The effort it takes to get your site to rank highly organically is a long and dedicated process. This is not something that can be done in a day or week – it takes a commitment and unless you have the time and resources, a long term engagement with an SEO expert.

This list is a little old but the information on it has not changed over time. So from the Top 5 Search Ranking Factors, let’s do a quick review:

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links -The most important factor that determines how important you are is how important other people think you are. You need people to refer to you as the expert on a subject. In the real world it is called word-of-mouth. In the internet world it is called an inbound link from one site that does the TRUSTING to a second site which is the TRUSTED. But for the link to have real impact it must also say what the TRUSTED site is trusted for. This is called the Anchor Text. So if you want to link to Focus Consulting about Social Media calling the link “Focus Consulting” is OK. But calling the link “Focus Consulting – Social Media Consultant to the Stars in Oklahoma City” is pure gold. When you get a link from another site to your site make sure it references what you want to be found for, not just your company name. Anchor Text is the name of the game.
2. External Link Popularity – This is a numbers game – plain and simple. He who has 1000 links to their site will beat he who has 10 or 100. There is no shortcut to get your numbers up. A lot of hard work over a long period of time. Hint: Ask every past customer to link to you.
3. Diversity of Link Sources – Look at #2. Now back to #2. Now back to me. Make sure those 1000 links inbound to your site comes from as many different places as possible. 1000 links from 200 sites are more valuable than 1000 links from 3 sites (i.e. 333 links coming in from each site). It is OK to get multiple links in from a single site. But try to keep it to less than 10 per site.
4. Keyword use anywhere in the <title> tag – The <title> tag tells the user what the page is about. This is a very simple thing to fix but it is amazing how many projects we take on where even this basic step has not been done. Bonus super secret Focus tip: Make every page on your site have a unique page title. Same goes for the meta information about the web page.
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domain – The search engines trust what the trustworthy trusts. Huh? There are website all over the internet that come and go every minutes – fly-by-night operations. These are not trustworthy websites. They were not here yesterday, they won’t be here tomorrow, and they have very little to contribute to society. And then there are website that have been around for 20 years. They are huge and are very popular. Example: Government (.gov) and education (.edu) websites always fall in this category. When you are working on number 1, 2 and 3 above any link from a trustyworthy site that links directly to you has a very highly value for your website. So try to get as many links as possible from the big dogs.

Forward this to as many friends as possible. These are the basics of SEO that people seems to forget.

If you need help with your Search Engine Optimization then contact us today and let’s see what we can do together.

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