5 Tips to improve your search engine ranking

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to the process of optimising a website to be search engine friendly. Small and large businesses are catching onto the fact that their website can hugely benefit from SEO and ranking well on the search engines

In this article ill list the top 5 beginners SEO tips you can implement very easily and will help improve your website rankings.

1. Page Title Optimisation Your page title is the text description that search engines use in the results and your web browser displays in the top of your window. The page title is very important in SEO and is one of the main factors in helping your web page rank. Your title should be an accurate description of what content is displayed on the page and should only focus on 2 or 3 main topics or key phrases.

The tag is contained in the section of an .html page. It is a stand-alone element and not really a meta tag, but it is the most important step you need to take in optimising your website, whether it's a blog or static Web page.

This tag is what Google and the other search engines index in their results to link to your website. It is the "first impression" and your only chance to make the Google user click on the result pointing to your website. This is a mirror of the quality you offer on your website.

Your page title should use keywords used in your content heading and paragraph tags. If your web page has content related to "Sydney SEO" or "SEO Central Coast" your heading and paragraph tags should also include the keywords "Sydney SEO" and "SEO Central Coast".

2. Descriptive Link Anchor Text Every website uses text links in some form or another. Google and other search engines read these links in relation to the rest of your web page content and rate them based on how relevant they are. The name given to the text used in a link is "anchor text". A big mistake people make when linking their pages together is they use anchor text like "click here" or "read more". It is much better you use descriptive keywords in your link anchor text that are related to you on page copy and the page the link points to. For example if I was linking to a page with content about Sydney SEO and Central Coast SEO I would not say "Click here for more information" or "Read more", I would say "Click here for more information on Sydney SEO" or "Read more on Central Coast SEO".

3. Have Lots, & Lots of Content Content is probably the most important factor of SEO. Basically if you have the content your website will rank irrespective of your page titles or anchor text links. The more content you can get that is related to your websites topic the better. Google and other search engines love big websites and the more content you have, the more pages the Search Engines can see and therefore the bigger you website is.

4. Source Incoming Links Another good beginners SEO tip is, find external incoming links to your websites. One of the other ways Google and other search engine rank websites is by scanning how many other websites are linking to yours and if those websites have what us search engine optimisers call "Authority". Authority websites can be other websites that rank very well with a high page rank, government websites or educational websites. The more incoming links you get from external websites and especially authority websites the higher search engines will rank you. Part of the skill in SEO is sourcing and securing authority backlinks.

5. Name Your Page File Names There's lots of scope for SEO around your page names. Google guidelines suggest that you build a brand, but nevertheless keyword rich filenames do well in search... if the SEO is done right. They should be based around the top level keywords for that page, there's no reason to give pages or files random names. If a page is based around keyword content, then the filename should contain those keywords. Using my same examples as before, if my page has content about "Sydney SEO" or "Central Coast SEO" I would probably name my page Sydney-central-coast-seo.html or something along those lines. You will notice I used dashes (-) instead of and underscore (_) to separate the words. Google reads both as a word separater but dashes are more widely used.