Getting your website to rank highly in search engines for competitive keywords and search term these days is a fast moving target. A few short years ago, steps required to get your site ranked high is quite simple, firstly you need to get your site noticed by search engines, using a submission tool such as the free submission tool on the homepage of sites such as SitePromotion.info. The next step is to building links, it does not matter very much if the links are relevant or not, it just needs to be half decent link, stuffed with the anchor text you want your site ranking highly for and you are there!. With aforementioned basic steps, your site can dominate a keyword or key phrase for many years.
Social Media The Game Changer
The arrival of web 2.0, the so call user generated content, which spawn social media changed the search engine optimisation and ranking game in a radical way. Some argue that it was changed for the better, it certainly made ranking high for a search term or keyword almost indefinitely a thing of the past.
The first major way search engine ranking was shook up by Web 2.0 was the sheer number of contents and websites being created by bloggers and social media. Having a website was no longer the preserve of businesses and individuals who can afford expensive domain name and web hosting. Any one can create a free hosted blog on platforms such as WordPress.com and for a small fee, you can buy web hosting and domain name and host your own free WordPress powered website and customise it as done at Haba Naija.
The second significant way Social Media transformed search engine ranking was the sheer popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. You have hundreds of millions of people moving away from using search engines to find information but using their favourite social media website to find almost all the information they need, it was not long before search engines realise that they have to factor mentions and links in social media into their ranking algorithm.
The Essentials Of Ranking High
Unique picture could improve quality of your content
Whilst raking highly for your desired keywords may not be as easy as it once was, it is not an impossible task. If you are a blogger or have a website that requires constant updating or fresh content, you have won half the battle of modern day search engine ranking. You still need to build links just like SEO practitioners did in days gone bye, however you don’t need as many links. Here is a quick bullet points of the essentials of ranking your site or page higher for keywords and search terms in leading search engines.
Content is Still King – This term has been around since the early days or search engine optimisation, however, it was not as important back then as it is today. Even if you have a website with contents that does not change often, you should consider adding a blog or a forum to your site, just to satisfy the part of modern day search engine algo that makes fresh contents a very important factor. New pages added to sites such as Haba Nigerian Forum are reported to rank extremely highly in major search engines for competitive search terms within hours of the content being posted to the forum.
Unique Image is Queen – If content is king, unique pictures and images you use to illustrate article and web pages may certainly be considered queen. Search engines are now able to identify images and how often a particular image has been used online. If you create unique images and pictures instead of buying one from stock photo sites, you get a slightly more favourable nod from search engines and manual search quality raters (Search quality raters are people employed by search engines to check websites at random for quality).
Social Media Presence is Importantt – It goes without saying that having a social media presence is extremely important. Creating and maintaining social media page is time consuming but it can be rewarding if you get your social media strategy right. As a minimum, create a Twitter and a Facebook page for your business. Just creating the pages is not enough, you should add contents regularly and encourage your customers and associate to subscribe to your social media pages and post feedback about your product of services.
Build Quality Relevant Link – Though the importance of links in search engine raking has diminished, it is still the backbone of search engine optimisation. The good news is that you don’t need as many links as was required to rank highly in the past, the not so good new is that you need to be extra careful where you get your links from. It is extremely important that the links are from related site, and are not spammy. You also need to be aware that if you link to a page or site with loads of anchor text that are too similar, you site will be blacklisted and will not rank well in some search engines.