March 10, 2012 (Powerhomebiz.com) Not a day goes by when people don’t ask me about search engine rankings and how they can increase their ranking in order to help generating more business.
Imagine you are a life coach in a networking event full of people and someone comes in looking for a life coach. You want to be make it clear your a life coach – looking like a life coach, sounding like a life coach and saying you are a life coach. Well thats what you need to do with your website – tell the search engines you provide life coaching. This is known as “on-site SEO” and includes amending HTML tags such as your page title, heading tags and image tags to include your keywords.
Going back to the networking event analogy…. what would really convince people you are a life coach is if other people in the room were pointing to you saying “see that guy over there…. he’s a life coach”. Well its the same principle for search engines – the more people pointing at you saying what you do the more search engines trust you. The way to get other sites “pointing at you” is using backlinks embedded on their webpages. Backlinks are usually seen as with some anchor text which is a string of text displayed to the user to provide more meaning to the link rather than displaying the destination URL That anchor text is basically a websites way of saying “click here to find out about XYZ”. By using our keywords in this anchor text we are essentially telling the search engines thats what our website is about. The more links you have pointing to your website using that keyword phrase the more search engines are going to think that phrase is what you are about!
Forums, blogs, directories, link exchanges and article submissions are a number of excellent ways of increasing the number of backlinks to your site. But its about quality as well as quantity. See, Google ranks all websites on a scale of one to ten known as “PageRank” and calculates the rank of each site based on its complex algorithm taking hundreds of factors into consideration. Websites ranked higher are those with lots of content (BBC, Facebook etc) and having a couple of backlinks from higher ranking sites like that are probably worth ten-fold compared to a backlink from a low-ranking site like a local gardening centre or something.
People have tried all sorts of ways to fool search engines and “trick” them into ranking their website higher – but search engines are smart, they are aware of such tricks and will punish sites they crawl using what’s known as “black-hat” techniques (an industry phrase for naughty SEO techniques). Natural techniques are the best form of increasing your rankings – posting on forums, articles as well as social media are all excellent ways of helping to increase your ranking – and of course they are – because these are natural methods of promotion and the more people are talking about something the more search engines deem them relevant.
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Advice provided by Nick Hatton of Empire Solutions http://www.empiresolutions.co.uk , providing and helping small to medium sized businesses increase their sales whilst saving precious time and money.
Thanks this is a really good article with some sensible info for coaches just starting out on the web. I think a lot of life coaches imagine they’ll just get clients and that will be that. Nooo, you have to learn internet marketing, SEO, backlinks etc. Or pay an assistant to do it. Marketing will be the main way you spend your time in the early days, and you should always keep it up even as your business grows. Nice article, I know it will help people.
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