How To Rank In Search Engines And Keep Your Rankings

If you have a business, the online marketplace is crucial to your success and failure. While there are a lot of ways you can tap the online marketplace, search engines are something you cannot ignore. Simply put, if nobody can find you, how are you going to get new business? That’s where the role of search engine optimization comes in.

However, SEO isn’t a one-off thing, where if you start ranking for a particular keyword, you would be ranking there for all your life. Search engines keep updating page ranks of websites every 2-3 months. Thus, for your website to rank consistently in the top results, consistent SEO efforts are what is required.

Here are some tips for better SEO and keeping your rankings too.

Build a domain authority- Google places a lot of importance on the quotient of trust when it comes to ranking websites. If you are a name people can trust upon in your field, you will automatically be popular with the search engines as well. To build authority in your domain, content is the key. Giving out quality information that people can learn from goes a long way in improving your page rankings on Google, Yahoo etc. But doing that only once a week won’t help. In order to consistently rank in search engines, you have to come up with good content regularly. A frequency of a blog post every alternate day is a good strategy to begin with.

Link building cannot be ignored- The Penguin release by Google recently came down heavily on sites which had tones of backlinks from low quality sites. In effect, Google is fighting spam in its results and improving the knowledge it is giving to the users. Thus, quality backlinking is important for higher page ranking. And to keep those rankings, consistently building backlinks to your site is crucial. Remember, one link from a trustworthy website such as Yahoo is going to bring you much more benefit than hundreds of backlinks from low quality content farms out there. In fact, if you have too many low quality backlinks, you may get penalized. That’s what has happened to plenty of websites after the Google Penguin update.

The design of your website plays a role too- Believe it or not, your website design plays a crucial role in search engine ranking of your website. Easy to navigate and fast loading websites definitely rank higher than their slower counterparts. Thus, while getting your website designed, make sure you keep in mind the SEO part of it in mind as well.

Don’t ignore Google Places- According to search statistics, one-third searches on Google are people looking for something local. While stats may differ from time to time, the point is- localized search engine ranking is important. And for that to happen, you have to optimize your listing in Google Places. There are a lot of ways of doing that, such as giving out accurate information, using the most relevant categories etc. Optimizing Google Places is an important part of search engine optimization.

You can’t ignore social media optimization too- If you are looking for higher search engine rankings consistently, don’t make the mistake of seeing social media optimization as separate from search engine optimization. Different search engines index the data from social media sites differently, but the point is, your social media presence matters. According to Google, the number of ‘retweets’ and ‘followers’ count for a profile is directly taken into account for its organic and news results.

Abhishek Khandelwal is an MBA in International Business. He has more than 6 years of SEO consulting experience and he also works as a content writer with Content Writing Jaipur. Please click here to reach him on Linkedin.