3 Steps to Better Rankings

March 3rd, 2008

You could probably spend the better part of most of your days discussing the intricacies of search engine optimization but chances are you probably don’t want to right?

You don’t really care about algorithms or any geeky stuff like that so I’ve broken it down for you to 3 simple steps you can work on every day to improve your search engine rankings.

#1 Good Keywords – There are a ton of tools out there designed to help you create huge lists of keywords and keyword variations but if you ask me the most important tool you can use for your keyword research is your head.

That’s right your head.

Be smart. Look for keywords that tools won’t and can’t spit out. Competitors brands names (sometimes you can get away with bidding on them), go to your competitors websites and look for keywords and always target keywords associated with your niche’s top stories and headlines.

And if you want a list of keywords and variations the free tool by Google is as good as any: Keyword Tool External You’ll find a lot of little gems in there.

# 2 Content – Yup, content is still king… the only difference between today and say a few years ago is the search engine spiders and the geeks programming them are 10x smarter… it’s like they came up with some brain steroid or something… I digress.

The thing with content is we all tend to have pretty good ideas floating around in our heads. The problem occurs when we start trying to type out our thoughts… sometimes stuff gets lost in the translation, right?

I’ll give you one tip and then the rest is up to you to find a technique that you think will help you write more effectively.

Personally I verbalize my thoughts a lot better then I write them down so whenever I’m having trouble writing down what I want to say I basically record myself saying what I want to relay to the reader and then I just write up a transcript of my recording.

Once I’m done writing the article/post and the content is stellar I go back and optimize it for the search engines…

The first thing I do is stick my primary keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph and if possible I make it the first word of the sentence. I also insert this same keyword once in the body of the article and again in the last sentence of the last paragraph.

# 3 Inbound Links – Inbound links are the lifeblood of your website. Without good inbound links your website will just not do well in the search engine rankings in a competitive marketplace.

There are all sorts of methods and software that you can utilize to increase the number of links pointing to your sites but it’s much too broad a topic to get into here as this post is already a bit too long…

Definitely stay tuned for more info on backlink building, search engine optimization and content generation.

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