites they do help. The chances of getting all of your pages indexed can be increased if you use a sitemap. One thing that you may want to consider is using Google sitemaps.
- Directories – We all know that a great way to increase your rankings is by obtaining relevant links. One thing I like doing is to find all the free or paid directories that that I can submit my site to. They don’t necessarily do a world of difference when it comes to increasing rankings, but every little bit helps. Just make sure that the directories you submit to don’t use the nofollow attribute or else the link will not count. Three great directories that you may want to start off with are DMOZ, Yahoo and BOTW.
There are many other things you can do to increase your rankings, these are just some of the ones that have been effective for me. Are there any other methods that you have used and had great success with?
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