6 Advanced Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Google is the most popular website on the Internet. So, whether you have an offline or online business, it’s crucial that your company be found at the top of the search results. If it isn’t, you’ll be losing a lot of potential revenue.

If you don’t know how to rank your website at the top of search engines, I recommend that you read the Beginner’s Guide to SEO before reading this blog post. But if you are familiar with SEO, here are seven advance strategies to increase your rankings.

1: DON’T BE AFRAID TO SLOW DOWN

Over the past year, I have been noticing a trend: if you build links too quickly to your website, it won’t rank well. But if you only create a handful of rich anchor text links each month, your rankings will start shooting up.

So, my strategy with building links, even for the most competitive terms, is to only make five to ten rich anchor text links. And out of those links, two to four may contain the anchor text I am trying to rank for, while the others will include variations of the term.

In addition to that, I usually slow down or stop building links for my significant terms after five or six months as I noticed that my rankings start to go up naturally over time if I don’t continue to keep building rich anchor text links.

The key with link building is to be patient as it looks unnatural if your link count grows at a rapid pace. It doesn’t matter if your competitors have a hundred or a million links coming to their websites; you need to build slowly.

2: GET SOCIAL

There are two main aspects of social media. The first is your profiles on these social sites, and the second is how often you can get your website mentioned on the web.

Search engines like Google are starting to take into account votes from social sites. Currently, in Google’s Webmaster Tools you can see how many people voted +1 for your website and how it’s affecting your traffic.

So, if you want to do well on the social web you need to:

Build up your profiles – create compelling profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. The three articles I linked to should be able to teach you how to build compelling social accounts.

Promote your site – whether it’s blog content, a product you are selling or service you offer, add social media buttons to your website. Encourage your users to click on them as it will affect your search engine traffic in the long run.

3: DIVERSIFY YOUR LINKS

There are a lot of different types of links you can get such as blog roll links, homepage links, links from blog posts, directory links, educational links, footer links, etc. SEOs tend to build only one, instead of each, of these types of connections.

If you want to rank high, you can’t just focus on one type of link building method such as directory links. Instead, you need to get links to your site from blogs, directories, and sometimes from the homepages of other websites. Just make sure whatever relationships you are building are also relevant as those links tend to have the most significant impact.

For example, with Quick Sprout, I have a variety of sites linking to me. Here is an example of a news site link, a sidebar link from a popular blog, a link within a blog post, and a link from an educational website, all linking to my site. The diversification of relationships coming into the site is what partly accounts for over 50% of my monthly traffic from Google.

CONTENT ISN’T KING, UNLESS IT’S GOOD CONTENT

I’ve tried the approach of adding hundreds of pages of unique content in hopes that it would increase the number of pages on my blog. One of the ways I did this was through a questions and answers community.

The overall idea is good as it has worked for many companies like Yahoo. But the mistake I made was that I didn’t moderate the community very well, and I didn’t keep the content engaging.

Had I added great content through the questions and answers community, my traffic would have gone up. At first, I did see it go up, but once I started slacking on the content, it started going down. (The fault here doesn’t lay with the questions and answers community. It rests with me as I it was my responsibility to make it work.)

Adding more content to your website is an excellent idea if you want more search engine love. But you have to add useful content, instead of just flooding your site with mediocre information, so that those pages get more natural links.

5: BUY LINKS ETHICALLY

I know what you are going to say. Buying links are frowned upon. And, yes, you are right – you don’t want to hit up a website and ask it if it will sell you a link.

But what you can do is spend money on content and then give that content away for free. The best example of this is infographics as you can create good ones for $500 and email favorite bloggers to see if they want exclusive rights to them as long as they link back.

Popular blogs like Guy Kawasaki and Mashable seem to be willing to post infographics created by other companies. If you happen to get a link from one of these sites, you’ll be getting a very authoritative link.

When using this strategy, you have to understand that you can’t just create crap content and expect others to pick it up. If you create useful information and email favorite bloggers, there is an excellent chance that you can get a link from a blog with high PageRank for $500.

6: GOOGLE CAN SHOW YOU THE WAY

My favorite way to build links is to leverage Google. For example, if I am looking to build relationships with my Las Vegas website, I would search for websites that talk about “Las Vegas” and have a links page.

Here is the search command I would use: in the title:” las vegas” in URL:” links.”

I would then go through the listings above and send a custom email to each of the site owners to see if they would be interested in linking to my website.

I know this sounds like a tedious task, but I can get roughly 10-15% of the websites I email to link back to my website. Also, I can typically hire a college student for ten dollars an hour and have him, or she sends out at least one hundred emails in eight hours.

That means I pay about $6.67 -$10.00 a link, which is a great deal.

CONCLUSION

SEO isn’t rocket science! You can rank your business for any term as long as you are willing to get creative. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. More importantly, be patient as it can take months, if not years before you start ranking for competitive terms.

Also, make sure you try to rank high up on page 1 as ranking on page 2 for popular terms won’t drive you much traffic. In other words, you’d have a better rank in the top three spots on page 1, or you need to start going after different terms.