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Top 10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking
By Darren Dunner (c) 2007

My top 10 ways to improve search engine rankings are based on 7
years of banging my head against the world wide web's search
engines and reading numerous books on top 10 SEO tactics.

Let me say first of all that there are a lot of books, sources
and tutorials that make promises of getting your website into
the top 10 spots on the major search engines. Most of these are
self promoting and the end result is that you have to hire these
people to accomplish the things they say you can do on your own.

So I want to preface this by saying that this article on how
to improve search engine rankings is not necessarily a
do-it-your-self guide. In fact, the art of SEO can be time
consuming and irritating to say the least. Some methods require
the help of companies like mine so I write this in hopes that
you will understand what it really takes to gain exposure,
realize what you can do on your own and determine when you need
assistance.

One final point I want to make is "Don't use any SEO Company
that can't explain what it is doing and that makes claims of
using secret software that you can never see or use". Yes, SEO
can be complex but not to the point that you can't understand
what is being done. A good SEO company is able to educate you
on what is being done and explain that it is best to leave some
techniques to the experts.

My 10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking

1. If you are using a shared host, ask your host for a
dedicated IP address for your site. This means that no one on
the net shares this IP with your site. It is yours and yours
alone. Many shared servers have tons of related sites on them.
Having your own IP separates you from those sites.

2. Make sure your site validates as a search engine friendly
site. The best site to use for this purpose is The World Wide
Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/). Their markup validation
service (http://validator.w3.org/) will tell you if your site
conforms to W3C standards and whether or not the search engines
can read your site. If your site has errors, these may stop the
bots from properly indexing your site.

3. Make sure you have a contact page with an address and
telephone number and a form of some sort so people can contact
you. Don't list your email on the site unless you want spammers
to send you tons of junk mail. Make sure the form you use on the
site uses captcha (challenge-response system). Have a Privacy
Policy Page and Terms of Services page and ensure that they have
at least 300 words of text each. Most sites have these pages,
but I strongly recommend you not copy. Find examples, but use
your own words and include keywords related to your site. Make
the pages personal to the reader.

4. Every page on your site should have at least 300 words or
more. Don't write a 2 paragraph page that has little to no
real information. Provide details and give examples.

5. Create a FAQ or Tutorial page on your site. Make each subject
link to its own page and focus each page on 1 or 2 keywords. As
a start, try to add 10 of these types of pages to your site. You
can come up with ideas for FAQ's or Tutorials by reviewing your
industry and trying to determine what people might not understand
about it and the kinds of questions they might ask. Then post the
questions and the answers. This is an easy way to add great
content to your site and to help potential clients feel secure
about your service.

6. Add a blog to your site. Have your blog designed to match
your site so that as it draws traffic your readers know this is
your main site of business. This will add value to your site,
plus improve your search engine rankings. Create categories and
write frequently about your industry to keep your readers
interested and your content fresh.

7. Create Link Bait using your blog. There are very few services
that offer this on a professional level and it can be very
complex. I suggest leaving this service to the professionals
because it requires time and knowledge and can be difficult and
frustrating to do. The idea is to add unique and detailed content
about your industry which creates enough buzz through various
channels to motivate others to refer and link back to your blog.
This can be a huge asset to your business because many writers
love to provide plugs to quality content.

8. Post to Directory sites that have good inner page rank,
especially on the page where your site will be listed. Use
unique anchor text for each posting. Again, this may be one
of those tasks best left to professionals because, if done
correctly, your site's search engine ranking can be dramatically
improved and, if done incorrectly, can be a waste of time,
effort and money

9. Text Link Brokering is another creative and effective way
to build more anchor text back links. Find related and quality
ranked sites that will list your site in text format. Generally,
this requires a one time, monthly or yearly fee.

10. If you have a product or service to sell, offer affiliate
incentives. Post these incentives on affiliate forums and
elsewhere to generate interest in getting others to promote your
service for you. Be sure you have a solid affiliate back end in
place to provide your affiliates with dependable stats and
access. Then, have people write reviews on your program's
tracking and payout reliability to generate additional buzz.

The 10 points noted above are by no means a complete list
of what you could do to improve your site's search engine
ranking, but if you focus your efforts on these 10 areas,
rest assured you will see both an increase in traffic and
higher rankings.
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Darren Dunner - http://www.the-content-writers.com has
been writing and providing these services for over 7 years.
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