Could your site be mistaken by Google as a “junk” or spam site? Make sure your website displays these signs of quality to maximize exposure and boost your website ranking.

Tip #1 to improve ranking of a website: Adhere to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization that oversees the standards for the internet and internet coding. Having code that meets W3C standards is considered to be a “sign of quality.” It is thought that having signs of quality on a website can help with rankings in the search engines. Therefore having fewer W3C validation errors means that your site could gain a higher Google website ranking.

To help meet W3C standards, follow best practices, such as formatting your site with CSS rather than HTML tables, avoiding using deprecated (outdated) code, and so forth.

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Getting online sales leads can be tough. Sprucing up your website can help with generating sales leads – and increasing your bottom line! The Search Guru offers these organic SEO strategies:

Organic SEO tip #1: Examine on-page elements

On-page elements are the elements that affect organic search engine optimization that can be controlled by the designer or developer. Use the following checklist to help increase online sales leads to your website.

Title tags (the single most important on-page element). The title tag is like the headline of your advertisement in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The title tag should:

• Be unique and relevant to the page topic
• Contain keywords, a benefit statement and a call to action

Header tags (the second most important on-page element). Header tags (also called H tags) highlight important text for the search engines. H tags should:

• Be used on every page
• Highlight the main idea or headline (H1)
• Highlight secondary ideas or sub-headlines (H2)

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How to Become Invisible to Google

Believe it or not, when I first began writing this post, I was surprised to learn that there are actually website owners who want to learn how to become invisible to Google. Why they would want to do that… well, their reasons are their own.

Most of us do want to improve web visibility in the Google index. But, just in case you don’t want to be visible (and we are really, really advising that you do want to be!), then here are the steps to become invisible:
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Organic SEO tips: how to create a landing page

Let’s say that you sell 20 products online, with each one falling into one of two categories: Product Type A and Product Type B. You’ve created a unique page for each of your products, which is terrific, but what’s the next step?

The next step is to create a landing page for Product Type A, with links to each of the ten products in this category, and a landing page for Product Type B, with links to each of the ten products in that category.

This internal linking strategy will accomplish two goals:

• make it easier for human site visitors to find the products they need
• make it easier for the search engine spiders to index the content and return these URLs in response to relevant search queries

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Want to start climbing up the Google SERPs ladder faster? Make an online video!

That’s right, a video. According to a study conducted earlier this year by The Forrester Blog, posting an online video can increase your site’s chances of reaching that golden first page of search engine results by 50 percent for keywords that produce video search results. In other words, a YouTube video is 50 times more likely to rank for a certain keyphrase than a page containing that keyphrase on your site.

That’s a pretty amazing statistic. But now that Google’s Universal Search is in full swing, the SERPs are chock full of blended search engine results – a mixture of pages, videos, news, books and more from Google’s standard and specialized, or “vertical,” search results. Read the rest of this entry »