15 Tips to Increase Your Page Rank and Website Traffic

There are some basic principles to which you need to adhere in order increase traffic to your site and improve your search engine ranking.

• You must create a site which has lots of valuable content, products or services. You can get all the content you need from article sites, such as this one, or www.article-news.org, which have RSS feeds to fill your site with ever changing content.

• You should place all your primary and secondary keywords or keyword phrases in the first 25 words on your page and then repeat them evenly throughout your content. Use bolding, but not so much that it distracts the reader.

• Research your keywords and phrases in order to attract your target customers. Use tools like Overture and Wordtracker. Find a keyword phrase which has some searches, but not much competition, preferably below 1000 competing websites. You won’t get this phrase by being to generic, for instance something like “weight loss” will have millions of searches, but also millions of competitors – you’ll never make it with a phrase like that. Instead, think of very specific phrases that people will look for, like “how to lose weight in ten easy steps”. I haven’t looked up that particular phrase to see the results, but you get the idea.

• Use your keywords in the right fields and references on your page. Here I’m talking about the title, META tags, headers, etc. Also put some keywords in the top left corner of your page, as this is where the search engines start to read web pages, top left and down the column, then to the top of the second column etc.

• Design your site to be as simple as possible. Don’t try to cram as much information as possible on it, otherwise your visitors will be confronted by a mass of words, and soon click off your page and on to another one. Unfortunately, most visitors have the attention span of a gnat (myself included), and if they can’t find anything interesting within the first two seconds, they will go elsewhere.

• Ensure your customers can easily find what they are looking for. Have a brief site map in your left hand column. Make it especially easy for them to navigate to your sales page.

• Submit your web pages (not just the home page), to the most popular search engines and directories. This can be a laborious task, as it needs to be done manually, to be effective. However, if your site only has a dozen or less pages it shouldn’t take too long, and it is a one time only task. Don’t use an automated submission program.

• Keep up to date with any changes in search engine algorithms and processes and modify your web pages to comply, to keep your search engine ranking high. Keep putting your keywords into Google to see if your ranking has slipped.

• Use page spy tools to check up on your competitors and other top ranked websites to see how they got their high position in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.

• Find out from your web hosting company where your traffic is coming from. Analyze the incoming sources, Are they coming from search engines or links from other sites? What keywords did they use to find you?

• Give your visitors plenty of ways to remember your site. Use newsletters, free reports, ezines etc.

• Write and submit articles like this one to article directories. Make sure both a link to your page (not necessarily your home page) and your keyword phrase are included in your bio box.

• Use popular payment and shipment methods. For payment, Paypal seems to be the universally accepted method, ad people do not like giving out their credit card details to people they don’t know.

• Be professional, if you don’t quite know what you are doing hire people who do. It might seem expensive, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on an amateurish website which people can spot a mile away.

• Don’t just create your website and leave it. It has to have ever changing content to keep the search engines interested. If you can’t do it manually, at least get an RSS feed to do it for you.

© Peter Phillips 2007