May 14, 2012

Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Ranking

The Internet or the World Wide Web is a vast universe in which millions of web pages are filled with tons of information on a plethora of topics.  But the only problem is that, all these web pages are either titled with some mysterious name or placed on a server with coded paths.
What makes the use & searching of the Internet easy even for a newbie is the effortless access & use of search engines. Search engines are online tools, which can be used to find specific information on sites on the Internet.

Whenever any person is looking for some information on the Internet, they typically go to either a popular or a personal favorite search engine. They enter the query in the search engine & check up the results or links displayed. People generally tend to click the results or links displayed at the top. It is perceived that these links are more precise or closer to their original query.
Hence being among the top links displayed by the search engine is important for any site to have visibility. If you are offering any kind of service on your site, being among the top links is of utmost importance for your business success as it helps to generate online traffic for your site.
Search Engines are one of cheapest tools for online marketing. But the important question is to find out, why some sites rank better than others in search engine query results.
This is on account of a powerful technique & web-marketing tool called ‘Search Engine Optimization’, popularly known as SEO.
SEO is a technique with the help of which, search engines are able to find and prioritize the rank of your site, higher than thousand & millions of others in response to a particular query. SEO helps in generating online traffic to your site from respective search engines.
Before we understand these techniques, it is important to have general idea of the methodology employed by various search engines to search & rank sites on the web.
Search engines use software known as a crawler or spider, which jumps from one link to another from a specific web page & indexes everything its finds in its way. By indexing, the search engine identifies certain keywords & expressions (also called search strings), which best describes a particular web page. It assigns these search strings under particular keywords in its database. These indexes are stored in huge databases & the activity of crawling & indexing is an on-going process.
When a particular query request comes to search engine, it compares the query expression to its indexed pages in its database. Since there could be millions of web pages that contain the query expression, hence search engines use algorithms to calculate the relevancy (rank) of each indexed web page & accordingly displays them.
Now if you want to improve the rank of your site, you need to be in harmony with the methodology followed by search engines in ranking web pages. Based on the same, I am jotting down the top 10 techniques, which can be employed to improve the ranking of your site.

1. The right Keywords

You need to come up with keywords that describe your site. It is better if the keyword is 2 or 3 lettered words i.e. string of words. These should be available in the content of your site & especially in the first web page. Search engines target keywords to index sites.
2. Appropriate Keyword Density
In addition, you also need to have a right keyword density. That is the webpage should have a right mix of the keywords spread over the other contents. A webpage with good density has a higher chance of being identified by the search engine than one with thin keyword density.

3. Quality Back links

Back links are those links that come from other sites to your site. The more number of back links your site has, the more popularity it commands. You need to work on this & also keep in mind the quality of the back links.  A nice way is to register with popular web directories like DMOZ & yahoo.

4. Use descriptive Meta tags

When designing a wordpress driven and html based websites every page has a space between the head tag to insert relevant information about the contents of that page. Meta tags are primarily used by search engine crawlers. They summarize the information of a page. The writing of Meta keyword tags is another way to provide the description of your site & directing the search engines to the basic theme & relevance of your site.

5. Title Meta data

This is responsible for the title of your page & is displayed at the top of your browser window. It is extremely important & should be relevant to the respective contents of the page. The same should change as the contents of your pages change.

6. Use Text more than images

Search Engines have one problem, which site administrators fail to consider. That is search engines, cannot index images, sounds, flash movies or JavaScript. It is important to have these keeping the end customers in your mind, but we need to be innovative with them. You can add ‘text descriptors’ or text tags to the images & videos on your site. Also avoid using these as links as search engines will not register them.

7. Using Site Maps

There’s a lot to consider here, but the goal is to create a site, which search engine spiders can easily access and crawl, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Site-maps are vital for this purpose.

8. Frequently Updated Content

It is important for you to regularly update the content of your website. Not only do the customers take notice of it but so do search engines regarding the relevancy they allot to a particular site.

9. Social Media

Social bookmarking can be expressed as one of the best techniques of pulling traffic to your website. Every blogger in the blogosphere must include this in their plan to get their website or blog noticed.
Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Pinterest and many more helps a blog to rank higher in SERPs by providing them with quality backlink. These sites along with social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc helps a lot in pulling traffic to the blog concerned.
10. Avoid the following
In addition to the things you should do to improve the ranking of your site, there are also few important don’ts, which you have to bear in mind. These can result in getting your site blocked or banned by search engines. I am writing them down for your reference:
Some Don’ts

  • Don’t use Keywords for the heck of using them or putting them just to get indexed by search engines.
  • Avoid un-related reciprocal link exchange programs
  • Avoid using duplicate content
By following the above-mentioned techniques, slowly & gradually your ranking will improve in the search engines. There are no magic formulas but some good tried & tested techniques.

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