In order to have a high ranking in the search engines and get lots of free traffic, you need to be active with a search engine optimization strategy. There are simple things that you can implement in order to increase your rankings over time and they also work in the long term, regardless of how the algorithms change.
There are really two things that you need to consider when perform any SEO strategy.
On-page SEO factors
Off-page SEO factors
The onpage factors include the things that you can do directly to the webpage (title tags, keywords, H1 tags, web structure etc) while the offpage factors include linking strategies. Let’s discuss this in more detail below.
Title of the Web-page
The title of the webpage needs to include the main keyword for this webpage. If you have a number of keywords, then you need to select the most important for your SEO reasons. Find the keyword that attracts the most traffic and gets the most searches during the month.
Your Primary and Secondary Keywords
You need to use your primary and secondary keywords throughout the text of the webpage. An ideal amount is not exactly known, but an average of 2 to 3 percent makes sense. You should start the page with your primary keyword if you can. You should also include the primary keyword about three times during the first paragraph as this will tell the search engine robots what your page is about.
H1, H2, and H3 tags
The H1 tag is a piece of HTML code that search engine robots look for when visiting your website. You need to ensure that you use this tag and add your primary keyword to it. This is the most important keyword that you have on your webpage and the keyword that you want the search engines to list your page under. In most cases, H1 is used to highlight the title of the webpage content.
After your have added quality content in your webpage, you should highlight the important sub headings with H1 or H2. This will allow Google bot to identify which keywords are important in your webpage. Remember, don’t overuse the H1, H2 and H3 tags. Always make your web content interesting and easy to read for your visitors.
Getting High Quality Backlinks
You need to have a selection of high quality links pointing to your website. Ideally these should be from authority websites and high ranking, human edited directories. Google loves high quality links from authority sites and you gain a lot of credit for having them. It is best to gain one-way links if you can as this prevents any page rank leakage.
When you first create your linking campaign, look for one-way links first, then you can find quality websites to exchange links with. Here is a list of one way link building strategies:
- Article Marketing
- Yahoo Answer Marketing
- Document Sharing
- Ebook Submission
- Press Release Submission
As with every marketing campaign, a mix of different strategies works best. Try to apply all strategies first and see which one works best for your business type. Once you have discovered the best link building strategies, you can maximize your sales.
Reciprocal Linking
Don’t discount reciprocal linking but is should come second place to one way links. Reciprocal links are still considered by the search engines but they need to come from market specific websites. It is also better if you can get links from websites that have a higher pagerank or more visitors than yours. Look for websites that get a high amount of traffic and seem to be authority websites, and target them.
Summary
If you take the steps that have been outlined above, you will see a rise in your search engine rankings and an increase in overall free traffic.