Success With Marc

If you’re like most internet marketers, you spend some time working on your site search engine ranking. There are plenty of reports, books, and experts on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) right now as more people compete to rise to the top of the search engine rankings. Type ‘SEO’ into Google and you’ll see 39 million pages dedicated to that keyword!

A lot of buzz about Don Crowther and his presentation at BlogWorld Expo 2008 hit the blogs and Twitter this week.  Unfortunately, I didn’t attend the event, but if the participants attending his seminar walked away with what I’ve learned from him this past week, then it must have been a highlight of the conference.

I received my package from Stompernet.com last week, and I’ve enjoyed many of the articles in their magazine publication. However, the one that truly stands out for me is Don’s article about the anatomy of a site search engine ranking.  SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) is a critical part of online success as a marketer, or any business for that matter.  SEO, or knowing how the search engines decide which pages get ranked at the top, is what a lot of us want to know and invest money or time trying to figure out.

I won’t cover the entire article. It’s rich and jam-packed with a full 3 pages on SEO tips.  I’ll cover some basics in the hope of getting a dialogue started in the comments.  Let me know what you think and what tactics are you using to achieve high search engine ranking.

Don breaks down search engine engine criteria into two groups:

• On-page factors which you control
• Off-page factors controlled by others.

Let’s focus on what we control first.  Don lists 16 things that we can do to our sites or posts to improve rankings.  I’ll share 4 of them.  I don’t want to risk infringing the copyright  with Stompernet. Here’s a hint: I included most of the other tactics within this post if you wish to look for them. I’ll update about this page’s progress in the rankings in the next few days.

1. Use keyword rich title tags - Make sure that your title tags have your keywords. Your title is shown at the very top of your browser. Don’t leave it blank, or only have your company/site name up there.
2. Write long copy - Don’t write short posts for all of your pages. The average page at the top of Google’s ranking is about the size of a good article. Search engines love content. I heard someone once say that text is great spider food.
3. Have clean URLs - Get rid of the ? and & in the page URL.  Many time the search engine spiders stop at the symbol and ignore what follows in the URL.
4. Add new content daily - This one is difficult to do, but vitally important. Content gives more for the search engines to index. Create one quality content rich post a day that targets a specific keyword everyday.

Off page factors is all about the links, that is all about the incoming links.  I’ll cover some of that information within the next week.

The basic take-away from Don’s article on SEO is to write great stuff that people want to link to, and your site search engine ranking will climb quickly.

In the meantime, there are definitely ways to structure your site and pages to help things along!

Technorati Tags: search engine ranking position, seo, serp