Simply by writing quality meta data and homepage text, I took a web design company from no rank to rank #3 in under a week for their main keyword (Davis Web Design). That shows the power of keywords when a site is built completely in Flash or images.
Let’s start with internal links, these are links within your post to your own stories and other websites. People usually do a great job of linking to other people’s websites as references, why not our own? For each post, try to add a couple links to another one of your posts. For example, you may hyperlink a word in your first paragraph to a separate post you did on that topic. This not only keeps users reading your blogs/sites, but builds search authority.
The best link to your blog post is from an external site. Although it is not easy to request that another site link to you, it is easy to comment on someone else’s article or blog post and include a reference or link back to your post. For example I can search http://technorati.com or http://blogsearch.google.com for something and find other bloggers talking about that subject. By commenting on other blogs with a link to yours, you add value to their blog while attracting new readers and building search authority.
If possible, you want the hyperlink of your post to be strong keywords and not just a long URL. For example “Check out my similar article on How Google Works” is better for search engines and web users than “Check out my similar article at http://www.zachpresnall.com/2/post/2009/03/how-google-works.html”. You can use simple html code to create this link: “Check out my similar article on <a href=”http://www.yourpost.com”>your topic</a>.
The easiest way to get links to your posts is to add them to social bookmarking sites. I recommend creating accounts with digg.com, delicious.com, stumbleupon.com, slashdot.org, and technorati.com and submitting every one of your posts to them. The fastest way I have found to submit to all these sites at once is to use socialmarker.com. So in less than 5 minutes, you can establish 5 links to your site.
It is obvious that the higher Google rank you can achieve, the more traffic you will receive. And I mention Google because due to its huge market share it is really the only search engine to optimize for. The non-sponsored results down the middle of Google get 75% of the total clicks, and the sponsored results along the right (and sometimes top) of Google get 25% of the total clicks. Here is just how important the regular, non-sponsored rankings are:
So how does Google figure out what website to rank as number 1 or number 2? If you understand how Google works, you will understand the rest of these tips easily and naturally.
Google finds the best match for a search query by looking for words on sites that use the same words that the user typed into Google search. It looks for these words in a number of places on a blog post. We’ll cover all of these again later, but they are known as on-page factors that influence search engines:
So a user searches for the phrase “Sacramento real estate” By using those same words on your page in the above locations, you’re telling Google “my post is about the same thing – the search user is looking for my website!” The above on-page factors account for about 25% of Google’s matching process.
You can rather easily craft your content to tell Google that your post matches what the user is looking for, but Google will believe you more if you have references (other websites) that also indicate a proper match. Therefore the majority of Google’s process looks at the links coming into your page from other websites. It concludes that if other websites found your page valuable enough to link to it, then it must be valuable for Google users as well. These are called off-page factors, and Google looks at:
Here is a great tool called website grader that allows you to grade your website on a number of factors. You can even enter competing websites to see how you compare to them. The best takeaway from this report is the number of inbound links, the number of other websites that point to yours. This is valuable because Google will give you a higher website rank just for having links from others.
Check it out and let me know if you need help interpreting your results.
HubSpot Website Grader for SEO
Here is why free search engine traffic achieved through search engine optimization is so much better than paid search called search engine marketing. The obvious reason (besides the expense) is that when you stop paying for the sponsored links, the traffic stops visiting your site. A residual payoff is to rank high in the middle section of search engines with the free results because you can stay positioned there for a long time, meaning optimize once and traffic keeps on coming.
The second reason is that free search gets 250% more traffic than paid search, according to Online Marketing Research. That means a number 1 paid rank is equivalent to a 9 or 10th place free rank. This eye tracking study shows where users look (the red portion) and click (the red Xs).
Google Eye Tracking Study