Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider in improving the traffic your website receives.  The general rule of thumb is that the more traffic your website recieves the greater the profitability of your website is. Though this is the rule, it doesn’t always ring true.

If your optimize your website for the wrong keywords then the traffic coming to your website will be untragetted and will nothing to make you more money.

The best ways to improve your website:

1. Site Navigation

Your website’s navigation menu should include meaningful titles for every pages that it contains. Also, your menu should appear on every page of your site, and it should be in a format that both people and search engines can navigate and understand. Javascript based menus make it difficult for search engines to navigate your site, so it would be advisable to have a text based menu nas well to make sure the search engines can traverse your entire website.

2. Choose related Keywords and slightly less popular phrases

Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases. Use some Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords aswell. This basically means use other keywords that mean the same thing. So for example, if your page is about dogs, then talk about puppies, kennels, leads, bones etc. The search engines will appreciate these additional words and help your website to rank higher and quicker.

3. Choose where you link to

The search engines expect to see website that link out to other related websites. They don’t like website that don’t link out at all. So include a couple of authority links in your pages (such as wikipedia, about.com, some .gov sites etc) Also keep the number of outgoing links don to a minimum. Don’t become a link far with doxens of outgoing links. Keep your outgoing links on theme as well. So if your website is about dogs, then link only to other dogs sites. Don’t link out to other computer sites, dating sites etc.

4. Update Your Content Regularly

You need to regularly update the content of your website, even if it’s only a slight change. Search engine spiders give better rankings to sites that update content often.

 So if you can post regular content to your website the better you will rank.

5. Don’t Submit Your website to the search enginbes

The search engines like to find new sites by themselves. The best way to get a new site noticed by the search engines is for you to provide links on a highly spidered website (like this one) and the seacrh engines will find your website really quickly.

6. Read Search Engine Relevant News.

Always keep up todate with whats happening in the world of SEO. What may have been acceptable techniques a few months ago, may now be frowned apon by the search engines. So stay upto date with the SEO news. If you can’t do it yourself, then have someone around that can keep you informed and keep your website at the top of the search engines.

Keep on top of the game and you will be happy you did.