If you want to catch rain, you have to put out buckets. Here are some tips for how to get your website ranking in the search engines.

Make sure that your code is error-free

Run your url through http://validator.w3.org/ to make sure that your code is free of html errors.

Fix broken links

Use Xenu’s Link Sleuth to find broken links to your website. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account

This tool will show you how Google crawls your site and help you identify specific problems that Google encounters while visiting your site. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?pli=1

Also add an xml sitemap (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/) in your Webmaster Tools account to help Google better crawl your website.

Update your page titles

A page title is the line of text that appears at the top of any browser. It is difficult to overstate the importance of page titles. The better your page titles, the better your page rank — so write good, relevant page titles. The page title is often used as the heading of your listing in the organic search results. It is the first thing that searchers see. “Welcome to Sam Conner’s website” is NOT a good page title. “Naples Real Estate Agent – Sam Conner” is a much better page title. People don’t search for “welcome + sam conner;” they search for “naples real estate agent.” Keep your titles under 64 characters, otherwise the title will not display fully. Never use the same page title for all of your web pages. Work relevant keywords into your page titles, but make them reader friendly, else searchers will skip past your listing. Do not keyword stuff; write in plain language. Do not use stop words such as “a” or “the.” Search engines ignore these words, so you are just wasting valuable space. Instead, use separators such as “-” or “|”

Keyword research

Use the Yahoo keyword tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ to identify keywords to use in your page titles and page headers. This search tool only represents 1/3 of searches, and the data is old (January 2007) because Yahoo no longer supports the tool. However, the results provide a good gauge of monthly search activity. The tool does not always work well because it is most often overloaded with usage. Keep trying, though. It does come up sometimes.

Old domain names

If you have an established domain name, don’t change it. Search engines give more weight to older domain names. To Google, old is good.

Content is KING

Search engine spiders love text. Stay away from fancy stuff like Flash unless it is absolutely necessary. Write lots of text content and post many pages to your site so that you have “landing pages” where visitors can find you. Landing pages also provide pages that you can optimize using your keyword research to write good page titles.

No JavaScript

Stay away from JavaScript as it causes trouble for spiders.

Do not buy links

Never buy links. Sites with bought links may be penalized. Links associated with paid advertising are fine; those meant to manipulate search results could get you banned from Google.

No dirty tricks

Never use tricks like hidden text or duplicate content on multiple domain names.

Use hyphens in your page extensions

Separate file names with hyphens rather than underscores. Google views www.mysite.com/real-estate.html as real estate (good), but www.mysite.com/realestate.html as realestate (not good).

Link building

Search engine optimization revolves around link building. Creating incoming links to your site will help your search rankings. Develop good, external links to your site by blogging or submitting articles to sites like http://www.ezinearticles.com. A website that exists as an island (no one links to it) will not do well in the search engine rankings. If you write an article with your url at the bottom (in the resource box if you go with ezinearticles.com), that provides an incoming link to your site. Establish a blog on a site like http://activerain.com/. Put a hyperlink at the bottom of each post — some to your home page and some to internal pages. Google thinks of links as “votes” for your site, so the more links directed to your site the better. Check the incoming links to your site using http://www.backlinkwatch.com/. You can also check your competitors’ external links.

Check the competition

Use http://www.nichewatch.com/ to see which of your competitors rank for your niche keywords.

Deep linking

Whether from directory listings, blog posts, articles or wherever your links come from, make sure that you utilize deep linking. A deep link is a link to a page on your site other than your homepage. If all of your links point to your home page, it looks as though your site has little value as anything more than a virtual business card. It can also make your links look as though they have been automated. Post a blog or write an article and place a deep link at the bottom so that the reader can obtain more information from your website.

Link text

Mix up your link text. You do not want all of your link text to be your web site address. Use your company name, your url, or a descriptive title as the link text.

Bold or highlight

Highlight or bold a couple of keywords near the top of each page.

Submit to directories

Submit to http://www.dmoz.org/. A listing in DMOZ is golden. It can take 1-6 months or even longer to get listed, but if you get listed it will boost your search engine rankings. DMOZ is free, but be careful to follow their submission guidelines to the letter. Google continually spiders DMOZ, so your pages are almost guaranteed to remain in Google’s index if your site is listed in DMOZ. Being in DMOZ will help your Google rankings as well as smaller search engine rankings because most of the smaller players pull from the DMOZ database.

Another good way to get directory links is to use www.best-web-directories.com. They will submit your site to directories. They have a weekly submission service, but you must do an initial purchase before you can apply for the weekly submission service. The weekly service is a good deal because you can build directory listings slowly (13 per week) so that it doesn’t look out of the ordinary to Google.

Page headers

A page header is the line of text at the top of each page usually written in large, bold font. Use keywords in your page headers as well as the text on that page, but make sure to make the headers reader friendly.

Add content to your site

Add new content regularly. Google likes to see a website that is “fresh,” indicating that the site is active.

Use real text, not images

Use text instead of images. “Chicago Mortgage Broker Deb Milner” in fancy type embedded into your home page as an image cannot be crawled by the spiders. Always use text.

Optimization training

There is some excellent SEO training at www.lynda.com. It costs $25 per month to be a member, but you can cancel after the training. It’s time well-invested.

Last thoughts

Be careful to pay for optimization training. A lot of SEOs use “black hat” techniques to get your site ranked high in the search engines, but their sketchy tactics could get you penalized or even banned from Google. If you want to pay for SEO, consider using www.websearchengineer.com, the website of Richard John Jenkins. He is a “white hat” SEO who does good work.

I have a list of 7,500 mortgage keywords. If anyone wants it, email me. You can do an edit/find to sift out the keywords relevant to your local area. Then you can run those keywords through the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) to see which keywords to build your pages titles and content around.

If you want to hire someone to help you make these changes or fix your code, I recommend http://www.katasidy.com/. They do a great job at a reasonable price. You would be surprised at how much you can get done for a very small investment.

Posted by: Wade Young| Denver, CO