How to Achieve Top Listing

Lovable Links

Having read Google’s patent several times, it seems clear that in the foreseeable future, quality inbound links will continue to have the most impact on your search engine rankings and organic listing positions. Most of the search engine algorithms place some value on the amount and quality of inbound links that point toward your website. The ranking of the website that links to your website factors into the amount of weight that the search engine places on this inbound link when determining your rank. Links from websites that complement your website offer the best value, and the link popularity of those sites directly correlates the value of the link with your website.

Directory Assistance

When optimizing your website, it’s worthwhile to submit your website to directories such as Yahoo! and DMOZ. These directories can have a significant effect on your search engine optimization. One way that they can help your website is through the increased traffic that they can provide. A listing in one of these directories will also enable search engines to index your website.

Don't Forget a Sitemap

One of the do’s of search engine optimization (SEO) is to create a sitemap for your website. A sitemap is essentially a listing of all of the pages of your website. It's typically stored in your robot.txt file located on your home page. The reason a sitemap is important to SEO is it enables the search engine to crawl all of the pages of your website quickly and efficiently; however, care should be taken to ensure that the sitemap does not contain broken links. Broken links can result in the search engine exiting your website before crawling the remainder of the pages.

If It's Broke, Fix It

Broken links on your website can be detrimental to your search engine optimization (SEO). One important step that should be taken in optimizing your website is to test all of the links on your website to ensure that they function properly. There are two main reasons why broken links can negatively affect your search engine rankings. First, broken links are extremely frustrating to website visitors. Visitors may overlook one or two broken links, but if you have more than that, they are likely to exit your website quickly. Second, search engines will typically automatically exit your website after encountering the first broken link. If this happens on an early page of your website, the search engine may not crawl the majority of your pages.

Get Dated

When posting an article, video or blog, ensure that the date of publishing is embedded in the code of your content. Why? Search engines like Google have options that allow people to search by date (even time) the information was posted. People looking for content within the time period your info was published are more likely to find yours if the publish date has been recorded.

Put Yourself on the Map

If you have a shop or office, ensure it and its address are listed in the Google Maps Business Directory. That way, should people be looking for services in a city, your business might appear near the top where a map of relevant businesses get displayed.

Find The Niche Keywords

There are some businesses that have years ahead of you when it comes to optimizing their content for main keywords. Cracking the top ten for those keywords is going to be awfully tough. While you shouldn’t ignore the obvious keywords, take on keywords that may not be obvious (see: have a lot of competition) but are still words potential clients may be typing into their search engine.

Keep It Fresh

Updated content is good. The more you have on your website that uses your weighted keywords, the richer your site will be. Crawlers also pick up on frequent activity, which means your site will be measured (usually resulting in higher ranks) more frequently.