Relevance is the key. The old saying: “Content is king”, is at the heart of getting good search engine rankings. The more relevant your content is to a search term, the higher your site ranks in search results.

Here are six steps to climb the rankings chart.

Focus
Ensure that your content is relevant to the keywords you want to target and vice-versa. Which keywords do you want to get high rankings for? Focus first on those that will bring quality traffic.

Say, a market research company wants high rankings for “market research”, “quantitative research” and “qualitative research” so that it can capture the audience that is looking to hire its expertise. The strategy would be to focus on narrower keywords such as “market research firms” or “market research companies”. Hunt for more generic keywords later.

Optimize Your Content
Focus first on keywords that will bring in quality traffic. This step is critical to the success of your blog. Go through your content and include the keywords naturally into the text. Make page titles, headings and sub-headings keyword-rich; search engines give more weight to these when determining relevance. However, do not stuff your pages with the keywords hoping to trick search engines. Google’s team will sniff these out and pin you down on their black list.

Tweak Your Tags
Search engines give more weight to text enclosed in certain HTML tags such as the tag and the heading tags. So, after optimizing content, have keyword-rich page titles, headings and sub-headings. Try to keep the text under 64 characters. Anything longer might get chopped off by the search engines.

Increase Your Credibility
Google places emphasis on the number of sites which link to yours and the credibility of these sites. Ask your readers, business partners or even friends to link to your blog. Get as many credible incoming links as you can. A good incoming link should contain both your company name and keywords.

Be Patient
You can use search engine ranking tools (both free and commercial ones) to track your blog’s rankings for the keywords you have chosen to focus on. However, it may take up to 8 to 12 weeks to appear on page 1.

Rinse and Repeat
Measure your results using search engine ranking tools and update your website at least once a week as search engines give priority to updated sites. If you do not get listed in the top 10, do not fret. It is a hotly contested page with scores of companies vying for the spot.
Look instead at your blog’s ranking for the keywords. If you have moved up, then you’re right on track. Refine your keywords, include new keywords, optimize your content and get more credible incoming links!

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