We get many calls into USWeb from people looking for proven ways to increase their search rankings, or search visibility. The methods companies like USWeb use are obviously tried and true strategies that anyone with the time and knowledge can put to use.

First you have to realize that it all begins with the content. Search engines look for content to be unique, visible, and relevant. Unique content is obviously a no-brainer. Write the content yourself, or you risk getting de-indexed for duplicate content.

Making your content visible is applicable to a couple of issues. First, make sure you are not trying to trick search engines. Check out the site below for a tremendously bad example of trying to trick a search engine.

http://www.dataresurrection.com/
(you can see the white-on-white text when you highlight the bottom white space of the page)

As you will notice from this site’s non-existent rankings in Google, this tactic is not effective.

The second area to keep in mind in making your content visible is making sure that there is nothing stopping the search spider from viewing your content. This can be complicated, but the easiest way to check this is to look at the cached version of your page in Google. Make sure your content is making it in.

Another great example of making your content visible to search engine is making sure your copy is not in an image. Many Web designers place copy in an image to make things easier. Search engines cannot read this content.

Creating relevant content is also something that should be naturally accomplished. Make sure to use the appropriate keywords in your copy. If you are writing a page about selling cars, make sure to use the word cars at least a couple of times on the page.

There are a lot of different opinions about the exact keyword density you should have on a page. In my opinion, if you’re being that myopic, the site will not look natural to either search engines or visitors. Keep your search terms in mind, but do not over do it when it comes to your copy. Keep it natural.

Links are another area where you need unique, visible, and relevance to make the best of your possibilities in search.

Unique links mean that you should not just get a large amount of links from one site. You will find much better search rankings in getting links for multiple sites.

By visible links, I am speaking of people trying to hide links to site. Search engines like Google are very smart and will notice if these are not visible. Make sure your links from other sites are not white-on-white, and are at a visible font size.

Asking the person linking to you to place your link in the proper anchor text can easily add relevancy to your links. For example, I would rather you link to USWeb with a link saying Online Marketing Firm, than http://www.usweb.com, or even USWeb. We easily rank for our own name, but the anchor text link makes our site more relevant to search engines.

These are the proven methods of increasing your search rankings. They may not seem as exciting as cloaking, link spamming, or other deceptive means, but they work.

seo, search engine markeitng

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.