Improve Search Engine Placement
Who doesn’t want to improve search engine placement? Having a better ranking in the search engines can be the difference between getting 10 visits per day or 10,000 visits per day. Here are a few quick and easy to follow tips that will help you improve your search engine placement.
Post and Page Titles
Your post and page titles need to be short and sweet. When you publish content, you need to keep the titles very catchy and appealing to not only regular readers but also the potential readers who use the search engines. Keep your titles down to about 3 to 5 words in length.
Body and Content
Your content needs to have the exact phrase match found in your title at least twice. Additionally, if you use individual words within that phrase that can help too. Lastly, it would help to also link the exact phrase to another site that provides additional information related to the exact phrase/title words. The length of your content should be around 250 to 500 words and should not contain more than 5 to 10 external links.
Permalink and URL Structure
Your post or page url (web address) should also have the exact phrase as part of the url. It is better to have dashes separating the words as search engines can get words mixed up without the dashes.
Example: YourSiteName.com/Your-Post-Title.php or
Quality of Material
Your content should be unique. It should also serve a purpose. The content should be entertaining, educational, informative or just plain useful. Content that is copied form somewhere else isn’t useful and search engines don’t like duplicate content.
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3 comments
Some good tips there Garry that I’ve already picked up from talking to you, but how about this one?
In terms of Permlink structure….I’ve been wanting to change my site from http://www.zath.co.uk/2007/12/09/belkin-n1-wireless-router-review/ to http://www.zath.co.uk/belkin-n1-wireless-router-review/
I’ve tested this on my test site and added the code into the .htaccess file and all seems well on there. However, if I do this on Zath Games Tech and it works to view historical pages, will it affect my rankings for those historical pages on Google?
I’ve started to get some regular traffic on a few pages and ideally wouldn’t want to lose that now. Cheers!
I am not sure about .htaccess things… When I decide to change my permalink structure, I do so being prepared to bite the 404 page error bullet. Back when I didn’t know better and when I discovered this tips, I felt it would be much better for my site in the long run of things and it was worth the LOSS of creating 404s on my existing posts and pages. Google will eventually re-index everything.
I did this earlier this year on GCDC and it took about two months for Google to re-index everything with the correct URL. Also, keep in mind, as Google re-indexed old stuff, your new content instantly is optimized for search engines and you’ll start to see new crowds of people dropping in.
Thanks for the advice Garry, I ended up setting up individual 301 redirects for each of my most popular pages and that seems to be working well enough – a bit time consuming, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get the Wordpress redirect working.
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