Recently ZDNet asked us how companies can improve their SEO and increase their presences online. Our director, John Ng, and Adam Bunn, director of SEO at London-based search marketing agency Greenlight, shared ten tips to boost search rankings.
Here’s an excerpt:
1. Create useful content for readers.
This should be the aim of any Web site, specifically since the drive behind Google’s decisions to update its algorithm typically revolve around delivering content that is high-quality and relevant to users. Ng noted that writing original content is not easy and requires significant resources and time, but he reminded businesses of their end-goal.“Give great info and folks will visit and link to your site, thereby increasing your page rank,” he said.
He added that companies also risk the possibility of plummeting site rankings if they are found “cheating” by resorting to tactics such as content farming or link farming to increase their search rank.
2. Be unique.
“Search engines hate duplicate content,” Bunn said, but noted that original content aside, businesses fundamentally have to think about the proposition of its site.“Is it really any different to the hundreds or thousands of other sites offering the same thing? What makes your site remarkable? If your answer to this question is ‘nothing’, then you will struggle to achieve ranking success,” he said.
3. Research the SERPs.
Search engine results pages (SERPs) nowadays are populated with many different types of content besides traditional Web links such as video, news, maps, images and shopping information, Bunn said. Hence, businesses must first find out what types of results tend to appear with their target keywords. For instance, he noted that for some keywords, optimizing for images or maps rankings are the quickest and easiest route to higher online visibility.4. Keyword everything.
Ng explained that besides the actual text, other features on the site such as the URL, image names and links should also reflect the content by utilizing keywords that users would likely use while searching. The site will be more organized and better crawled by search engine spiders.For example, by titling an image “healthy chicken.jpg” rather than “image001.jpg”, the pictures will turn up on image searches, he said. Similarly, use a link that reads, “Our menu offers healthy options” instead of “To find out more, click here“….
Read the whole article by ZDNet’s Jamie Yap here – 10 tips to boost search rankings.