Every webmaster and business owner wants to see their site at the top of the search engines. For this reason one of the most commonly asked questions we get is “how do I improve pagerank for my website?”.  Here are the five basic principles we preach for improving pagerank, search engine rankings, and organic traffic.

1. Understand the basics of pagerank

Pagerank is the easiest search engine optimization metric to check so naturally it gets a lot of attention. My honest advice is to ignore pagerank and focus instead on doing the simple steps I’m outlining here. If you do this not only will you improve your pagerank, but you will save yourself a lot of stress.

You see a lot of people letting their pagerank become the focus of their search engine optimization campaign. What most of them fail to realize is that pagerank is a measurement of over 500 million different variables. Hyper-focusing on even a dozen of these variables will never result in long term success. What will create long term success is focusing on building a solid website foundation, providing compelling content, and promoting your website on social networks.

2. Start with solid on-page SEO

Much like building a house, building a website for long term search engine traffic requires a solid foundation.  This foundation is the code and organization that search engines read when indexing your website. We consider a site with solid on-page SEO to be one where visitors and search engines can easily find and understand every page and how it relates to the rest of the website. Here are some easy changes that you can do without having to hire us to redesign your site.

1. Fix your site navigation. This will help your customers find their way around your site and not get lost.
2. Link related content. Linking between related pages on your website helps to establish that relationship and will increase the authority of both pages.
3. Use titles for headings and sub-headings. Some search engines still give greater weight to headings but regardless using headings helps to establish the hierarchy for the page and is good usability practice.
4. Write accurate title tags and descriptions. Title tags and descriptions are used by most search engines when they display results. For this reason it is more important to write an accurate description than it is to fill it with keywords.

3. Create compelling content

Once you set out to increase traffic and improve pagerank it is very important to spend the time needed on creating compelling content. This is because no matter how many visitors you can wrangle up with a good search engine ranking and social media; once they arrive they will be looking for your content. If you content sucks those visitors will only stay as long as it takes to find their back button. If your content rocks you can turn those visitors into customers who come back time and again to read your stuff. Here are some basic tips that I use when creating content.

1. Write in a clear and easy to understand manner. Your visitors will appreciate not having to break out the dictionary.
2. Understand your audience and write content that they will find timely and useful. Try to write content that either answers a question they have or solves a problem.
3. Subscribe and/or bookmark Copyblogger.com it’s a resource that I can’t recommend enough. Read everything they have ever written and you will be miles closer to your goal.

4. Social networking and Social bookmarking

Alright! You have a well coded website full of helpful and timely resources targeted at your audience. Now it’s time to get eyeballs on your content and start developing relationships with the people who will be soon paying your bills. That is where social networking comes in. Social networking lets you connect with your customers, brings in thousands of visitors to your content, and provides your site with the inbound links we will be chasing in step 5.

There are hundreds of social networking websites with more popping up every day. No matter your industry there are bound to be sites where customers who are passionate about what you do hang out. You will want to find those places and start contributing to the discussion there. It is important that you contribute and become a valuable resource before you start pushing your service otherwise you will be shunned as a spammer.

Regardless of your industry I would highly recommend getting a Facebook page and a twitter account. Even if you don’t start using them right away this will reserve the name and prevent anyone from stealing it from under you. You will also want to join a couple traffic generating social networks to bring in the visitors.  Which ones to join depends on the type of content you produce. Here is a good resource for determining which sites are the best fits for your website. You will want to pick a couple that you think give you a chance to really connect with your audience.

5. Build inbound links

Inbound links are one of the main factors for both increasing search engine results and increasing pagerank.  Google especially uses inbound links as a major indicator of the quality of a web page. This includes links from other pages on a web site but links from other websites are given a greater rank. Not all inbound links are equal though so while every link has value links from websites with high PR are especially valuable. Here are a few simple tips to getting high quality inbound links that will really push your traffic and pagerank.

1. Do steps 3 and 4 over and over and over again. If you can create content that people want to read and promote that content on the social networks you can bring in thousands of high quality, highly relevant inbound links with little effort.
2. Syndicate your content at article and eZine websites such as EzineArticles. These articles find themselves spread over the internet quickly and each one contains a link to your website.
3. Submit your website to as many directories as possible but focus on getting into the big ones for your industry. Especially try to get your site listed on DMOZ as it still carries a lot of weight with search engines. The key is only submit to directories that are free and that don’t require you to link back.
4. Don’t forget local search and websites. If you run a brick and mortar business get a local listing in the search engines.

In Closing

Developing a website for long term search engine traffic may seem like a lot of work at first but it really isn’t. What stops most people from achieving success in the search engines is a lack of dedication. Instead of putting in the time to build up their site they either give up too soon or waste all their energy trying to game the system. I promise that if you stick with these 5 basic principles you will not only develop a site that gets search engine results, but you will build real long term relationships with your customers and keep them coming back time and again.

This was a big topic to try and tackle in one post so there was a lot left uncovered or glossed over so please feel free to post any questions in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them.