Giving Your Site an SEO Boost

July 25, 2007

Search engine optimization (SEO) is nearly as much an art as it is a science. The complexities of SEO require the services of experts in order to keep up. However, there are several things that can be done to give your website a quick SEO boost, and potentially improve your search engine rankings.

Two things that can be done relatively easily and quickly are creating content and increasing your link popularity. Both of these items are vital and very important parts of SEO. Doing just these two things virtually guarantees a boost in search engine rankings.

Creating Content

This is mostly done by writing articles that focus on the key phrases you are trying to optimize for. Trying to improve your ranking for the key phrase “hiking boots”? Start writing articles about them.

If you’re a retail store that sells hiking boots, then articles that review different brands of hiking boots, explain what to look for in a good hiking boot, a boot fitting guide, and so forth are perfect opportunities to boost your site’s relevance in the eyes of the search engines.

Some additional SEO tactics you can implement as you write these articles is linking out to authoritative sites (sites with a high Google Page Rank), increasing usability by linking to other related pages on your site, and making sure all your code is W3C compliant and that there are no broken links.

Be sure to include your chosen keywords and phrases in the webpage title, headline, and throughout the document. Bolding your keywords helps as well.

Increasing Link Popularity

Link popularity is a score based on the number of inbound links to your site. Though all inbound links count toward your link popularity score, certain types of links carry more weight than others.

One-way links carry the most importance, while two-way (you link to me and I’ll link to you) links are given relatively low importance. Additionally, any incoming links from a page the search engines consider to be a “link farm” (a page with a very high number of outgoing links) doesn’t help your cause much, and in fact can hurt your ranking.

Additionally, a one way link from a site considered to be an “authority” on a particular subject is given a bit more weight than a link from a less authoritative site. However, quantity of links is still more important than who they come from.

So how do you get people to link to you? Well, the best way is still to have great content that is worth linking to. If you have good content, other sites will naturally want to link to you without you even asking.

However, since you’ve written all those great articles (from following the advice in the previous section) offering redistribution rights on those articles is a great way to increase inbound links. The key is to require that anybody who reprints your article include all links that you’ve inserted, and always be sure to include a link back to your website in the article’s signature.