Improving your search engine ranking
Once you have designed and built your website to rank well with the Search engines, what else can you do to improve your SEO ranking?
The more links there are coming into your site, the higher you get ranked" explains Dianne Volek, CEO of Intercomm South Africa and creator of the InterCommerce Small Business Portal. "But how do you get those incoming links? It’s actually not that hard."
Online Directories
Listing your website in key online directories is important. Two of the most important ones in South Africa are Ananzi and Aardvark. In both directories new listings are proofed by a real person to rule out spam sites so they both are considered very authoritative by search engine.
Directories in niche fields are also critical. InterCommerce allows you to list your own website - register for a username and password and then suggest a website. Do a google search for directories in your field, and then submit your site where its appropriate.
Publish authoritative articles online
High quality articles and informative press releases on your website are the first step to being noticed by Google (90% of all searches done, are via Google!)
Submitting high quality, original articles using your important keywords to the main article directories really helps your search engine optimisation. At the bottom of each article you have an opportunity to include some information about you and your website address.
How does this help? Whenever someone uses your article on their website, they include the live link to your site. Assuming they used your article because it matches the subject of their site, these incoming links can really increase your ranking.
Dianne suggests that every company with a new website should write 10 unique articles of 250 to 300 words and post them to the article directories over the course of a couple of months.
Where do you submit articles? If you do nothing else, submit your business articles to www.intercommerce.co.za! Register for a username and passowrd, as well as a Platinum level account and you will be able to submit articles for approval direct to our site. Articles MSUT be relevant to small businesses, and you will need to be a South African business to become a member.
A good article website for internaitonal companies is ezinearticles.com. If you have the time, you should also submit to goarticles.co.za. On the other hand, I found Newsline.co.za is weak and offers poor formatting - your article will appear less than professional.
Reciprocal Link Building
Reciprocal links can be sensitive, but done correctly they can have a positive effect. Unfortunately links have been abused by companies who hire SEO "specialists" - the links are arbitrary and irrelevant. Google is much smarter than that!
You don’t want to trade links with just anyone. You must only link with people who are in your niche. If incoming and outgoing links are from sites on a related topic, the search engines see this as more authoritative. So if you are selling computers on your site, you would want to link with someone who sells computer software, not someone who sells cosmetics.
An even better way to exchange links is to trade articles. Write an original article for the other person’s site and include a link to your own site. This is more powerful than being part of a list of links because search engines look at the total number of links on a page when calculating their worth. So a single link from a blog post is more valuable than a link on a page of fifty other links.
Remember you are not only creating a website for search engines - you want readers also! Good, relevant links are better from a reader point of view too.
Internal Links
Creating links within your site is also important. When you write an article, create links back to other related articles you’ve previously written. This makes it easier for the search engine spiders to crawl your site. It also makes it easier for readers to locate related content which may make them spend more time on your site.
Clearly building incoming links and therefore improving your search engine ranking is not all that hard or mysterious. It just takes a little planning and some time.
Read the FAQs on how to use this InterCommerce Business Portal to build your small business!
Search Engine Strategies
One of the most common misconceptions in web site development,
is that once a site is built and submitted to the search engines,
heavy traffic is on its way.
Another is that when making a submission to each engine, a site
will be registered immediately and will stay listed with that engine
for as long as it is in operation.
That's just not how it works… not even close!
Search engine optimization - the effective utilization of search
engines to draw traffic to a web site - is something of an art.
It is an ongoing, continuously evolving, high maintenance process
that includes the customization of a site for better search engine
ranking.
