If you have an online business, then you will need traffic flowing to it because without it your business will be dead in the water, and the search engines can provide any website with a lot of traffic, when you know how to get on their first pages. How to improve your SEO ranking is down to how much optimization you do for the search engines, or to put it another way how you prepare all your website content for the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing.
These are the big three when it comes to where people search online, and it is fair to say that the first one mentioned is the Daddy of them all, so may be it is all about Google Search Engine Optimization. This is the one that most website owners want to please the most, but the others should not be disregarded as they too produce traffic for many a website.
Search Engine Ranking Optimization
The name of the game is to get your content in front of as many people as possible and to do that you need to get your content on the first page of the search engines with the aim of being in the number one spot, or at least one of the top three positions. The reason for this is that many people searching online will not venture beyond the first page, and will, a high percentage of the time only click through to the websites that are situated in the top three positions.
A large chunk of the traffic will go to the number one position, which can be around 40% and number two position getting around 11%, number 3 position may get around 8% and the seven positions left sharing around the last 40% between them, with number ten position getting as low as 2%, so as you can see it is important to get up to the top of page one in Google and the other search engines.
Note: These are average percentages and do change, this is just to demonstrate how the top positions get the lion share of the traffic.
If your website is properly monetized and you get to the top of the search engines with the right keyword phrases that people are searching for, then you can have a very profitable website indeed, sales will be big. If you are not on page one in the top spots, then you may never see any sales at all, so it is important to get a top search engine ranking.
Free Search Engine Optimization
It sounds like it could be an expensive business this SEO stuff, and it can be, but it is possible to learn search engine optimization, although there is a lot to learn and it might take a while to get to grips with this vast subject. You could hire a search engine optimization specialist, but as I said that can be expensive and hard to find a company that prove their worth. You could bypass the whole SEO caper altogether and forget organic traffic from the search engines and pay for traffic, but this can be expensive as well, and does have a learning curve to it that might see you out of pocket by a lot before you ever see any results.
What can one do then to simplify this SEO stuff and get some decent rankings?
I am glad you asked because it is possible to have access to the basics without having to learn a lot, and the best thing is that you can do this for free and get the reminder to perform these simple tasks in every post or page you create on your site.
Welcome to….
The All In One SEO Plugin
This is a free WordPress plugin that will optimize your website for search engines such as Google. It has a main page where you can set up your main title for your site, a subtitle, description and your main keyword phrases, this is what will be shown in the search results for your main keywords, when searched for.
This plugin also includes the same details for you to fill in at the bottom of every post or page that you create within your WordPress dashboard, so you can target the title, description and your target keywords of the post/page you are working on and attach to all the content you create. I will be filling this information in before I publish this post with the title of the post, a description of what the post is about and any keywords I am targeting that I got from my Keyword Tool Jaaxy.
This is not the be all and end all of SEO, but it is a great plugin that will perform the basics for you, so that you have an edge when it comes to organic search engine optimization, and how well you rank.
Web Search Engine Optimization
There are other ways to help get your website ranked and into the top positions and I will share a few ideas here which you can investigate more if you are interested in any of them, but just remember that the All In One SEO Plugin is a great start and a uniform way of setting up your content for the search engines.
Keyword Search Tool: Obviously keywords are important, but unless you are a well established site, then you have to pick your keywords carefully so you get well searched phrases that do not have to much competition, otherwise you will not get anywhere near the top spots and therefore get none or very little traffic.
Make sure you use a decent keyword tool to do your keyword research and find the best phrases.
Content Is Still King: You have probably heard before that content is King and it is still relevant, Google and the other search engines are looking for original quality content that they can provide to their audience. It is that simple, well written, valuable content that is informative, easy to read and answers questions related to your business.
Custom Permalinks: This can often be missed when it comes to SEO and yet it is so easy to set up, and you only have to do it once, then you can forget it. The default permalink setting in WordPress is http://howtomakesomemoneyonline.com/?p=123 which is not relevant to the post you have written, it looks better and is easier for the search engines to understand the content of your post if it looks like this … http://howtomakesomemoneyonline.com/a-wealthy-affiliate-review .
You can change this by going to Settings in your WordPress dashboard and then Permalinks, click on Custom Structure and post this code /%postname%/ in the space provided. Remember to hit the blue Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.
WordPress Page – Using Permalinks
Internal Links: It is good practice to link to other pages on your site that are relevant to the content that you are writing at the time, you can see above that I have linked to another page on keyword research. This is a good way of boosting the SEO value of a page and the traffic to it.
Organize Your Menus: Having an easy to navigate website is not only easy for your readers, but it also makes it easy for the search engine spiders to crawl through you content. So make sure your menus are easy to navigate and that all your pages are easy to find. You can structure your menus in your WordPress Dashboard, in Menus under the Appearance tag in the left hand column.
Build A Sitemap: A sitemap makes it easy for the search engine spiders to follow the way your website and its content are structured, the easier you make it for the search engines to crawl your site, the better, after all you want them to rank you in their listings. You can build a sitemap by using a simple WordPress Plugin called ‘Google XML Sitemaps’, it is easy to use and will update periodically, just search of it in the Add New tab of your plugin section in your dashboard.
Final Words
It can seem an overwhelming subject, this SEO stuff and it is kind of, but armed with the SEO plugin, you will sort out the basics for your on page SEO Guidelines, and I have included several other tips that will help with getting your content noticed by the search engines. It still makes sense though to learn as much as you can about this subject because after all if we all want to get noticed and get organic traffic, rather than paying for it, which means we will have to please those pesky search engines.
I hope you have enjoyed this post ‘How To Improve Your SEO Ranking’ and can take away some useful tips to help you with Search Engine Optimization. If you have any questions or would like to share any other tips, then do please leave a comment below. I love to receive your thoughts and comments to my content.