How to get your website ranked and stand out in a crowd of search engine results

Nobody starts a website with a goal of it not being seen—most people want their website to show up on page one of Google or Yahoo! search engines.  This takes time.  However, we find that a lot of new website owners don’t know how to get started to ensure their website address shows up in search engine results.

You might have heard of the terms SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you might have even seen our blog post on the complete visual guide to SEO. But, do you know of the concrete steps you can do today to get your website to show up higher in search results?

Here are a few things you can start doing now to optimize your site for search engines:

1. Improve Relevancy of Your Content — Information presented on your website should be relevant to the topic around which your website is created. The key to getting higher search ranking is being consistent and relevant in your website copy. The copy you post on your website shoold also include key keywords that are relevant to your business and for which you wish to rank high in search engine resolts. Suppose you are a wedding photographer located in San Diego, California who specializes in outdoor weddings.  You shouldn’t just use a keyword like “photographer”.  You should use relevant keywords like “wedding photographer”, “outdoor wedding photography” or “San Diego wedding photography”. You can also improve your website copy by creating:

1. Keyword Rich Page Titles
2. Including most important keywords in the first paragraph
3. Use keywords in hyperlinks

2. Work on Link-building – Search engines assign value to the number of other websites that are linking to you. Meaning the more relevant website that currently link to your site, the higher your website shows up in search engine results. As a wedding photographer, you might want  to get listed in sites that provide a directory of wedding service providers and trade links with another wedding services provider.  Here are few things you can do to improve your link-building:

1. 5 suggestions to improve your link-building
2. Submit your website to key directories

3. Update File Names — As the popularity of image searches continues to grow, the importance of your file names also start to increase. You might wonder how a picture file you uploaded on your website can impact search results. Think about the following scenario: when people search based on a specific keyword, search engines look at your files names for matches in addition to keywords used to describe images on your website. Thus, instead of using obscure names such image_123456 think about choosing file names that contain keywords relevant to the topic of your website that also describe what is on the image, like “SanDiegoWedding”.