Making it to Page 1 - How to Increase Your SE Ranking

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process. The technology changes all the time, so there is no one-time quick fix; to optimize your SEO takes time and continuous management. This article will explain ten ways that will help you to boost your SEO.

1. First and foremost, page content is the most important factor in SEO. While Google is not the only Search Engine around, Google is responsible for generating almost half of all Web searches. They have a proprietary algorithm designed to determine the importance of a page for a particular search term.

2. There are a number of areas in the HTML of a Web page that the algorithm pays attention to: meta tags, title tag, description tag, keywords tag, comment tag, heading tags, formatting tag, and the alt image tag. All of these are invisible to the end user, but very visible to Google and other major search engines.

3. As well, the page’s copy (the text that is visible to the user) plays a huge role in your SE ranking. It not only has to be solid marketing copy, but also search-optimized copy. Unlike many other search engines, Google prefers to look at the text on the page.

4. The days of having Flashy, heavily designed sites are over. As the Web 2.0 trend continues, it has become clear that it’s less about flash and more about simplicity. The trend now is to develop index-friendly pages without a lot of Flash, graphics, JavaScript, etc.

5. Another important factor is your site's navigation and information architecture. It's really crucial that your navigation uses HTML text and not graphics (ideally search terms) which point to other content related to that search term.

In our next blog, we will discuss tips 6-10.