As I’m sure many people have found either when working on a clients site or analysing your own competition the fact that Google along with the other search engines have their “favourites“. There are a small amount of sites in every niche where no matter what content they publish they always seem to rank well regardless of the content not being optimised or having any inbound links.
In comparison, you on the other hand might have been working extremely hard to rank for that content, through numerous optimisation techniques including gaining quality inbound links yet still have very little to show for it. What people aren’t aware of is that these high ranking sites have managed to reach a high trust level within the search engines which allows their content to rank highly.
A lot of time and patience is needed to build trust within the search engines but here are 25 essential SEO tips that will help:-
- Ensure your whois record is up to date and make sure there’s a visible record of the domain owner including name, address, phone number and email address.
- There is a lot of debate surrounding this subject but it seems to be the case that better results can be achieved with top level domains so it’s well worth considering using a .com, .org, or .net etc domain.
- The age of the domain name is very important to Google therefore if starting a new online business you should definitely consider purchasing an existing domain name as opposed to registering a brand new one.
- If your domain contains more than 2 words it’s best to try and avoid the use of hyphens in the URL as this can sometimes look spammy, for example www.RedCarCentre.net is far better than www.Red-Car-Centre.net.
- Google assumes that when starting an online business you’re in it for the long run so when buying a new domain or renewing its generally better to opt for a longer registration period of at least 2 years before its due for renewal.
- Used a clean fixed IP address and try to stick with it for the long run.
- Verify your site with Google Webmaster central , this will aid you to learn of negative issues your site may have which could effect the amount of trust your site will be able to obtain.
- Clearly display your contact details including address and phone number on your site.
- If needed clearly display links to your terms and conditions and privacy policy on your site and update site maps if necessary.
- Don’t go over the top with your sites optimisation as this flags up spam filters and is sometimes misinterpereted with the use of automated software which wont bide well within the search engines.
- Avoid creating too many cross links on other sites you own as again this can flag up spam filters within the search engines.
- Keep your sites content up to date, making sure you update regularly. This will show the search engines you are actively trying to provide useful information on a regular basis.
- Don’t use doorway pages that transfer you across to another website as becomes a big frustration to both visitors and the search engines.
- Try to obtain your inbound links organically. People are becoming more and more reliant on the use of automated link buying/selling software which has lead to the search engines having a big cramp down on this type of strategy.
- Your backlinks anchor text should be varied and not always under that one term that you really want to rank well, by using a variation of anchor text it will help the search engines to see your links have been naturally created.
- Sites that link to your own ideally should contain as little other out going links as possible.
- Try to maintain your pages below 100K as this will make them more easily crawlable.
- Use an XML site map generator to create your site map and make sure you update it whenever you add or remove pages.
- Review your robot.txt file to make sure you’re not blocking certain parts of your website from being crawled and indexed.
- Build on your content to make the information you supply interesting and useful as this will make more people want to naturally link to your site from their own.
- You should work towards decreasing your sites bounce rate as a higher bounce rate is sometimes that your site isn’t supplying relevant content.
- An inbound link from the three major human edited directories dmoz , Yahoo Directory and Best of The Web helps.
- Try to limit the amount of dofollow links to on your site to around 100.
- If using a new domain only link to trusted sites within your sector for the initial 6 months.
- Keep your content unique, the search engines can see when duplicate content has been used and this will hinder your sites performance within the search engines.
Now you know the basics start building your sites trust today…
