I believe it’s safe to say that regardless of the type of web site you own, drawing the continual attention and favor of the major search engines is very important to your effectiveness on the Internet.



And since it’s never wise for a businessperson to leave their fate in someone else’s hands, it’s imperative that you continually take strides to improve yours.

Think of the Internet as a treadmill running at high speed, stand still and you will actually move backwards as your competitors who are willing to run, pass you by. To play the search engine marketing game, you need to keep your feet moving forward… not just enough to stay in the same place, but fast enough to keep you competitive by propelling you forward ahead of the pack.

That being said, it’s important to understand the motivation behind how the search engines work. Essentially, search engines are judged by you, the user, by their ability to bring you the best matches to whatever it is you’re searching for online -- their inability to do this effectively not only hurts their bottom line but also hurts the usability of the Internet in general.

So it makes a lot of sense that the search engines would take great care in ensuring they are doing the best job they possibly can to help you find what you’re looking for.

I have to say, they certainly have their work cut out for them though. There are tons of very smart people out there continually looking for and exploiting any and all loopholes in an attempt to slant the playing field in their favor. The search engines have essentially assumed the role of policing this activity in order to give all web sites an equal chance at achieving higher rankings. This is why top search engines like Google change their algorithms constantly -- if someone does manage to find and exploit a loophole, it won’t be available for very long. So unless you’ve got nothing better to do, trying to cheat the system is just not cost effective -- I highly recommend that you stick to the tried and true tactics.

What I’m about to share with you, are what I and many other Internet marketing experts consider the 2 most important keys to organically improving your search engine raking. Now are these the only things that the search engines take into consideration when ranking your site? -- Absolutely not! However, these two appear to be the main ones whose importance hasn’t waned over time. So here goes:

1. Fresh, Unique, Relevant Content

Ahh… how the search engines love this… that’s one reason they are so enamored with blogs… because blog content tends to be unique, focused on a specific topic, and updated frequently.

So whether though the posting of your e-zine issues to your web site, posting one-of-a-kind relevant articles, or hosting a discussion forum, just to name a few different things you can do, get into the rhythm and habit of adding in-demand content regularly – I’d recommend at least weekly.

2. Lots of One-Way, Incoming Links from Other High Ranked Sites

This is essentially social proof to the search engines that your web site is important -- and as we stated earlier, this is exactly what the search engines want -- they want to bring their target market the best matches available on the Internet.

Now for the most part, the more web sites that are linked to you, the better! Want to take it up a notch? Don’t just go for quantity, go for quality as well -- Get linked to by other relevant web sites. Want to take it up another notch? Get linked to by web sites that are ranked higher than you. Want to take it even further, have those web sites linking to you use keywords from your destination page as anchor text to represent your link… cool stuff here!

It also important to note that while one-way inbound links appear to be the best kind… this doesn’t mean not to do reciprocal links with other relevant sites… those are good too… they just may not be weighed as heavily as the one-way inbound ones.

So in closing, I’d like to leave you with the notion that if you want to get the most value out of your web site, it’s imperative that you put into place, and take consistent action on, both content and linking tactics for your web site immediately.

© 2007 Online Marketing Muscle -- All Rights Reserved.

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