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I’ve recently answered a question on a forum about how to improve your ranking on google. I have reproduced it here, as I thought others may find this useful…

One way to be found is to make sure that you are in the top 10 for the keywords that people use when looking for services like yours. SEO is a bit of a dark science, but don’t let that put you off. A good friend of mine Tola Popoola, who sells personalised chocolates, has managed to secure a no. 1 ranking on google for ‘personalised chocolates’ without any expert assistance.

The first stage in this process is to make sure you have identified the keywords that people will search for when looking for a service like yours. I use this FREE google keyword search all the time when thinking about keywords: http://www.google.com/sktool/#

The second stage in the process is to look at your meta tags and content of your site. Do you have these keywords liberally sprinkled through your website? Ideally some of these keywords should be in your URLs of your website.

Then the third stage is to build awareness of your brand on-line, and more importantly ‘back-links’. Back links are where you post a link of your website onto another person’s website. The most effective way to build a back link, is to pick sites with high google ranking – either because they have been in existence a long time, or have a high daily traffic. Or pick sites which have similar content to you. When you put a link in a comment, put the link around a keyword which is important to you. For example, UK business coach, is an important keyword to me. Instead of writing out the URL to the business coaching page of my website (http://www.theefficiencycoach.co.uk/Business_Efficiency-Business_Coaching.php).

I would put a link on the words UK business coach.

Look out for blogs or forums to comment on, and always make sure that you leave a signature at the end of your comment, pointing back to your site. (Just like Tola has done on all her posts on this discussion thread)

Make sure you have signed up to two free services that Google provides – Google Analytics & Google Webmaster, as these will show you who is visiting your site, what pages they are visiting & where they are coming from. Webmaster will also show you what searches you are appearing in.

It does take time to improve your search engine ranking on google, and there are many professional companies out there who will help you do this. If you do choose to use one of these companies, make sure any guarantees that they give you about your search engine ranking are for the keywords that you want!

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