Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

7 Steps to Great Rankings on Google

Newport SEO

Truth be known: there is no magic involved in positioning your business at the top of major Search Engine Result Pages. The internet itself is an engine, and Newport SEO is skilled at tooling web sites to receive maximum exposure on Google. Here are a few of the most simple solutions we use on a daily basis to fine tune our customers’ web pages and make certain they are at the summit of every search.

#1 Register your company with Google Local

The fastest, no cost way to rise up the ranks of search results is to register your business on Google Local. Google prides itself in “text-only” results but by taking this simple measure your local listing will likely find its way to the top of the page, and will include a map of your location when a city, state and your company’s name are inputted into a search engine. For example: Sushi in La Jolla, CA or Plumbers in Buffalo, NY

#2 Acquire Quality Industry-Related Links

Google measures your site’s authority by the number of inbound links pointing to your site. Think of links as “votes” from other sites. However, the sheer number of links is not nearly as important as the quality of the sites linking or voting for your site. For instance, one link from the homepage of a very authoritative site, such as NationalGeographic.com is worth more than hundreds of links from cheap directory sites.

#3 Funnel Your Link Juice

Internal link architecture is almost as important as inbound links. Ever wonder why Wikipedia pages come up as number one for so many Google searches? It’s because their internal linking is structured in such a way that their link juice trickles from their homepage into their sub-pages. This causes the sub-pages to be displayed in the search engine results pages for terms that are related to the content on that page. It is important, especially for small businesses that haven’t developed a high Google ranking, to make sure that non-crucial links, such as contact pages and site maps are nofollow links, so as not to dilute your juice.

#4 Create a sitemap

A sitemap helps Google quickly and easily find all of the pages on your site. It also allows you to specify which pages Google should show and which ones it shouldn’t.

There is a reason why news sites get articles listed on search engines within minutes and it may take months for some sites to even show up. This is because News sites use a sitemap to time-stamp articles, which tells Google to come take a look frequently. You can generate a free sitemap at www.xml-sitemaps.com.

#5 Prune Your Titles and Descriptions

Titles and descriptions are the part of your site displayed in the Search Engine Results Page, which is what your customers will see when they are searching for your services. Your title and description should appropriately explain how your site is relevant to them. If your page descriptions are not unique on every page, change them up or delete them. If you don’t, Google will create its own description based on the content on your page. Remember, keep your titles and descriptions succinct. Google only allows 155 characters to show up, so it’s a waste to use more.

#6 Page Titles and Article Names Should Contain Keywords

Instead of using a title tag to hold your company name, enter some keywords which are relevant to the page’s content. Again, short and sweet will take you farther than a lengthy title. In this section only 66 characters will be displayed.

#7 Make a Video

Multimedia has been around almost as long as websites have, but until recently videos have offered very little in regards to Search Engine Optimization. With the advent of new media venues such as YouTube, Google started adding thumbnails of videos to certain search results. It’s not only a great way to say hello to your website’s visitors, it can attract a huge amount of traffic that converts into real dollars.

These are the fundamentals of Newport SEO’s success. These simple tips will get you headed in the right direction so that your potential clients can locate you before they find someone else providing similar products or services. Unfortunately, we cannot list all of our methods because it would take a book, but we hope you appreciate these smart changes we’ve offered to broaden your web presence.

Newport SEO offers an elite service to select clients focused on delivering high quality website traffic from the major search engines.

Posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Branding, Computers, Design, Graphic Design, Internet, Marketing, Small Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.