A Free Guide To Advanced Search Engine Optimisation That Will Improve Your Websites Search Engine Rankings in Google and Yahoo!
This Advanced search engine optimisation guide follows on from my first article: "a basic search engine optimisation guide" please read that article first if you have not already done so.
User Testing
You have built your site, it's optimized with your chosen key phrases and you have a well structured, easy to use navigation in place and have a site map with clear text link to every page. Next you have to put it past an actual user who has never seen your website before. This is so that you can get a true objective opinion from an independent person.
Ask them to find a specific piece of information and see how long it takes them to find it. Ask someone else to visit your site and watch which links they click on and ask them why they chose those ones. This can be facinating. Don't be defensive, the feedback that they give you will help you to improve your site for your end users.
Ask your test user if they find your content easy to read and understand. If they don't, ask them why. You will have spent hours developing your content but you really need to try and be objective at this stage in order to make sure your content is just right. Correct any problems that you find and carefully consider any suggestions that your users give you. If in doubt get a few more opinions to base any descisions on.
Search Engine Submissions
I have a different opinion that most people regarding search engine submissions. I submit to directories instead. This is because I have found that submitting to Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major engines has proven to be a bit of a waste of time. The major search engines in the world are spidering search engines. This means they will follow links to wherever they go. Simply having sites that are spidered by the major search engines linking to you will get your website found. In fact there is strong evidence to suggest that sites that are found 'naturally' i.e. by a search engine spider following an incoming link have higher rankings that ones that submitted directly to a search engine.
Try submitting your site to the directories listed at:
http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php
http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/top-web-directories.html
When I have submitted my sites to these well respected directories, I have found they get spidered in as little as two days.
Make the best use of your time, seek out quality directories and other websites to get links from and leave the spiders to find you by themselves - by following links back to your site.
Link Building
All of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links pointing to them. How many is enough depends on your industry and targeted phrases. Running a search on Google the reads "link:www.yourcompetition.com" will reveal approximately how many links a competitor has.
The first place to seek links is with general and topic-specific directories. After that you may want to move into reciprocal link building. Reciprocal link building is the exchange of links between two websites. Some webmasters will simply link to any website that links back to them. I highly recommend being more particular than that.
Find websites that you believe your site visitors would genuinely be interested in and you've probably found a good link partner. You want to find links from sites that are related to yours.
There are obviously many more methods to building links than directories and reciprocal link building. Again though, this is a whole article (or more) in itself.
Monitoring
Whether you use WebPosition Gold or just run searches manually by hand you will have to monitor the major search engines for your targeted phrases. Also, you will need to review your stats to see where your traffic is coming from and what search terms are being used to find you.
If a month passes and you don't see any changes then more work needs to be done. I'm certainly not stating that you should take a month off, a solid search engine positioning strategy involves constantly adding content, building links, and insuring that your visitors are getting the information they want to have and finding it as easily as possible.
Add Fresh Content
If you have followed this guide correctly, you will already have had some success with your search engine rankings but that doesn't mean its time for a rest. Search engine spiders like to read and you can improve your rankings further by adding fresh content to your website that is useful for your users. Also try to set yourself a comfortable weekly number of inbound links and try to achieve this every week. Your websites ranking will grow and grow!
