Increasing Your SERP’s
You can increase your search engine results pages or SERP’s by fixing common SEO mistakes and applying some really simple fixes to most your current pages. Not only will you increase your SERP’s you’ll also increase the conversion rate of searcher to visitor, and hopefully convert that visitor into a sale or a registration for your community.
The most important aspect to your SERP is the Title of the page. Having a nicely titled page, that’s keyword rich, and short will help improve your SERP and this is one of the largest factors in converting that searcher into a visitor. Put your keywords toward the front of the page title and try to keep your title short and still descriptive.
After you’ve put your keywords into your title, the next is getting them on to your page is a way that makes sense to readers and search engine spiders can understand. If you spam your keywords or load the page up with a bunch of garbage text that doesn’t make sense to users or spiders, you won’t increase your SERP’s any and will do more harm then good. Some have also suggested to make use of the <strong>tags</strong> to increase the effectiveness of your keywords.
Keyword density. This goes back to getting your keywords on your page in a way that makes sense to both users and spiders. Some suggest that a healthy keyword density of 4-7% should yield the highest results to increase your SERP’s. To figure out your density of keywords, there are free analysis tools available or count the number of words on your page, then count the number of keywords and do a little division dance to get the percentage.
Use your keywords in H1 tags & other H tags. This will inform the search engine spider of what the page is about, whats important on the page and what to look for. This isn’t nearly important today as it used to be, but most believe it still goes into consideration when increasing your SERP’s. Using your keywords in other sized H tags can also increase your page SERP’s and with CSS making it easy to style them, there isn’t a reason not to anymore!
Keyword use in your domain name & domain name age. Remember on of our first articles on where SEO begins? Well this is one of the reasons, if you’ve got a nicely named domain, with a little bit of age to it, and no hypens you’re probably about 20% to 25% on your way to the top 10 to increasing your SERP’s.
Using the keywords in page URL’s is a ranking factor that will also increase your SERPs. As you can see when you do a google search for most phrase you’ll get more and more returns that are human friendly URL’s. Or URL’s that humans can read and decode, and example would be this page URL or if you’re using vBSEO for your vBulletin forum, the page URL’s it generates if you’ve set it up to. Increasing your SERP’s is all about keywords as you can see.
The final few things to increase those SERP’s are making good use of the ALT and TITLE tags for images and links. Be sure to use the tags accordingly and make the descriptions match what you’re displaying/linking to. You don’t want to use an ALT tag of Hot asian chicks, then display a fat guy covered in gravy.
And lastly the poor meta tags, these have been a true fall from grace over the years, and hold very little weight in SERP’s today. Be sure to put good use to the keywords and description meta tags how ever because it begs the age old question of “Which weighs more, an anvil, or an anvil with a feather?” if you catch my drift.
As you can see increasing your SERP’s is a extremely simple way to convert searchers into visitors, and thats the biggest part of growing your community is getting the visitors. Check out our other articles and tips on how to convert the visitors into registrations or sales.
Hopefully if you follow all these tips for every page you can control, you’ll see an increase in your SERP’s. remember, ranking #1 for a keyword is nice, but getting traffic from many different phrases should be your main goal!
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