It’s easy to start an online business, but achieving success is a different matter. If people cannot find your website, then they aren’t going to buy from you. That’s why it’s so important to achieve good search engine rankings.
If you’re a small business owner, then you may have received emails, or even letters, from companies offering to get your site on the front page of the search engines. Many of those companies promise huge results for very little cost, but they aren’t willing to explain how they get their results. It’s best to avoid those companies, and instead look for a digital marketing company that is more transparent about how they promote your website.
What Colour is Your Hat?
Internet marketers tend to divide themselves into two categories, black hat marketers, and white hat marketers. Black hat marketers use tricks and exploits to improve website Search Engine Rankings in the short term – but when the search engines catch on, the sites that use those tricks are penalized. If you want to keep your Search Engine Rankings using black hat methods, you’d need to constantly fight to stay ahead of the search engines – and even then, you’re taking a gamble that you won’t land on a long term blacklist.
White hat techniques may take longer to “kick in”, but they produce much more consistent long term results, and aren’t going to damage your reputation. It is such white hat techniques that we’ll discuss here, and that would be used by any reputable UK based SEO agency.
How to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
- Fix your website: A website with broken links, poor navigation, and code errors is unlikely to rank well in any search engine. The first thing any good digital marketing company will do when you hire them is look over your site and make a list of any problems. If you want to make a start at working on your own SEO, this is a good place to begin.
- Check your Meta tags: While Meta tags aren’t the be-all and end-all of SEO, they are useful. If you don’t have any, or if they’re seriously keyword stuffed (a hangover from the early days of the internet), then maybe you should set them to contain something useful and relevant to your site.
- Build some incoming links: This is where hiring a good UK based SEO agency would come in handy – or an SEO agency based in the country where your customers reside, if that isn’t the UK. Disreputable link builders will sell you hundreds of links for just a few US dollars, but those links will be on spam sites, short-lived stats pages, and link farms. This will make your site look bad to the search engines. Relevant links are the only ones that will benefit you.
- Spice up your link text: When you’re building links, don’t just make them all follow the format of linking to your company name. You’ll rank better if you can secure some links that reference your product, or the area you’re based. If you’re getting lots of organic links, this should be happening anyway.
- Speed up your loading times: Does your site take forever to load? If so, you could be losing visitors, let alone SEO benefits. Clean up your code, or investigate moving host if necessary!
Apparently internal links are important too. I’ve been working on fixing my internal links right now. I hope to some positive changes in my SER soon.
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Some really great tips for how to increase search engine rankings all of which will result in an increase in traffic to your blog.
James Debono recently posted..Knowing How to Increase Blog Traffic is as Easy as 1,2,3….
Hi James. thanks for your valuable comment
As much you share in the social networking sites you can improve the traffic of your website.
I’m working on my page load times now and I’ve tried everything. Might be time to pay the premium and switch my hosting a little closer to home.
The website must be on-page optimize also. It must load fast and the file size of the pages must be not that big. Also, putting quality contents time to time will push the site to higher rankings.