So you want to know how to improve search rankings? In today’s world your presence on the search engines (specifically Google) is becoming more and more important.

Quite simply, high Google SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) equates to traffic and ultimately money.

Getting your website high on the search engine rankings can really make a difference in how many clients you get (if you offer offline services) or how much ad revenue you make.

The “science” of improving your search ranking position is called Search Engine Optimization, or simply SEO. It’s quite easy to improve your Google search ranking with a few easy tips.

1. Use Search Engine Friendly Website Titles

Titles are one of the primary means for search engines to know what your website is about. You would be surprised at how search engine unfriendly many website titles are. If your website is about Vancouver truck repairs, don’t name your website “Rick’s Car Repair World.”

Make sure your title relates very closely to what your website is about.

If we have a local website about Vancouver car and truck repairs, it makes sense to give the title of your website something that the Search Engines can use to properly classify your website. Something like “Vancouver Car and Truck Repairs” – NOT “Dirty Jackson’s Auto Repair.” The search engines need your help to tell them what your site is about.

2. Make sure all Webpage Titles/ Blog Titles are Search Engine Friendly

Now, in today’s blogging culture, it’s popular to come up with a witty title that has people “oo and ahhing” with how intelligently sounding it is. Folks, don’t do this. This “wit” is completely lost on the search engines – and at the end of the day, it’s the search engines that will bring you valuable traffic not your witty title. If the topic of your post is about “oil filter repairs” INCLUDE the keyword somewhere in the title – preferably near the beginning of it. This is an essential part of SEO. If you give a witty title that has little relevance to the content of your webpage, the search engines will not categorize your page properly and you won’t get traffic.

3. Use your keyword on your website/webpage.

Every website is about some topic. This topic can often be distilled down to a keyword or keyword phrase – essentially the “essence” of the website. If you have a website that talks about natural cancer treatments, the keyword phrase that “represents” your website would be something like “natural cancer remedies” or “natural cancer cures” or “natural cancer treatments.” The keyword should be one that a person will likely type into Google. You can find out how many people type keywords with the Google Keyword Tool.

If you know they keyword that represents your website or the content of your specific blog post/web page, you want to include this keyword/keyword phrase about 4-7 times per 500 words. Don’t spam the keyword – search engines are good at detecting this. But make sure that you do include the keyword a couple times. Also try to throw in some variations on the keyword. Instead of “natural cancer treatments” throw in a couple uses of “cancer treatments that are natural” and “natural cancer remedies.” The more long tail keywords you throw into your post, the more categories Google can start to rank your site for and the more traffic you will get.

4. Get Properly Anchored Backlinks

This is the most important aspect of improving your search engine rankings. Backlinks are 95% of getting your website to the top of the search engines for a keyword.

Backlinks are essentially other websites that link to your website. Anchor text is that text that “describes” your website to Google – the text that is highlighted blue. You want that text to be the keyword phrase that you want to rank for. For example, if you want to rank for “john’s oil filters”, you would want as many other websites to have this on their website: john’s oil filters. Notice how the link is blue. The blue part is the "anchor text" -- and this is what Google uses to rank your website in the search engine results with. The exact syntaxt of the html is this: <a href="http://mydomain.com”>myanchortext</a>.

Get enough websites that have this "john's oil filters" on their website (and provided there is not a lot of other websites with the same anchor text link pointing to a different website), and you will rank number #1 for the term “john’s oil filters” on Google. Now, you need to make sure that people are actually going to type in the keyword you want to rank. In this case, no one is going to type in “john’s oil filters” into Google.


Well, there you have it. Follow these simple 4 steps and you will improve your search engine rankings. Get enough backlinks and you will not only improve your search engine ranking, but dominate them.