Ten Steps to Great Search Engine Rankings

By Pete Dimaio on October 12, 2007 2:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

1) Develop Great Content

Content is king with search engines. To rank highly under any term a site must have a sufficient amount of relevant content about the subject. It is not enough to have keywords, the content must also match the keywords. For instance, if you are promoting real estate marketing, a site must have valuable content about real estate marketing.

2) Program in Clean Code that is Easy for the Robots/Spiders to Scan

Clean code means a search engine's spiders and robots can easily read and evaluate the site. The easier it can be indexed, the faster a good site can rise with its targeted search keywords.

3) Develop a Strong Network of Sites Linking to Your Site

Google became the most-successful search engine by determining that the value of a site is derived not only by the content and outbound links but also by whom links to a site and the value of those sites.

4) Properly Design Pages Using a Clear Design Architecture

A site that has a clear flow of information on each page will rank higher than a site with content in no clear order. This refers to the effective use of headlines, subheads and clear body copy -- copy that is not muddled by over user of underlines, bolded text, italic text, and different font sizes.

5) Implement Unique Page Titles and Descriptions for Each Page

Page titles and meta descriptions are a tried and true way to rank highly. Each page should have a clear, conversational title and relevant meta description. The title should be no more than 100 characters and description no more than 250 characters, as a general guideline.

6) Provide Relevant Keywords for Each Page

Keywords are the first step for a search engine to evaluate a site, but they must be relevant to the content on that page. Keyword stuffing -- the process of adding a lot irrelevant keywords -- negatively affects search rankings. Typically the first 250 characters of keywords are reviewed, but up to 900 characters are acceptable.

7) Ensure that Your Site is Well Linked Internally (deep-linking)

Text links are a great way to lead a search engine's robots and spiders through the site. If a keyword is relevant to another section of the site it should be linked to that section.

8) Provide Descriptive Names and Alt Text for Photos

Search engines don't just search for text. Naming photos intuitively and providing accurate alt text will help a search engine get a full, 360 degree view of a site.

9) Implement an Efficient Sitemap

Providing a sitemap that is easily indexed will help search engines quickly scan a site.

10) 1001 Other Items

Search engines look for an untold number of characteristics when indexing a site including when it was last updated, traffic, hosting and much more when determining the final rank of a site. While these variables are important, the most valuable is always derived by having great content.

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1 Comments

Sam Stevens said:

This is a good general overview of best practices, but if you are talking about meta keywords in item #6, you might want to refer to some more up to date resources.

Typically NONE of the characters of keywords are reviewed, and search engines are NOT reviewing keywords as a first step in evaluating a website. Keywords are not used for ranking anymore, and only Yahoo! uses them for retrieval purposes (but not ranking!)

Keywords are helpful to the person doing the optimization work (a quick glance at the meta keywords keeps you on track with your page optimization goals). The meta keywords tag is also a good spot to drop commonly misspelled keywords. Keywords can be helpful if you have an internal site search engine that uses them for ranking.

I don't think any SEO would dispute the importance of keyword research for use with content optimization, link text, etc., and for PPC, but I don't sense that's what you are referring to here. The brief info you provide in item #6 appears to promote keyword concepts that are quite out of date with the current world of search marketing. Please do clarify if I have misunderstood what you've written.

February 8, 2008 8:05 PM

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