Five Overlooked Ways to Improve Search Engine Placement

Few people can rank high in today’s search engines without embarking on a link building campaign. The first thing that many webmasters do is try to cheat. They jump on the guru-secret bandwagon and follow all the free content, spammed across the net, secrets. In the end they waste hundreds of hours, and still lack any content in the top search engine positions.

Face it, we all want the #1 SERP for the most profitable keywords. Most of us will never see it. Even the largest SEO companies cannot promise 100% success, through every keyword, permanently, without including a few pages of small print in their contracts.

Ignore Page Rank (for a few minutes)

A website can receive top search engine placement (SERP) before it is ranked, before it is indexed. This is because the search engines use up to 100 different elements to place a web page at the top of ranks.

Too many webmasters focus on keyword density, meta information, and inbound links. They completely forget that the end user is also factored into a page’s rank.  Example, a page with 10% visitors remaining on the page, for more than 30 seconds, and clicking through to another page, receives a high ‘authority.’

Many webmasters suffer from BO (Backlink Obsession). They create pages with low conversion rates, no reader value, and poor navigation, all in the effort to get at those coveted top search engine placements.

Link Flow

Not all links have the same value. Google divides the value of a link by its position on a page, and by the number of links on a page. Many webmasters damage their promotion/marketing efforts by removing Social Networking links, cutting down navigation, and removing features such as Top-Posts, Most Comments, etc.

One of the easiest solutions is the most overlooked. We’d be rich if we had a nickel for the number of times people looked stunned when they learned how simple the solution was – just use <no-follow> links.  They are not necessary. The website’s robot.txt file and sitemap will take care of the problem.

Lowering the number of links on a page increases the ‘value’ Google passes to the pages that are listed. This is one reason why most blog owners have 200 inbound links and achieve PR3, but SEO experts can achieve PR5 with less than 30 links.

Robot.txt & SiteMap

Search engines look for this file. It gives them a foundation to rank the site. They are vital to search engine placement. There is no reason why any website on the web should

Deep or Wide?

The experts will argue forever over the debate, “Should a website be created deep, or wide?”  From the standpoint of ‘fast indexing’ the answer should be wide. Using sub-directories, can reduce the number of links on a page, and still generate usable navigation systems.

Update Pages

No one knows why Google dumps pages from the index. Everyone experiences. There are solutions. Every six months go over the website, go to a page, make some changes within the first 10% of the page. Google webmaster accounts have a tool that lets webmasters resubmit an individual page. This can be time consuming. Wait until Google re-crawls the site and then submit the pages that were missed.

The search engines thrive on new content. Updating pages is one way to keep ‘on top.’ However, beware of changing the URL. Broken links can lower a web page’s rank very quickly.